Weaponization of the legal system reaches a new level

OPINION:

If we are to believe the news, the district attorneys in Fulton County, Georgia and Manhattan will soon announce indictments of Donald Trump. 

The New York indictment looks especially imminent. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is hellbent on charging Mr. Trump. In fact, the New York City District Attorney’s office has been searching for any way to charge the former president since 2017. The investigation has poured over President Trump’s personal and business life. They’ve reportedly settled on charging Donald Trump for the non-crime of his attorney Michael Cohen paying Stormy Daniels settlement money.

Even The New York Times admits the case is a stretch: “The case against the former president hinges on an untested and therefore risky legal theory involving a complex interplay of laws.”

It doesn’t matter. Donald Trump is uniquely evil to the liberal prosecutors in New York. Mark Pomerantz, who investigated Donald Trump for the New York City District Attorney’s office, reveals in his book that he was asked in 2017 to join the DA’s office for the sole purpose of going after Mr. Trump. Mr. Pomerantz wrote that, unlike prosecuting “killers,” the prospect of prosecuting Mr. Trump made him emotional, as Mr. Trump “disgusted” him.

The now-former prosecutor wrote that he “would have paid the District Attorney’s Office for the opportunity to prosecute President Trump.” 

This zeal to go after the political opponents of the Democrat Party while ignoring real criminals starts with the leadership in the Manhattan DA’s office. The New York Post found that “soft-on-crime Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has downgraded more than half his felony cases to misdemeanors — while also managing to lose half of the felony cases that do reach court.”

Mr. Bragg can’t find the time to prosecute felonies in his district and protect the citizens that pay his salary, but he has all the time in the world to pursue a partisan agenda against Mr. Trump. This is an attempt to undermine a presidential candidate in order to curry favor with Democrat officials while ignoring New Yorkers’ concern with rising crime in New York City.

The partisan legal antics don’t stop in New York. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis convened a special grand jury in Atlanta to try to secure charges against Mr. Trump. The foreperson of the special grand jury went on a national media tour, where she gleefully fantasized about taking down Mr. Trump. 

Mr. Willis appears to be targeting Mr. Trump for actions that are protected by the First Amendment. It’s only illegal to challenge election results in third-world Marxist hellholes. It’s not criminal to lobby other politicians. If political arm-twisting were illegal, then every politician in America would be in prison.

These two prosecutions are intended to kneecap Mr. Trump with the 2024 presidential election on the horizon. Mr. Trump remains the Republican frontrunner, and he is ahead of Joe Biden in recent polls. 

These district attorneys are attempting to force Mr. Trump out of the race with bogus legal theories—Mr. Bragg’s even essentially dismissed by the liberal New York Times—because they are terrified of a fair election. 

Why wouldn’t they be afraid? There’s record inflation and a looming financial crisis. Most Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the country. Mr. Trump brought us peace and prosperity; Mr. Biden brought us war and despair.

Fortunately, these politicized legal shenanigans tend to blow up in Democrats’ faces. Just look at how Mr. Trump’s poll numbers improved after the FBI’s baseless and illegal raid on Mar-a-Lago. 

The one thing that has united conservatives in the Trump Era is disdain at the Democrats’ weaponization of the legal system. 

But while the use of our courts to score political points might not succeed as planned for Democrats, it will succeed in causing permanent damage to our nation. For all the Democrat talk of “protecting democracy,” weaponized prosecution is a blatant attempt to steal control from voters. 

Every time a prosecutor’s office becomes more focused on targeting political opponents than protecting its citizens, we become more like the countries we used to liberate.

• Mike Davis is the founder and president of the Article III Project, which defends constitutionalist judges. As the former chief counsel for nominations to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA), he served as the staff leader for Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation. Davis served as a law clerk to Justice Neil Gorsuch, both on the 10th Circuit and Supreme Court.