Eli Lake is no admirer of Donald J. Trump. So why is he arguing that the charges lodged by the Justice Department against the former president, alleging multiple crimes connected to his mishandling of classified documents, ought never to have been brought?
Lake is a journalist and pundit who has worked for Newsweek and The Daily Beast as a national security correspondent, and is now a columnist with Bloomberg View. He explained his position on the Trump indictment in this article for Bari Weiss’s Substack, The Free Press, and also during the June 12 Commentary Magazine podcast. Briefly to summarize his argument, Lake says (1) that the charges are founded on a toxic statute, the Espionage Act, that has been misused in the past to silence and persecute dissenters, and (2) that the prosecution of Trump will only worsen the partisan divide that afflicts America.
There’s no doubt that Lake is correct about the politics of prosecuting Trump. The so-called Resistance has given not only the former president’s core supporters but millions of other Americans ample reason to suspect that a double standard operates when it comes to Donald Trump, Republicans, and conservatives generally. From the first days of his candidacy, Democrats and progressives did everything they could to destroy Trump. And meanwhile, they protected such people as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden when questions came up concerning their behavior. Clinton was certainly guilty of much the same criminal behavior as is now alleged against Trump—but she was allowed by a compliant Obama Justice Department to slither off the hook. Trump, on the other hand, was smeared with charges that he’d colluded with V. Putin to steal the 2016 election. But we now know that Russiagate was a total lie, cooked up by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Today, Donald Trump is once more a candidate for the presidency; as things stand now, he’s on course to clinch the Republican Party’s nomination. And who’s prosecuting him? Joe Biden’s Justice Department, which hardly troubles to conceal its partisan bias. Under the circumstances, pious declarations that “no one is above the law” fall flat. Nobody believes it, not even the people who keep repeating the phrase.
Nor can Lake’s argument regarding the Espionage Act be dismissed: The record on that score is clear. Though the statute has indeed been used to prosecute actual spies like the Rosenbergs, it has also been deployed against dissidents and whistleblowers. Lake describes the law as “a loaded gun against modern journalism,” and I agree.
But to his argument I would reply (1) that double standards and partisan bias don’t excuse bad behavior and (2) that if the Espionage Act is a flawed statute, the remedy is legislative.
Plenty of government employees and military members of less exalted status than Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump have been charged, convicted and jailed for mishandling classified information. To let Trump skate for what looks like serious malfeasance in that regard also creates a double standard: one law for the movers and shakers, another law for the proles. The fact that progressives have embraced that standard should motivate conservatives to adopt the opposite position: Fiat justitia, ruat coelum. Let the Resistance explain, if it can, why Hillary was given a pass.
To that I would add that all the blather on the Right to the effect that “America is becoming a banana Republic” is patent nonsense. Trump’s not being dragged off to the Gulag. He’ll get his day in court; if he has a good defense, he’ll be afforded every opportunity to present it. And his fate won’t rest with MSNBC or the New York Times editorial page but with a jury of his peers.
If the judicial process is not to be trusted in this case, when can it ever be trusted?
I realize that Donald Trump’s most committed political opponents, embodied in the Resistance, are bad, bad people. They’ve lied and cheated and corrupted key institutions of government, all just to bring him down. That’s the truth. But it’s also true that Trump himself is a bad, bad man whose influence on American politics has been nothing short of disastrous. And if it takes the further disaster of this politically motivated prosecution to get rid of him, that’s a price worth paying. He and the Resistance deserve one another. Therefore let justice be done, though the heavens fall.
“To let Trump skate for what looks like serious malfeasance in that regard also creates a double standard: one law for the movers and shakers, another law for the proles. The fact that progressives have embraced that standard should motivate conservatives to adopt the opposite position: Fiat justitia, ruat coelum. Let the Resistance explain, if it can, why Hillary was given a pass.” -- That was really interesting. Great piece.