Trump: The Man to Bring Down?
by Alain Destexhe • April 3, 2023 at 5:00 am
The indictment of former President Donald Trump is just the latest maneuver by many in the United States to distort elections.
The tactic appears reminiscent of Soviet secret police head Lavrentiy Beria's: "Show me the man, and I will find you the crime."
"[I]t is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it. It is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him." — Alan Dershowitz, Professor Emeritus at Harvard Law School, New York Sun, March 15, 2023.
In the 2020 presidential election, under the pretext of Covid, election laws in many states were changed -- illegally, some by not going through state legislatures, as required by the Constitution. There was also a series of maneuvers -- including the federal government and 51 former intelligence officers knowingly suppressing media reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop -- that cast legitimate suspicion, regardless of what the almost unanimous mainstream media said, on the outcome.
After President Trump, on January 6, 2021, called on his supporters to demonstrate "peacefully and patriotically," in front of the Capitol Building, some skeptical and disappointed demonstrators -- perhaps again with the intervention of the FBI -- became disorderly. Politicians and the media did not hesitate to compare the events of that day to 9/11 attacks and Pearl Harbor. The only person unfortunately killed at the demonstration was an unarmed demonstrator, shot by a policeman. The federal government refused to release 14,000 hours of footage, presumably in an attempt at a cover-up. Trump was subjected to the absurd procedure of a second impeachment to remove him from office -- even though he was no longer president. Finally, he was banned from Twitter and Facebook, which had been so useful to him in 2016 to bypass a hostile media.
Moreover, despite the efforts of many politicians and journalists to protect Biden, the new Republican-dominated House of Representatives has uncovered bank records showing "payments made to President Joe Biden's son from a Chinese Communist Party-linked company," as well as "showing Biden family members received more than $1 million from a Chinese energy company after passing through the account of a family associate," [including] "an unknown bank account identified as 'Biden.'"
Trump's indictment, a humiliating "perp walk," and the possible incarceration of a former president, serve as useful diversions to prevent the public from seeing evidence of a current commander-in-chief who has been questioned as being compromised.
No abuses will be spared Trump, or any other Republican who might run for president in 2024. It seems as if many in America, in what appears an escalating wish for authoritarian power are ready for all maneuvers to not let American voters choose their president democratically in 2024.
The indictment of former President Donald Trump is just the latest maneuver by many in the United States to distort elections.
The indictment will not be known until tomorrow, but according to the American media, the former president is accused of making fraudulent payments to a porn star with whom Trump denies having had sexual relations. According to the claims of his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who went to prison for "lying to the Internal Revue Services about the taxes he owed, lying to financial institutions and lying to Congress," Trump is accused of making the payments with funds from his 2016 presidential campaign, which is prohibited. But Trump did not use campaign funds, which would actually have been a serious violation of campaign laws. Trump used his personal money -- to pay Cohen.
