Another "You Bumped Me So I Can Shoot You"

I get that it is asking to much to expect Trump supporters to be reasonable, but at least two things they claim about the indictments are really infuriating.

One is the suggestion that the timing is politicized, and that the Department of Justice should refrain from indicting presidential candidates in the year before the election. It is general DOJ policy not to take any action in a politically sensitive matter in the 60 days before an election.  In a matter so sensitive as a presidential election, there is certainly room to argue that 60 days is not enough, and that the DOJ should refrain from taking politically sensitive actions for 90 days before an election.  In extremely sensitive matters, one can even make the argument for six months.  (That would mean the beginning of May).  

Certainly no such consideration was extended to Hillary Clinton. The FBI investigation into her e-mail server began in July, 2015 -- the year before the election, and about the same time of year as Trump records indictment was dropped.  No one at the time claimed that it was unfair to open an investigation into the Democratic front runner so soon before the election.  FBI Director James Comey announced the decision not indict on July 5, 2016, about four months before the election.  Naturally, he denied that politics played any role.  I myself suspect that politics may have played a role -- and not necessarily improperly.  Recall, at the time Comey made his announcement, Hillary had secured the Democratic nomination and the convention was less than three weeks away.  Since it was unthinkable at the time to run a candidate under indictment, the Democrats would have had under three weeks to choose a replacement, with no mechanism in place for making such a choice.*  The result would almost certainly have been to throw the Democrats into complete disarray and throw the election to Donald Trump.  So politically fraught a decision is not to be made lightly.  I invite anyone to consider the Republican reaction if the DOJ were to drop a Trump indictment, not in July, 2023, but in July, 2024.

Well, Republicans may say, that is different.  Congressional investigators only learned about Hillary's private server the year before the election, so it was not possible to begin the investigation any sooner.  Trump's attempt to subvert the election was known before he even left office, and his keeping of classified documents was known in early 2022. But this ignores the extent to which investigation was delayed by Trump's obstruction. And in any event, can anyone doubt that it an indictment had dropped in 2022, Republicans would have cried political motivation because it affected the midterm election.  All of which comes down to saying that federal prosecutors have about one year in which to indict any candidate for President before their actions are considered politicized.

The other is the ridiculous claim that indicting Trump is criminalizing politics as usual, and that Trump's actions are no different from Hillary Clinton saying years after losing that she considered Trump to be illegitimate.  To anyone who would say that, allow me to pose the following hypothetical.  Suppose (as seems most likely) that the 2024 election is a Trump-Biden rematch. (Likely). Let us suppose that Biden spends the entire election saying that there is no way that he can lose honestly, and that if he loses, it will be the result of illegal, Jim Crow style vote suppression by Republicans.  Let us further suppose that the election is close and comes down to a handful of swing states, any one of which could sway the election, including Michigan.**  We will further suppose that Biden loses Michigan by tens of thousands of votes, but Michigan has unified Democratic control of the state government, so Biden plans to use that to reverse the outcome.

Suppose Biden and his associated start accusing Michigan Republicans of Jim Crow style voter suppression and intimidation and call out two Republican poll watchers by name, falsely accusing them of forcibly turning away minority voters.  Let us suppose that Biden and his followers file dozens of lawsuits to reverse the outcome, all of which are laughed out of court as completely lacking in merit.  Biden than pressures leaders of the Michigan legislature to declare him the winner and choose a new slate of electors.  When they refuse, he has a group of Michigan supporters meet in the Michigan capitol the day electors meet, declare themselves the true electors, and submit certificates declaring him the winner.  Let us further suppose that Biden calls up the Michigan Secretary of State and urges her to "find" just enough votes to reverse the outcome, threatening her with criminal charges if she fails to come through.  And let us suppose that Biden pressures Kamala Harris to unilaterally reject the Michigan electors on the spurious grounds that the Michigan outcome is disputed and either send it back to the legislature to reconsider, or declare him the winner.

Does anyone seriously think that Republicans would shrug all of this off as politics as usual?  Does anyone think that the party that considers it a crime for Joe Biden to so much as talk to his son's business associates would not see any criminality in all of that?

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*Hillary did not name Tim Kaine has her running mate until the convention.

**To be clear, the 2020 election did not come down to Georgia.  Trump would have to sway six swing states to alter the outcome, hence his attempt to reverse the result in all six.