How To Destroy the American Legal System
Victor Davis Hanson
Posted on X @VDHanson
1) Hunter Biden’s current testimonies are contradicted by his own text messages, bank records, phone records, and testimonies of some of his associates. Anytime he is trapped in inconsistencies, he falls back on his addiction. Translated, that means we are sometimes supposed to believe he is a Yale-trained lawyer, experienced corporate grandee, and skilled negotiator, and thus carefully avoided involving his father in the family’s various schemes. And then again, sometimes when the evidence is damning and overwhelming, he simply cannot remember, or claims he was addled at the time in question due to his medical “addiction”.
2) In the Georgia Trump case, lawyers Terence Bradley, Nathan Wade, and Prosecutor Fani Willis all testified under oath to events that are contradicted by either prior other witness testimonies, or their own previous statements, or electronic phone records, and thus, to square the record, either have claimed amnesia, ignorance, or larger racist forces at work. Two of the three are leading the effort to indict a former president and current leading candidate for the presidency on a racketeering charge never before used in a Georgia election interference case, and to be tried by prosecutors who have either zero experience in felony criminal cases or no experience in racketeering cases or both.
3) Letitia James, the New York Attorney General, ran for office on promises to use her office to go after Donald Trump. She used an obscure consumer fraud law to claim Trump overvalued assets to obtain a loan that was paid back with interest and on time to a bank that audited his financial statement prior to the loan and had zero complaints about its profitable loan after it was paid off. Trump now is fined $355 million for a crime that has no victim, and has lost control of his New York businesses to a court-appointed judge. No one in New York history has ever been tried under this statute for allegedly exaggerating assets to get a loan that was paid back and over which the lending agency had no complaints.
4) Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg also boasted in his campaign for office he would go after Donald Trump. He is trying Trump on multiple felonies in a state court surrounding a supposed campaign finance violation over a nondisclosure agreement that the proper federal attorneys earlier felt did not merit prosecution.
5) Special Prosecutor Jack Smith is trying Trump for removing classified files to his estate at Mar-a-Lago. Note that twin special prosecutor Robert Hur found that President Biden also removed classified files to more and less secure residences for far longer (over 30 years) but as a senator and Vice President without Trump’s statutory presidential authority to declassify such documents. Biden admitted in 2017 he possessed such classified files and yet knowingly waited years to notify authorities. He did so only on the expectation that prosecutor Smith would soon indict Trump for the same alleged crime. Smith is also trying Trump on “insurrectionary” conduct despite Trump never having been charged in the prior three years by any federal or state authority for such an offense.
6) E. Jean Carrol (won $83.3 million in a “defamation” civil suit against Trump) won her case despite:
1) having no idea what year the alleged sexual assault took place some 30 years ago;
2) claiming she remembered the assault by the designer dress she wore that did not exist at the time;
3) advancing a narrative of events nearly identical to an episode of Law and Order that aired in 2012;
4) tweeting roughly two decades later that her supposed assailant’s TV show The Apprentice was one of her favorites;
5) her ELLE editor denying Carroll was fired from the magazine due to the Carroll-Trump dispute;
6) creating an app about how to break up couples through various machinations;
7) refiling her case beyond the statute of limitations, but only once a leftwing New York legislator strangely passed a bill allowing claimants of sexual abuse to have a one time, one year window to refile beyond the statute of limitations.
7) Blue or purple states such as Colorado, Illinois, and Maine are currently all attempting to remove Donald Trump from their presidential ballots on allegations of insurrectionary activity despite the fact he has never been convicted of any such charge and there is no precedent for such presidential disqualification.
8) Note the following: All the prosecutors, and litigants are either Democratic partisans or liberals. The trials have and will take place largely in Atlanta, New York, or Washington among leftwing prosecutors, judges, and jury pools. The majority of the charges and suits—the various states’ misuse of 14th Amendment, Bragg’s bootstrapping a state indictment onto a federal charge, James’s contortion of using a consumer fraud law to try Trump for a crime without a victim, Willis’s misuse of a racketeering statute to concoct an election interference charge, Carroll refiling once a leftwing jurist passed a special law that allowed her to do so postfacto, Smith’s effort to indict a president for insurrection and removing classified files—have either never been used before in these ways, or are in the wrong jurisdiction, or could equally apply to Democratic targets such as Joe Biden (found culpable by a special counsel but exempt by cognitive disability, named in various testimonies and texts as recipient of illicit foreign payments, accused of prior sexual assault), Hillary Clinton (fined for campaign finance violations), or Barack Obama (fined for campaign finance violations). So what is the reason for all this lying, these legal contortions, and egregious prosecutor and judicial misbehavior? Five simple facts alone:
1) The Left both fears and detests Donald Trump.
2) Donald Trump chose to run for the presidency in 2024.
3) Donald Trump is not a man of the Left.
4) Donald Trump is currently ahead of Joe Biden in both national polls and in the majority of swing state polls.
5) The Left feels barring Trump from the presidency is worth destroying 235 years of American jurisprudence.
