Biden’s lawfare complicity has long been obvious, even if obscured.
On Noah’s excellent piece about President Biden’s assertion that “we’ve got to lock him up” in reference to Donald Trump, I would simply add that this is not the first time the president has let slip his connection to the Democratic lawfare efforts, led by Biden’s own Justice Department, to get his Republican opponent — now his vice president’s Republican opponent — locked up.
During Trump’s state criminal trial in Manhattan, I wrote about the various ways in which the president was complicit in the lawfare campaign. In the column, I noted
this gem buried in a February 10 Politico report: Biden has “grumbled to aides and advisers that had [Attorney General Merrick] Garland moved sooner in his investigation into former President Donald Trump’s election interference, a trial may already be underway or even have concluded.” I believe this is why Smith — who could have pushed hard for a relatively swift trial in Florida on a very strong obstruction case against Trump regarding the Mar-a-Lago documents — brought such a legally dubious case against Trump in Washington: Biden and Democrats have made the Capitol riot central to their 2024 campaign, so Smith was under great pressure to bring whatever related charges he could theorize.
It was always nonsense for the Biden-Harris administration, Democrats, and their media allies to claim that Biden was sealed off from the Trump prosecutions. At least in their federal iterations (Smith’s two cases), these prosecutions could not proceed unless Biden approved of them. They are brought under executive power, which he holds exclusively.
Garland’s appointment of Smith as special counsel was strictly a political calculation designed to promote the illusion that Biden was uninvolved. DOJ had been investigating Trump for nearly two years and had every intention of charging him with crimes. But Biden knew Trump would claim that Biden was using his control of DOJ to try to sideline his GOP rival, so Garland appointed Smith as a supposedly “independent” prosecutor to distance Biden and DOJ from the Trump prosecutions. But there are no independent prosecutors in federal law; Smith reports to Garland, and Garland reports to Biden.
Smith’s Florida case against Trump involved alleged misappropriation of classified intelligence — exactly the same offense Biden himself committed. The Biden-Harris Justice Department gave the president a pass but indicted Trump on nearly three dozen felony charges. Funny how that works.
As I noted in the column linked above, in ordinary circumstances, the Justice Department would object to a state district attorney’s attempt to enforce federal election law, over which Congress has given the Justice Department exclusive criminal-enforcement authority. But when Manhattan’s elected Democratic DA Alvin Bragg did it to Trump — contending that Trump falsified his business records to conceal a supposed campaign-finance violation — the Biden-Harris DOJ sat on its hands (even though federal prosecutors had investigated Trump and determined that there was no viable federal case against him).
Moreover, as I related in yesterday’s column on the case of amnesia that befell former prosecutor Nathan Wade when a House committee grilled him on Fulton County, Ga., DA Fani Willis’s election-interference prosecution of Trump, we now know that the Georgia prosecutors consulted with White House officials, as well as the Biden-Harris DOJ, in connection with their state RICO case against the former president.
It’s no surprise that the desire to lock Trump up is front of mind for President Biden. It has been for quite some time.