Donald Trump is now criminally charged for actions taken before and after Jan. 6, 2021. He is accused of directing a conspiracy to subvert the Constitution with an intent to retain power after losing the 2020 presidential election.
However the politics of the indictment play out, it is right and proper that the case go to a courtroom and a jury in Washington, the scene of the alleged crimes. This both reasserts the primacy of the rule of law and reminds us how a constitutional republic works: Should the executive branch abuse its power, the judiciary will adjudicate.
We owe this to history. Get to the end of the story, formally and finally.
It is argued that the indictment goes, uncomfortably, at Mr. Trump’s thinking: Did he believe what he said about the stolen election, or was he lying? This speaks to intent. His defenders argue that he believed it, and that even if he didn’t, he’d still be operating under First Amendment protections. His estranged attorney general, William Barr, disagreed, telling CNN: “He can say whatever he wants, he can even lie. . . . But that does not protect you from entering into a conspiracy.”
The question of what Mr. Trump believed strikes me as beside the point. Based on long observation, he doesn’t “believe”; he’s not by nature a believer. His longtime method of operation is to deploy concepts and approaches strategically to see what works. Put another way, he makes something up, sticks with it if it flies, drops it if it doesn’t, and goes on to “believe” something else.
But to sum up, the gravity of this story means the criminal charges had to be brought, with all that will follow—the arraignment, the pretrial motions, the trial, the presentation of evidence, the summations, the verdict, the sentencing if he is convicted. Other considerations, and they are real, are secondary.
Is the indictment poorly timed? Yes, in a presidential cycle, while the Hunter Biden story reaches a new level, and after a lot of time has passed. The indictment, when it was announced, wasn’t as electrifying for normal people as the media thought it would be. It felt like something that had already happened. We have been through last year’s Jan. 6 Select Committee hearings, saw all the dramatic testimony from those around the president. We’ve read the books, seen the documentaries. Didn’t this thing already go to court?
And there will be no clarifying sense at this point of, “At least now we’ll all figure out where we stand.” We all know where we stand. To supporters of the former president it will look like political overkill from the corrupt, Democrat-owned Justice Department, which will never stop going after Mr. Trump. If he dropped dead they’d go after him for dying the wrong way.
And yet: All this may be taking place late, but it must take place.
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I mentioned Hunter Biden, whose case, until the indictment, was to be the subject of this column. Something is happening in that story, some big shift is occurring. In the past month or so it has broken through in a new way.
The story is becoming more real, more substantial, especially I suspect to people in the middle. In the old understanding of the Hunter story, a druggy sex addict recorded his adventures on a mislaid laptop. An embarrassment, but every family has one. The emerging Hunter story is different in nature. It is: This guy was actually good at something, being a serious influence peddler and wiring things so he never got caught.
Some on the right have always thought this. I think it’s being picked up and watched now by less politically aligned and engaged people. The story has taken on a different level of sleaze. It’s starting to look not like family loyalty but enabling, and not only enabling but doing so in search of profit.
In May and late July two Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers, Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley and Special Agent Joseph Ziegler, put their careers on the line in congressional testimony. It was credible; they were impressive. They said the IRS had impeded its own investigation of Hunter Biden’s income and its sources, including from overseas business dealings. Mr. Ziegler said the investigation was “limited and marginalized” by Justice Department officials. Mr. Shapley told CBS News that his efforts to follow money trails that involved “dad” or “the big guy,” Hunter’s euphemisms for his father, were blocked by the Justice Department.
Also in late July, in federal court in Wilmington, Del., the plea bargain deal blew up. It dealt with tax and gun-possession charges against Hunter. Judge Maryellen Noreika told federal prosecutors and defense attorneys to go back and try again, the deal didn’t look normal and she wasn’t there to “rubber-stamp” it.
That was followed by the congressional testimony of Devon Archer, who was Hunter’s business partner and said to be his best friend. In closed-door testimony to the House Oversight Committee, Archer said that as vice president, Joe Biden took part in phone conversations with representatives of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company on whose board Mr. Archer and Hunter Biden sat. Mr. Archer’s full testimony was released Thursday. He confirmed that the vice president attended a dinner with Hunter’s foreign business associates, and soon after $3.5 million was wired into one of Hunter’s business entities.
It is unseemly, to say the least.
Another thing breaking through: when speaking of Hunter Biden, people use language like “the president’s troubled son.” There’s always the sense he’s a kid, that he tragically lost his mother as a child, had a troubled adolescence as the younger, less impressive son.
Hunter Biden is 53. At that age some men are grandfathers. He was doing business with Ukrainian and Chinese companies not as a wayward 25-year-old but as a middle-aged man. An age when adults are fully responsible for their actions.
Here is the unexpected political turn in the story. The president’s calling card to middle America has always been “middle class Joe,” the family man from Scranton, a normal guy of a certain assumed dignity who lived, as he said, on his salary, and who had known personal tragedy. Fully true or not, that was his political positioning, and it served him well. But the Hunter story is threatening to shift his father’s public reputation into Clinton territory—the sense that things are sketchily self-seeking, too interested in money. Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 because of that aspect of her political reputation.
I suspect the Hunter question is going to linger and grow through the election. It’s a story people can understand—ne’er-do-well son scrounges for money through influence-peddling, name-peddling, access-peddling, whatever. How much money was involved? Where did it go?
This isn’t whataboutism. These are legitimate questions.
For seven years Democrats have scored Republican officeholders for not wanting to talk about Donald Trump. Why do they concede nothing about Hunter, not even admitting the perceptions are bad? Why aren’t they honestly troubled?
Mainstream media has work to do. This is a story. Let the chips fall where they may.