If Democrats really wanted Donald Trump to fade away, as they claim, then they would stop persecuting him.
Maybe they are so blinded by hatred that they can’t see that every time they use the heavy hand of the law against the former president, they just cement his status as MAGA martyr.
Or maybe they are so terrified of running against Ron DeSantis in 2024, that they actually want to martyr Trump to ensure he wins the Republican presidential primary ready for a repeat contest with Joe Biden.
In that scenario, Democratic prosecutors in New York and Georgia, and a partisan DOJ, play the role of picadors in a bullfight who soften up the bull with a thousand cuts before the decrepit old matador staggers out to finish him off.
Whether or not Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg really is about to arrest Trump this week, as has been reported, over trumped-up hush-money charges relating to a one-time assignation 17 years ago with porn star Stormy Daniels, Friday’s leak from the court could not have come at a better time for Biden.
The story that the first former president in American history would be charged with a crime, fingerprinted, put in a holding cell and maybe even perp-walked to humiliate him before the world is a dream come true for salivating Trump-haters.
Welcome WH distraction
But, more significantly, the story took the spotlight off the bombshell bank records released the previous day by the House oversight committee, showing $1,065,000 had been funneled from a Chinese energy company, through Biden intimate Rob Walker, to four immediate family members of Joe Biden: his son Hunter, brother James, and Hallie Biden, the widow of his late son Beau, who also is Hunter’s former lover.
Also listed as a recipient of the Chinese money, which was doled out to the four Bidens in regular small increments between March 6 and May 18, 2017, was an as-yet unidentified family member, listed only on bank wires as “Biden.”
Comer’s team has subpoenaed further bank records and is expected to reveal the identity of that mystery person this week.
In anyone’s language, that is a huge story.
Even The New York Times had to cover it, although with a typical “Republicans pounce” angle, and “balanced” by a story about an “investigation” by House Democrats into a supposedly missing gift to Trump from the Japanese Prime Minister of a $3,000 golf driver and $500 putter.
But the golf clubs are thin gruel against the impending exposure of the Biden family’s foreign influence peddling scheme, with then-VP Biden at its center.
So for the Democrats’ spin machine, it was time for a Trump scandal, always their tactic in a “break glass in case of emergency” moment like this, guaranteed to distract media attention, and keep voters in the dark about the real scandal swirling around Biden.
Enter Bragg, the Soros-funded, soft-on-crime DA who has been talking about Trump being indicted on something or other since at least 2019, and who made “Get Trump” a part of his election campaign.
His case is a joke. The allegation is that Trump falsified business records by concealing a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels which was made by his estranged former lawyer Michael Cohen in 2016.
Everything rests on the word of Cohen, a convicted perjurer, who testified before Bragg’s grand jury for three hours last Monday, and then again on Wednesday. Before that he had been in for interviews with the DA’s office at least 19 times.
But on Monday the grand jury will hear testimony from Bob Costello, a former legal adviser to Cohen before they fell out, who has acted for Trump’s some time lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and is a former supervisor with the Southern District of New York.
Costello will cite evidence contained in the 2020 book “The Fixers: The Bottom-Feeders, Crooked Lawyers, Gossipmongers, and Porn Stars Who Created the 45th President” that Cohen keeps changing his story about the Stormy Daniels payments and can’t be trusted.
Costello knows because he was an on-record source for the book and Cohen granted him a waiver of their attorney-client privilege to reveal what he had told him about his troubles when the feds first came knocking — and it’s nothing like what he’s saying now.
When prosecutors were told about the book Friday, they knew nothing about it, says a source, which doesn’t say much for their due diligence.
Dems’ real fear in 2024
Either way, the process is the punishment, and Trump’s supporters say his arrest will clinch the GOP 2024 nomination for him.
Florida pollster Albert Marko, of Mavarinas Management Group, says that is exactly what Democratic operatives want, because they know that DeSantis’ support among independents and centrist Dems will “obliterate” any Joe Biden repeat of 2020.
He says national polls, which show Trump way ahead, “mean absolutely nothing for a primary race which is a race to 1,234 delegates.”
State polling shows that by Super Tuesday, the Florida governor could be up 900 delegates, “as Trump’s star power fades in major states like California and Texas . . . Florida, Ohio, Iowa, New Jersey and Arizona are all winner-take-all states.
“It’s entirely reasonable to think Trump loses all five to DeSantis.”
DeSantis hasn’t even declared he is running, but leftist media and Democrat mouthpieces on MSNBC are melting down over the prospect of a younger, more ruthlessly effective version of Trump who doesn’t have the same baggage with independents.
“A DeSantis Presidency Could Be Even Worse Than Trump” was a typical headline in the New Republic. “Donald Trump was and is a lazy, ignorant narcissist. The Florida governor is a smart, motivated, very right-wing Catholic who wants to remake America as he imagines God wants it to be.”
If a legal witch hunt is the Democrats’ plan to win in 2024, it just shows how desperate they are.
Why don’t they try winning elections the old-fashioned way, by presenting candidates and policies worthy of voters’ approval instead of perverting the justice system in the pursuit of power?