Want To Get Away with Murder? Just Run Against Donald J. Trump
We’re currently in week two of the much-ballyhooed Ukraine scandal, and as Salon.com salivates over Vice President Mike Pence, Attorney General William Barr and acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney potentially getting sucked in, one could argue that Joe Biden might actually be guilty of the same type of thing that Trump has only been accused of.
By now, anyone paying even slight attention knows that Biden bragged about threatening to withhold aid from Ukraine unless a prosecutor who just happened to be investigating a company where Biden’s son served on the board was fired.
As many have pointed out, Biden’s son being connected to wrongdoing in Ukraine would be incredibly damaging to the former vice president’s political plans.
It’s all conjecture at this point, but it’s within the realm of possibility.
After all, what could be so damning that the elder Biden would threaten to withhold $1 billion just to get Ukrainian authorities to stop sniffing around a company where his son worked?
(It’s a great irony that allowing Ukraine to complete the investigation could put some of those more prickly questions to rest.)
Democrats and the establishment media, in the meantime, are busy ignoring Biden and accusing Trump of pushing the investigation to hamstring Biden if he wins the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
But using that logic from the establishment media’s reporting, Biden is guilty as sin, because while Trump’s alleged threat is entirely inferential at this point, Biden’s bragging about his threat is spread across the internet for anyone to see.
And a lot of people have seen it:
There is, however, a key difference between the Biden and Trump cases: Biden enjoys a new protection never before seen in American law enforcement or jurisprudence.
That’s because he’s running against Trump.
And, by the media and Democrats’ reasoning, that means Trump can’t push to have him investigated, because any negative information an investigation might turn up would redound to Trump’s political benefit.
That’s the crux of the left’s claims against the president, by the way — that he used his position of power to harm a potential political opponent.
What that means in practice is that, apparently, the chief executive of the entire country, Trump, can’t investigate anyone who might run against him.
Said otherwise, by the left’s lights, it’s illegal for Trump to push for an investigation that might result in bad media coverage for any potential political opponent.
Stop and think about that for just a second.
If we carry that reasoning to its logical conclusion, Trump can’t prosecute any crimes because, as district attorneys have known for a very long time, prosecuting crimes can bolster re-election chances.
Now, neither Democrats nor the media would ever say that out loud.
They’d say that Biden is a special case because he has a high probability of running against Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
But even if we go along with them on that point, we still end up in a bizarre position where anyone committing a crime can enjoy de facto immunity by simply running against Trump.
And we can’t solve that problem by pushing the prosecution down to the Department of Justice (which would really do the prosecuting anyway), because the Democrats are already trying to suck Barr into this too.
The entire charade would be laughable if it didn’t have serious implications for law and order.
The transcript is now out in the open, as is the whistleblower’s complaint. The DOJ has already cleared Trump of wrongdoing, and federal prosecutors declined to act on the complaint when it was first filed.
It’s very hard to picture Trump being found guilty of anything, impeached though he might be (and obviously absolved).
This means that at the end of the day, Trump will remain standing atop yet another shattered Democratic/media conspiracy theory.
But what will remain is a disturbing new precedent.
If you want Democrats and the media to help you get away with a massive crime, just run against Trump and you can’t be touched.
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