McCarthy: The DOJ White House Collusion

[George K]

tl;dr - the Biden administration's fingerprints are all over these case.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/bidens-collusion-in-the-anti-trump-lawfare-gambit/

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Some of the collusion between President Biden and his party’s politicized lawfare campaign against his 2024 Republican opponent is so undeniable it can’t be hidden.

Biden’s collusion is easy to spot when it comes to Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s federal prosecutions of former president Donald Trump. As I’ve noted a few times, Smith’s special-counsel designation is a political artifice, not a legal necessity. There is no conflict of interest between the Biden DOJ and Biden’s political opponent — as there is, by contrast, in the Biden DOJ’s investigation of Biden’s son. Indeed, the Biden Justice Department, under Biden’s appointed attorney general, Merrick Garland, was investigating Trump for two years before Garland named Smith special counsel.

Smith’s appointment was not called for by DOJ’s special-counsel regulations. It was sheer partisanship: Biden and Garland knew that Trump’s would campaign on the claim — a quite colorable claim – that Biden was exploiting his executive authority to his political advantage by having his rival prosecuted (pretty much the same thing House Democrats impeached Trump for in 2019, after he tried to pressure Ukraine to investigate Biden). To try to blunt Trump’s claim, Garland appointed Smith in order to project the illusion of independence: We were to see Smith as an earnest career prosecutor making a unilateral assessment of whether to charge Trump, free of oversight by Garland and Biden.

That is fiction, of course. All executive power is reposed in the president. Jack Smith has no power of his own; the power he exercises is Biden’s. In so doing, he answers to Biden’s AG, who also answers to Biden.

No one should be surprised, then, at this gem buried in a February 10 Politico report: Biden has “grumbled to aides and advisers that had 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.

In any event, the notion that Biden has no involvement and no stake in prosecutions of his election opponent being pursued by his subordinates in his Justice Department employing his executive power is daft.

Need more? At Thursday’s Supreme Court argument regarding Trump’s immunity claim, Justice Samuel Alito asked prosecutor Michael Dreeben whether, in taking an important stand regarding the scope of executive power, Dreeben was speaking in his capacity as a lawyer on Smith’s staff or for the Biden Justice Department. Dreeben conceded: “I am speaking on behalf of the Justice Department.” Manifestly, there is no daylight between President Biden, the Biden Justice Department, and the federal prosecutions of Biden’s opponent that — if Smith has his druthers — will keep Trump chained to courtrooms for four to six months while Biden is out campaigning in battleground states.

Naturally, it is easier to discern Biden’s lawfare collusion in the federal prosecutions of Trump than in the criminal cases brought by elected Democratic prosecutors in the states of Georgia and New York. But the collusion is plain to see there, too.

It came to light in connection with the defense motions to disqualify Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis and her paramour, Nathan Wade (formerly the lead prosecutor on Trump’s case), that Wade consulted with the Biden White House Counsel’s Office during the investigation. This came on the heels of reported consultations between Willis’s office and the Democratic-dominated House January 6 Committee — the committee to which then-speaker Nancy Pelosi, in a move even she conceded was unprecedented, nixed the appointment of members chosen by Republican leadership.

The J6 Committee worked cooperatively with the Biden Justice Department, then theatrically issued criminal referrals calling for Trump’s prosecution, after which Smith filed his indictment at a time designed to trigger a trial in the months leading up to Election Day 2024. Two weeks later, Willis filed her RICO indictment against Trump, echoing the same “election interference” allegations and relying on common evidence.

One could argue that, because of the commonality, it is only natural that Willis would work with the feds. When state and federal prosecutors investigate and charge crimes arising out of the same factual transactions, they must of necessity consult on matters of scheduling and the questioning of witnesses. Of course, that would not explain why Wade, a state line prosecutor, would be meeting with Biden’s White House staff — i.e., the political side of the administration — rather than his law-enforcement counterparts in the “we never, ever do politics, no siree” Biden Justice Department.

Willis is sufficiently tainted and incompetent that there is little prospect she can get her unwieldy case to trial before the November election, as Democrats hoped. Still, Biden’s fingerprints are on it.

Biden’s collusion with Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Trump, which has just finished its first week of trial testimony, is more subtle — more of the dog-that-didn’t-bark variety. If you were unfamiliar with how the federal government works, you might well miss it.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all subtlety. To be his lead prosecutor, Bragg recruited Matthew Colangelo. Most prosecutors see themselves as working in law enforcement; Colangelo specializes in anti-Trump enforcement. He comes to the DA’s office from a stint as one of the very top lawyers in the Biden Justice Department — the associate attorney general overseeing the government’s civil, civil-rights, antitrust, and tax-enforcement activities.

To put it mildly, it is highly unusual for a lawyer in so lofty a federal perch to decamp to a county DA’s office for a line-prosecutor post — even allowing that the county is in the Big Apple and the trial gig is a prosecution of Donald Trump, which will make Colangelo a very famous fellow. But in this instance, it is a seamless transition. Prior to joining the top echelon of Biden’s Trump-hostile Justice Department, Colangelo had worked at the New York attorney general’s office — where Bragg was then a top deputy and where Colangelo specialized in lawsuits against Trump and his organization. It was Colangelo’s work against Trump that Bragg touted in running for district attorney in blue, blue Manhattan — the borough where Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden beat Trump by close to 80 percentage points in the 2016 and 2020 elections, respectively.

But let’s put Colangelo aside as the bridge from Biden to Bragg. The best collusion evidence in the New York case is the silence of the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission.

The FEC was created by Congress in 1974 to ensure uniform enforcement of federal campaign law, for which Democrats began pushing in the post-Watergate years. A specialized bureaucracy was deemed necessary because the regulation of campaign funding has profound implications for the projection of political speech — the core of the First Amendment’s free-expression guarantee. Hence, the campaign laws are abstruse and controversial — subject to repeated court challenges, many of them successful, since their inception.

To get a firm grip on federal campaign-finance enforcement, and to avoid overly aggressive applications of this dubious legal edifice that could easily lead to further chipping away by the federal courts, the Justice Department and the FEC have been given exclusive jurisdiction over enforcement, as the FEC put it in approving a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between itself and the Justice Department just a year ago — i.e., not long after Bragg filed his indictment of Trump, in which he did not dare admit that he was endeavoring to enforce federal campaign law. The feds take up the entire campaign-finance-enforcement field, as one would expect given that we’re talking about federal law that controls federal campaigns and elections. As the MOU elaborates, the Justice Department has “exclusive jurisdiction” over criminal enforcement; the FEC has “exclusive jurisdiction” over civil enforcement.

The campaign laws are so complex that the FEC’s role includes the promulgation of “regulations to implement and clarify these laws.” For its part, the Justice Department has produced an exacting enforcement manual of well over 200 pages, which has been edited numerous times, in order to walk federal prosecutors through the complex web of statutes and regulations.

Why does this matter? Well, if you weren’t born yesterday and you follow the news even casually, then you know that the Department of Justice is so territorial about its jurisdiction that it would make a tiger wilt in admiration. Similarly, the FEC jealously guards its turf. Do you really think for a moment that the Biden Justice Department and the FEC would sit in silent passivity if any other state prosecutor, besides Bragg in this particular case, usurped federal authority and undertook to enforce federal law — in a matter as to which the DOJ and FEC, after thoroughly investigating, had decided not to prosecute?

Unlike Trump, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign actually did violate the campaign-finance laws by misdescribing its disbursements in concocting the Russiagate smear (e.g., the production of the Steele dossier) as legal expenses rather than opposition research. Consequently, the FEC fined Clinton’s campaign.

Now, let’s say a district attorney in some deep-red county in Florida, Texas, or Oklahoma theorized that Hillary had schemed to steal the 2016 election, and that the shady description of the Russiagate expenditures in her campaign’s ledgers amounted to falsification of business records under the laws of that DA’s state. Let’s say that ambitious Republican DA, in order to court the affections of MAGA populists or Clinton-loathing conservatives, had gotten a grand jury to indict Hillary on the Bragg theory — namely, falsification of records to conceal a violation of federal campaign law.

Ask yourself this question: In those circumstances, do you think there’s a scintilla of a chance that the Biden Justice Department, with its exclusive jurisdiction over criminal enforcement of federal campaign law in the United States, would sit idly by while a red-state prosecutor, with no federal authority, indicted a Democratic icon? Or do you figure that they would instantly bury the state and federal courts in voluminous legal briefs to get the case shut down as a lawless abuse of power? Would the media–Democrat complex be cheering the prosecutor, or ripping him as a reckless hack who was making up his own version of federal campaign law in order to persecute a partisan rival?

Yet, when it comes to the trial in Manhattan, the Biden Justice Department is sitting on its hands and ignoring the district attorney’s usurpation of federal authority. There’s one reason and one reason alone for that: Bragg indicted Donald Trump.

In the end, maybe this will all backfire on Democrats. But regardless of how it is being executed, never forget what the lawfare campaign is designed to do: Joe Biden hopes to ride these prosecutions of his opponent to a second term in the Oval Office.

[George K]

@George-K said in McCarthy: The DOJ White House Collusion:

It came to light in connection with the defense motions to disqualify Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis and her paramour, Nathan Wade (formerly the lead prosecutor on Trump’s case), that Wade consulted with the Biden White House Counsel’s Office during the investigation.