I can see you yawning from here. And it’s okay — no offense taken.
If you’ve been paying attention during the Trump years, it’s only natural to feel that fuzziness, that heaviness in your eyelids, when the topic is yet another Republican investigation into Democrat wrongdoing. Indeed, it’s only natural to conjure up images of Lucy, Charlie Brown, and that infernal football.
But this one just feels different.
Late Sunday night, Just the News’s one-man investigative band, John Solomon, published a piece under the following headline: “FBI opens ‘grand conspiracy’ probe on weaponization, opening door to special prosecutor.”
“Grand conspiracy” is a term I hadn’t heard before — at least not in a legal sense — and it sounds like this has the makings of something serious rather than perfunctory. And this probe goes far beyond the investigation of James Comey and John Brennan, which our Mark Alexander covered last week. Here’s Solomon:
The FBI has quietly launched an investigation into a decade of Democratic party deep-state antics from Russia collusion to Jack Smith, opening the door for the appointment of a special prosecutor to examine whether the well-documented episodes amount to a criminal conspiracy to meddle in three U.S. elections to the benefit of Democrats and the detriment of President Donald Trump.
Yeah, yeah, I can hear you mumbling. We know all about the deep state, and Crossfire Hurricane, and the Russia collusion hoax, and the perfect phone call, and that sham impeachment, and Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the Gang of 51 letter, and the Big Tech collusion, and the Mar-a-Lago raid. We know all about that stuff. And we all watched as the Durham probe droned on and chewed up millions and delivered bupkis. So what’s different this time?
It’s a great question. Indeed, it’s the question. And the answer is that this isn’t shaping up as the typical Beltway DOJ probe. For example, the Democrats have in recent years perfected the art of running out the statute of limitations. The Russia collusion conspiracy is now 10 years old. The Biden FBI’s pre-election social-media collusion is nearing five years. Remember how sweetheart “special counsel” David Weiss tried to run out the clock on Hunter Biden’s clear-as-day tax evasion charges?
Even now, with the Trump administration considering a special prosecutor to probe China’s scheme to help rig the 2020 election for Joe Biden by creating fake mail-in ballots, the Biden FBI’s failure to investigate and, in fact, bury the intelligence in this matter means that the statute of limitations is now just weeks away.
What makes the FBI’s new “grand conspiracy” probe so intriguing, though, is that, as Solomon reports, it “would allow a special prosecutor time to tie alleged criminal events currently covered by statutes of limitations to older events by treating them as part of an ongoing conspiracy or even a racketeering operation.” So just because Obama and Clinton and Brennan and Comey and Strzok were conspiring way back in 2015 doesn’t mean it’s now off-limits.
In addition, as Solomon adds, “The ‘grand conspiracy’ probe also would open the door to empanel a grand jury outside of Washington, D.C., where juries have been reluctant to convict actors who pursued Trump.”
Reluctant? You’re telling us. I’ve been pointing out for years what a sickeningly partisan Swamp our nation’s capital is, and how utterly unlikely it is to get a fair hearing and an impartial jury in a town that votes nine-to-one for Democrats. Just ask John Durham, who had Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann dead to rights for lying but couldn’t convince a DC jury to convict.
What a refreshing change it would be to have a grand jury empaneled in, say, South Florida rather than the rigged DC Swamp. Recall that the Sunshine State is where the weaponized FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. As one former federal prosecutor put it, “Florida is an intriguing option because overt acts of the alleged conspiracy occurred there and are still inside the statute of limitations.”
One of the best aspects of having a businessman as president is that competence and performance tend to become the rule rather than the exception. Good businessmen tend to learn from their mistakes, too, and this second iteration of the Trump Department of Justice seems markedly different from the first.
But even if this “grand conspiracy” probe doesn’t result in perp walks and prison time for the likes of James Comey, John Brennan, and others, it’s essential that we conduct the exercise. Indictments stick to public servants like sap, and the testimony and the evidence and the invocation of the Fifth Amendment and the repetitive utterance of “I don’t recall” all tend to leave their mark. And the time and the energy and the cost of mounting a criminal defense take their toll, too.
Taken together, these things also send a message to the next wave of sleazy schemers, the next wave of election-denying would-be conspiracists: Yes, this is a rigged town, and yes, Democrats own it, but they aren’t entirely untouchable.
There’s also the matter of history and the urgent need to revise it, to correct it. A new Rasmussen poll shows that a whopping 69% of self-described liberal voters still think “the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 election,” even though that hoax has been thoroughly debunked. Yikes. Talk about living in a bubble.
In this respect, even imperfect justice is better than none at all.
