Joseph Moreno

One of the outcomes of November’s election is that Americans can once again trust their own eyes and call out the obvious when they see it. President Biden long ago lost the mental acuity to serve as the nation’s chief executive. Progressive causes like climate change, diversity hiring and transgender men participating in women’s sports are ridiculous. And highly dubious prosecutions seemingly launched as political weapons are exactly what they appear to be. In a Friday morning double-header Americans witnessed in real time the crumbling of the last two vestiges of the lawfare campaign against former and future president Donald Trump. What were once touted as a dream of the left to bring down a king will at best be reduced to obscure footnotes in the annals of history.

What a waste. As Special Counsel Jack Smith had his 2020 election charges against President-elect Trump dismissed by Justice Tanya Chutkan, any amusement derived from the fact Smith and his merry band of anti-Trumpers just spent two years spinning their wheels is belied by the damage caused by his travesty. It is not only the tens of millions of taxpayer dollars squandered. It is not only thousands of misused hours of investigators and prosecutors who should have been pursuing violent crimes, drug and human trafficking and terrorism cases. It is not only countless time spent clogging the dockets of courts in Florida and Washington, DC, which should have been used for legitimate cases.

The effort to bankrupt, disgrace and banish Donald J. Trump to a jail cell in Riker’s Island has instead helped pave his road right back to the Oval Office. The unprecedented abuse of the American legal system fueled plenty of cable news coverage, but it also alienated the electorate. As with President Joe Biden’s mental decline, voters trusted their own eyes over the tale being told on their screens and delivered a decisive verdict against an eight-year politically-motivated lawfare campaign — exit polls showed that Trump voters were more likely to say democracy was under threat.

You’ve got to hand it to President Biden — even in his diminished state he still has a few tricks up his sleeve. You might think that as our octogenarian commander-in-chief is dragged kicking and screaming from office, amid the ignominious fumes of family influence-peddling no less, the last things he would shine a spotlight on are judicial term limits and ethics rules. But in fact his latest attack on the Supreme Court is the next logical battle in a war Biden launched decades ago and which Vice President Harris now plans to fully embrace and run with. What is being peddled as judicial “reform” is in fact the left’s continued effort to seize the remaining branch of government that has slipped from its grasp.

To call Jack Smith an aggressive prosecutor is an understatement. Smith’s crusade against former president Donald Trump has been nothing less than scorched earth, with a shamelessly transparent goal of doing all he can to stop Trump’s re-election in November. By dismissing Smith’s classified documents prosecution in Florida, District Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling has not so much clipped Smith’s wings as it has tossed him from the nest altogether. And her decision throws both prosecutions into a tailspin from which they may never recover. For two years Attorney General Merrick Garland has been insisting that Smith is operating with complete freedom and discretion, walled off from Justice Department oversight and political pressure from the White House.

According to President Biden, not since the Civil War has American freedom and democracy been so under assault. In his State of the Union address, Biden characterized January 6 as a day when “insurrectionists stormed this very Capitol and placed a dagger at the throat of American democracy.” With this kind of rhetoric emanating from the White House, it is no wonder a good portion of the country believes that any use of the legal system is justified to protect us from a second Donald Trump administration.  Except... that is not how the law works. By stretching their prosecutorial powers to the breaking point, Democrats are perverting the very system they are claiming to protect.  Take the charade in New York.

While Donald Trump’s excessive rhetoric often evokes eye rolls, in the case of Friday’s record-setting $350 million judgment against the Trump Organization, he is spot on. “Disgraceful.” “Lawfare.” “Banana republic.” All three apply.  It’s hard to imagine a more perverse and vindictive misuse of the justice system than that which New York attorney general Letitia James has committed. While campaigning in 2018, James promised to vigorously investigate Trump and his business. True to her word, once in the office James spent three years seizing and scouring through Trump’s tax and financial records for anything she could use as the basis for legal action.

When it comes to enforcing America’s national security laws, the Biden administration claims that it will stop at nothing to protect our democracy. The Department of Justice has embraced hyperaggressive prosecution theories, curtailed First Amendment rights and even breached the historical divide between law and politics — such measures are regrettable, but necessary when Democracy itself is on the line.   Despite all the tough talk, Biden’s DoJ just accepted a shockingly lenient plea deal for a military servicemember caught selling secrets to China.   Earlier this week, US Navy Petty Officer Wenheng Zhao pled guilty to conspiracy and bribery for providing highly sensitive military information to the Chinese government.