When Donald Trump first emerged on the political scene, one of the main arguments the Republican Establishment made against nominating him was that he was a crook, or at least constantly surrounded by crooks. The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial in 2015 headlined “Trump and the Goodfellas,” criticizing his history of working with and continuing to praise mobsters. When Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was sentenced in 2017, the Journal scolded his “poor judgment for hiring the notorious Beltway operator” who committed a “financial and lobbying scam, which is exactly what Mr. Trump risked in hiring a swamp denizen.”
And, while it has taken some time, subsequent events have vindicated the original concerns about Trump’s sleazy ways. A huge number of his associates have been convicted of crimes, as has Trump himself.
But as Trump took hold of the GOP, his Republican critics had to either swallow their criticisms of his crookedness (the Journal itself spiked a second editorial on Trump’s mob ties after he won the nomination) or leave the party. The new Republican view is that the reason Trump is facing a slew of criminal investigations and so many of his associates have gone to prison is that the criminal justice system is biased against Republicans.
Matthew Hennessey, an editor at the Journal opinion page, has a column painting Trump and his associates as victims of Democratic “lawfare.” Hennessey’s argument is that the sheer length of the Trump-world rap sheet is proof the legal system is meting out disparate treatment against Mr. Trump.
Here is Hennessey’s thesis:
Justice is supposed to be blind. The legal jihad against anyone who ever did political business with Donald Trump has many wondering whether that’s still true. The list of Trump associates targeted by Justice Department special counsel investigations and Democratic prosecutors around the country is astonishingly long. It’s total lawfare.
The first example Hennessey cites for this disparity is that Robert Mueller brought charges against Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and Michael Flynn, but that “anyone at the FBI who actually did meddle in the 2016 election” was “never prosecuted.”
This does sound kind of unfair until you consider three points. First, Robert Mueller is a Republican, and while Trump prefers to handle the fact that many Republicans find him unfit for office and a criminal by defining them as Democrats, it does not make it so.
Second, there absolutely was a special-counsel investigation into the FBI interfering in the 2016 election. Trump demanded, and received, a yearslong probe by John Durham, a famed prosecutor, who tried extremely hard to prove the theory that the FBI plotted against Trump. The trouble is that the theory failed to produce any convictions. Its only charges melted in court.
Republicans spent most of the time Durham was at work rubbing their hands gleefully in anticipation of the gigantic scandal he was going to uncover. Now they sadly remember Durham’s face-plant as more proof that somehow there was a real conspiracy against Trump that was “never prosecuted.”
And third, the fact that numerous Trump associates were found to have committed crimes is easily explained by the hypothesis once raised by the Journal: that Trump is a huge crook.
“You can read the lamentably long list of Trump-world legal woes as evidence that no one is above the law, which is the view of most Democrats,” Hennessey argues, “Or you can read it the way half of Americans and 83% of Republicans do — as clear evidence that a politicized justice system went after Mr. Trump and his associates because of who they are.”
None of this would have happened under President Ted Cruz or President Ron DeSantis. That was a big reason the Journal wanted those guys to be the nominee!
Of course Trump’s various goons are being convicted of crimes at much higher rates than the Democrats. The “lamentably long list of Trump-world legal woes” is basically what you’d expect if you handed the most powerful office in the world to a mobbed-up professional swindler.
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