by Daniel J. Flynn
The people most insistent on the purity of the 2020 election work feverishly on rigging the 2024 election. It makes one wonder.
This anti-democratic effort includes interpreting the suffrage-expanding 14th Amendment to deny suffrage to Donald Trump’s supporters in 2024. A Washington, D.C.–based group, for instance, sued in Colorado this week to prevent the name of the candidate favored by most Republicans from appearing on the ballot there. If the involvement of an out-of-state group did not serve as a clue, then its board comprising partisan Democrats — and a “Republican” who endorsed Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden for president — signaled the politics-by-other-means purpose of the motley crew. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington President Noah Bookbinder justified preventing the opposition’s preferred candidate from appearing on the ballot by maintaining that “it is necessary to defend our republic both today and in the future.”
It obviously did not start in Colorado on Wednesday. It did not start last year when 40 Democrat congressmen introduced a bill to ban Donald Trump from running for president. It did not even start during the bizarre second impeachment, in which, à la Oliver Cromwell’s post-death beheading, Democrats sought to impeach a private citizen holding no federal office for the purpose of disqualifying him for federal office in the future.
Perhaps it started with the “insurance policy” FBI agent Peter Strzok — strangely leading both the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and alleged Russian collusion with the Trump campaign — laid out in case of Donald Trump’s election. Recall that the Justice Department shielded the origins of the “dossier” — as though an intelligence compilation rather than opposition research paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign — that served as the predicate to spy on Trump’s campaign and portrayed a source for American intelligence as not only not a source but a potential Russian asset. In other words, they lied to advance the lie that Trump colluded with the Kremlin to win, an insurance policy cashed in after the Republican’s unlikely victory to derail his presidency.
Trump faces four criminal cases involving 91 charges in four jurisdictions. If convicted of each charge, the former president faces more than 717 years in jail. Considering that his pursuers, at least in New York, just allowed an illegal alien to walk repeatedly after six arrests for 14 crimes — several of them violent and most of them in Manhattan — in his two months in the city, this sudden tough-on-crime approach for offenses normal persons do not recognize as crimes strikes as peculiar.
In a case out of Florida, the feds pursue Trump on retaining classified documents — something Joe Biden did for years without arousing the interest of prosecutors.
In Georgia, Trump stands accused of a “criminal racketeering enterprise” for having “knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome” of an election by a supporter of Stacey Abrams, a woman who lost the 2018 gubernatorial election by five times the number of votes as Trump lost the 2020 Georgia presidential contest but somehow eluded the interest of prosecutors in her prolonged and rather lucrative effort to smear the state as a neo–Jim Crow enclave that denies blacks the franchise to rig elections.
In Manhattan, District Attorney Alvin Bragg seeks to imprison Trump for 136 years for being the victim of shakedown attempts. Joshua Solomon of the Albany Times-Union reports that in New York “in the past three and a half years, there were fewer than 300 instances statewide of an individual facing a top-level charge of falsifying business records in the first degree. Even more rare: a conviction, let alone a felony conviction, for the offenses filed against [Donald] Trump, which requires proving the intent to commit or aid in another crime.” In just 11 instances did the charges result in a felony. Ten of those 11 felonies, the article further conveys, resulted in prison — with just the one case resulting in time longer than a month. Bragg seeks 136 years. Hmmm.
The cases — three quite flimsy and the documents case much stronger — serve as 2024’s insurance policies, plural indicating disappointment with the effectiveness of 2020’s singular insurance policy. And the location of two of the flimsier trials — places where Biden won by 17 to 3 (Manhattan) and 18 to 1 (Washington) margins — acts as an insurance policy, too.
It does not scream strength when the votaries of a flailing octogenarian base his reelection on clearing the field of an opposing candidate. It does scream rigging, election interference, and all the other political curse words hurled by them at Trump after 2020.
When Democrats storm the halls of democracy, they wisely do so with lemon-faced lawyers in pantsuits rather than hirsute gentlemen wearing facepaint and Viking horns. Every day since Jan. 6 has been Jan. 6 for Democrats.
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Daniel J. Flynn, a senior editor of The American Spectator, is the author of Cult City: Harvey Milk, Jim Jones, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco (ISI Books, 2018), The War on Football (Regnery, 2013), Blue Collar Intellectuals (ISI Books, 2011), A Conservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, 2008), Intellectual Morons (Crown Forum, 2004), and Why the Left Hates America (Prima Forum, 2002). His articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, New York Post, City Journal, National Review, and his own website, www.flynnfiles.com.
Background Photo “Voting Booths” by Tim Evanson. CC BY-SA 2.0.
