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| Attorney-General Garland appointed Jack Smith as Special Counsel to handle the prosecution of the indicted former president. He is very experienced, far more skillful than any opponent the indicted former president has ever faced in a courtroom. |
I
do agree with the defeated former president that he is indeed an innocent
person, but aren't all those indicted innocent until proven guilty?
Should
that guilty verdict occur, the ensuing national crisis will surpass Lexington,
Concord, or the firing on Fort Sumter. That's why I fear that there might be a
plea deal for some lesser charge made during the last days of his trial, at
which point the overwhelming strength of the prosecution’s case will have
eclipsed any chance of their being an acquittal, even with the unfortunate
choice of the presiding judge.
To
read the full text of the 37 counts in the indictment, copy and
paste the following link, from US News & World Report, on your browser line:
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2023-06-09/read-full-text-of-donald-trumps-indictment or just CLICK HERE.
I hope that the strong
charges in this indictment will not be dropped in order to avoid such a crisis in
exchange for his guilty plea to some lesser charge, subject to the defendant’s
doing things like dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, agreeing to a few
months of house arrest at Mar-a-Lago and making a pledge to keep his mouth shut
forever after, in order to keep him out of a real prison. Honestly, I don't see that happening, but it still might.
Such a compromise should
not be made because although it would take the defendant out of the picture, it
would not do the same for his supporters.
And they are the ones who matter. THEY ARE THE
REASON WHY THE TRIAL SHOULD PROCEED JUST AS IT WOULD FOR ANY OTHER LAWBREAKER. They are the ones who
will continue to be a threat to democracy, with or without the defeated former
president as their leader. Any deal for
the defendant would not take them out of the picture but in fact, would
strengthen their position.
The
real crisis will be with those supporters who will make the BLM, abortion
rights, and gun control demonstrations seem like nap-time in a pre-K classroom. Some on the far-right are already calling on
groups like those who rioted on January 6 at the Capitol to act. Unfortunately, dealing with them effectively would
probably necessitate a threat to our freedoms and to democracy in the United
States, so even as the defeated former president fades into history, the
Pandora’s box he opened will not be fully closed.
If
you live in South Florida, drive down to Woolbright Road near I-95 in Boynton
Beach on any Thursday around the afternoon rush hour to view the indicted
former president’s supporters who come out to demonstrate there in his support,
waving flags and signs. If you are a
Democrat, you will just drive by, laugh, and perhaps show them a middle
finger. If you are a Republican, you
will just cry because those are the folks the party of Abraham Lincoln depends
upon to win elections these days. But they are there and they will not go
away! That is the point.
Whatever
the outcome of the indictment of the defeated former president (remember that he
is innocent until proven guilty), it points out how dangerously vulnerable the
Achilles heel of our democracy is.
(For those who need some brushing up on their Greek mythology,
the
Greek hero Achilles was made invulnerable by being dipped into the River Styx
by his mother, the sea goddess Thetis, who held him by the heel when doing so,
excluding it from his invulnerability. Achilles
was later killed by an arrow wound to that spot on his heel where she had held
him.)
Our
democracy’s Achilles heels are all perfectly legal, among them are the rights it
provides to our citizens. Included are the lies spread throughout the country with impunity by often questionable media, the diminution of
voters' rights by State governments, and the presence of almost unlimited amounts
of money in funding political candidates. All these things, and more can bring
down our democracy, as they almost did during the indicted former president’s
term in office. We must be careful that
any Band-Aids applied to its vulnerable 'heels' do not jeopardize that
democracy as well.
Let the trial (or trials)
begin!
JL
* * *
Why Did He Knowingly Break the Law?
An unanswered question that no one seems
to have a solid answer for is why the indicted former president hung on to the
classified documents in the first place.
I think it was simply a matter of pride
and a desire to show off. Who but the indicted former president would even want to live in a rococo palace, tastelessly decorated, like Mar-a-Lago? Even the government, to whom the Post cereal family, its original builders, donated it, didn't want it. Just as he
always wanted a pretty girl on his arm or in bed, or as his wife, and hung on to oddball
trophies like one of Shaquille O’Neal’s giant-sized basketball shoes, he wanted
to be able to show off the secret stuff that he knew about in trying to impress
others. That’s why he claimed the papers
were ‘mine.’ I doubt that he planned on selling
it to, or using it to curry favor with, foreign powers although he might have
wanted it to use against his critics, to whom he might scream out 'Gotcha, look what you said about that country in 2018!' That his doing so affected national
security was a possibility beyond the mental powers of this two-bit show-biz-oriented real
estate peddler.
Anyone with a security clearance knows
not to talk about the information it may have given them access to, or even the
fact that they had such a clearance.
Sixty-seven years ago, I was in such a position, and that’s about as far
as I go in talking about it, even though anything to which I had access is now
obsolete and worthless from an informational standpoint. But whom am I to judge that?
If I had the indicted former president’s mindset, I might tell you that I know
all about the place in Germany where Adidas built their international
headquarters, now a matter of public record, but I don’t. These are the kind of games the defeated and
indicted former president plays to impress people, and they do constitute
breaking the law. As I said above, let the trial (or trials)
begin!
JL
*
* *
Housekeeping on the Blog
Email Alerts: If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time
there is a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and
we’ll see that you do. And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might
suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. (You can pass those email
addresses to me by email at jacklippman18@gmail.com . )
Forwarding Postings: Please
forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it.
If you want to send someone the blog, exactly as you are now seeing it, with all of its bells and whistles, you can just tell folks to check it out by
visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com or
by providing a link to that address in your email to them. I think this is the best method of
forwarding Jackspotpourri.
There’s another, perhaps easier, method of
forwarding it though! Google Blogspot, the platform on which
Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that possible. If you click on the tiny
envelope with the arrow at the bottom of every posting, you will have the
opportunity to list up to ten email addresses to which the blog will be
forwarded, along with a comment from you. Each will receive a link to the textual portion only of the blog that you now are reading,
but without the illustrations, colors, variations in typography, or the
‘sidebar’ features such as access to the blog’s archives.
Either way will work, sending them the link
to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com, or clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting, but I recommend sending them the link.
Again, I urge you to forward this
posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it.
Have a nice day!
* * *
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