From Tehran to the American campus to a Manhattan courtroom.
Everyone should read Noah Rothman’s great piece on the biggest non-surprise . . . well . . . ever — to wit, that Iran, flush with cash thanks to the Biden-Harris administration’s reversal of Trump’s “maximum pressure policies” (see Jim Talent’s piece a few weeks back), is diverting to antisemitic campus “protests” some of the funds it would otherwise stream to its anti-American jihadist proxies.
Noah writes:
The Biden administration and its allies should not evade culpability for even unwittingly aiding a hostile foreign power. No such allowances were provided to Republicans, prominent officeholders and rank-and-file voters alike, for allegedly promoting the Kremlin’s interests. In the wake of the 2016 election, congressional Democrats embarked on an effort to implicate Republican voters as unwitting dupes who helped Moscow steal a presidential election . . . with memes. “Buff Bernie,” “Killery Rotten Clinton,” and an image of Satan and Jesus arm wrestling over the fate of the Republic were seriously alleged to have altered the course of American history.
Of course this narrative was ridiculous. Russia has been interfering in American politics for decades — in the Soviet era, occasionally in collusion with top Democrats. News flash: Our spy agencies interfere in Russian politics, too — as I detailed in Ball of Collusion and a number of columns (see, e.g., here and here).
It’s not clear to me that American efforts have accomplished anything except to give intelligence-community progressives a pretext to pressure social-media platforms to suppress information Democrats don’t want disseminated. As for the Russian efforts, they have been successful beyond Putin’s wildest dreams — not because the messaging is anything but a moronic, non-influential drop in the ocean of American political discourse, but because it serves as the just-described pretext.
Noah’s piece is a timely reminder of one Big Lie: namely, that the antisemitic activism on campus for the benefit of Iran and its Hamas proxies is an organic, grassroots phenomenon. To the contrary, it is being funded by Iran and other outside, anti-American actors in the now-familiar alliance of radical leftists and sharia supremacists, and it is being executed by agents of that alliance, many of whom have no meaningful connections to the universities and cities where they rouse the rabble.
This put me in mind of another Big Lie. The theory of elected progressive Democratic district attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Trump was that the former president had conspired to steal the 2016 election — and the scheme worked. This is such a ridiculous story that Bragg eschewed writing it into the indictment; the grand jury apparently thought it was charging a case of mere dodgy record-keeping that actually defrauded no one. But that was just the pretext to get into court. From the time the trial began, Bragg’s prosecutors, aided and abetted by Manhattan Democratic judge Juan Merchan, conveyed to the jury that Trump had defrauded the country out of the coveted Clinton presidency (that would be Hillary Rodham, not Killery Rotten, Clinton).
Bragg’s story was that if voters had only been informed that Donald Trump conducted extramarital affairs with a porn star and a Playboy model, his 2016 campaign would have been toast. (Yes, that would be the same Donald Trump who voters knew was a thrice-married celebrity billionaire rake . . . such that the notorious Access Hollywood tape that so stunned the chattering class had no impact on voters, for whom Trump’s proclivities were baked in the cake.)
Bragg alleged that because Trump supposedly feared that pre-election revelations about his tomcat ways would harpoon his presidential bid, he used subordinates to purchase the women’s silence. These transactions, the DA wrongly claimed, were felony violations of federal campaign-finance law (a set of laws Bragg had no jurisdiction to enforce and misapplied . . . with an assist from Judge Merchan, who barred Trump from calling a former FEC commissioner who could have informed the jury that the DA was all wet).
I know we’ve been through all this before, but it’s worth rehashing because Bragg’s allegations were not just delusional in theory, they were flat wrong in empirical fact.
On November 4, 2016, four days prior to Election Day, the Wall Street Journal ran a blockbuster news story headlined, “National Enquirer Shielded Donald Trump From Playboy Model’s Affair Allegation.” It’s all in there — all the killer information that Bragg’s prosecutors told the jury Trump had to keep from the electorate prior to Election Day: the $150,000 deal, orchestrated through Trump’s friend David Pecker (then running the company that owned the Enquirer), by which Karen McDougal, the Playboy model, was paid to remain silent about “her story of an affair a decade ago with the Republican presidential nominee.” The scheme, the Journal reported in the days prior to the election, was known in the tabloid world as “catch and kill”; and this particular scheme was orchestrated to conceal a monthslong romance that occurred while “Mr. Trump was married to his current wife, Melania.”
That is: The exact thing that Bragg insisted would have destroyed Trump’s campaign and ushered in the Hillary years had it happened . . . actually did happen. And the result, which anyone but a Trump obsessive could have predicted, was that it had utterly no impact on the election. Trump won — not because the electorate loved Trump (he got only 46 percent of the national vote) — but because all the Karen McDougals and Stormy Danielses and Access Hollywood tapes in the world could not fix what was wrong with Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. Naturally, in Trump-obsessed Manhattan, Clinton routed Trump by nearly 80 percent (87–10) — so no one in the only place where Alvin Bragg actually has jurisdiction to enforce the law was affected by Trump’s entirely legal nondisclosure agreements.
But Bragg has his story and he’s sticking to it. And unless the Supreme Court’s recent rulings convince Merchan to vacate the jury’s guilty verdicts, he will impose sentence in September based on the fantasy that Trump is guilty of stealing the 2016 election — by concealing information that was not actually concealed, that made no difference in the outcome of the election, and that it was not a crime to try to conceal.