by Lee Smith at Tablet Mag
With the arraignment of Donald Trump on charges brought under the Espionage Act, America’s cold civil war pitting blue cities against red regions has gotten considerably hotter. But that’s inevitable when you manipulate the nation’s laws to designate the leader of a movement representing one half of the country a traitor.
Legal experts say the Justice Department’s case against Trump is strong. Even many on the right agree. “This indictment contains serious charges,” says Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence. The former president is “toast,” says his onetime Attorney General William Barr. But to others, the 37-count indictment looks like a reboot of the 2020 letter signed by 51 former U.S. spies claiming Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. The package is so big it’s got to be real, when in fact it’s just Bubble Wrap all the way down.
Debating the indictment’s details—the DOJ’s legal theory, which documents do and do not belong to Trump under the Presidential Records Act, etc.—is a ritualized expression of faith that the law is still impartial and the justice system is in the hands of serious men and women, devoted law enforcement officials who even when it looked most hopeless over the last seven years never once veered from their mission and now finally got their man. But it’s just playacting, for the stark fact is this: The never-ending campaign to get Trump is evidence the country has gone mad.
“Here’s what I was hoping,” journalist Joe Klein wrote on his Substack. “That Trump would be charged with espionage. Full stop.” Of course he did, as did the majority of the media hastening America into open conflict. The Espionage Act was written for times like these. Enacted in 1917 to criminalize antiwar activism, the statute is a political weapon designed to bypass the Constitution and prosecute the ruling party’s domestic opponents. The fact that Trump has been charged with crimes under the Espionage Act is evidence that the world’s oldest democracy has fallen into the hands of a corrupt and pathological ruling faction that has turned federal law enforcement into a people’s commissariat serving a cohort of performative elites who still harbor the fantasy that a former American president is a Russian spy…