Even nearly three years later, Republicans still savor and chuckle at the video of the woman in a winter coat and glasses, howling a primordial “Nooooo!” into the cold January air as Donald Trump was inaugurated.
For Democrats, though, Inauguration Day 2017 remains a special kind of wound. As has often been said for going on three years, the Democrats have been trying—with all of the deep state and mainstream media power at their disposal—to undo the 2016 election of Donald Trump.
Democrats feel their opponents must be discredited and destroyed, and their preferred method is lawfare and media innuendo. And, as the ceaseless investigations and legal harassment of the last few years have shown, they have had the power of law enforcement and highly partisan elements of the Department of Justice with which they can exact revenge on Donald Trump and his supporters.
For the first time in memory, Democrats in the Senate have been bullying and frantically urging the Justice Department to investigate all aspects of the opposition party’s inauguration, from individuals connected to the inauguration committee to employees of the Trump Organization, high profile donors and fundraisers, and members of the post-campaign transition team.
For months, federal prosecutors in New York have been on the hunt. Hundreds of news articles breathlessly reporting the inevitable downfall of these officials were created from leaks by deep state operatives in the Justice Department.
Unsurprisingly, it always amounted to nothing.
In a late Friday night news dump last week, prosecutors sheepishly admitted there would probably be no charges filed against anyone in the Trump Organization for inauguration-related activity.
Where do the people who have been targeted by bogus, partisan investigations go to get their reputations back? Who pays their legal fees, and compensates them for months of time, stress, and worry?
Now, Democrats and these same activist, partisan lawyers are moving on to Republican donors, again hounding them using the legal system. These donors might have more resources with which to fight such harassment, but any wealthy individual runs up against the limitless means with which the United States government can apply pressure.
In April 2018, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Dick Blumenthal (D-Conn.) authored a letter to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, demanding an investigation into Elliott Broidy, a prominent GOP fundraiser and donor to pro-Israel causes. Of course, the two senators weren’t really writing to Sessions. They were sending a signal to Democratic Party loyalists in the Justice Department—then, as now, crammed full of Obama appointees.
As Liz Sheld at American Greatness asked, “Is this a fight to end corruption or a fight to use government agencies as weapons against political enemies?”
The attack on people like Broidy is strategic: Democrats wish to frighten potential Republican contributors with the prospect of invasive and costly investigations. If “the process is the punishment,” as they say, it’s better to just stop donating to conservative or Republican causes, keep your head down and allow the Left to prevail over American politics uncontested.
People like former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn, who have been the target of this kind of politically motivated prosecution and investigation by the rogue prosecutors, know how daunting it is to face the limitless resources of the U.S. government. If a partisan prosecutor is determined to get you, odds are he will.
The parallels to RussiaGate are alarming, too. That started as a Democrat-funded opposition research project. Christopher Steele, Glenn Simpson, and the gang at FusionGPS—all former intelligence operators or investigative journalists for hire—concocted a narrative and created official-looking “dossiers” to peddle their fanciful stories to the media. It was dishonest, sure, but it was well within the subterranean workings of a political campaign.
But what made RussiaGate a scandal—rife with illegality and alarming threats to American liberty—was how a phony “dossier” served as the basis for official investigations by the national security bureaucracy. This anti-American politicization of the legitimate functions of government should alarm us all.
“Regardless of the merits of the case,” wrote Streiff at Red State, “campaigning on using your personal clout to strong-arm the Justice Department into investigating someone who is a political opponent is something that just isn’t done in American politics.”
Indeed.
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