I used to read National Review and Rich Lowry regularly, but they lost me after they published their “Against Trump” issue and started asking me to pay to read their stuff. Still, I’m on their mailing list and will occasionally click over. On Wednesday I found myself agreeing with Lowry’s editorial.
Special counsel Robert Hur found that there was enough evidence to charge Joe Biden with a crime, yet he didn’t.
As we know, Hur concluded that a jury would probably find that Biden didn’t have criminal intent, although he stipulated during his congressional hearing a couple of weeks ago that a reasonable juror might conclude that Biden was guilty.
If this wasn’t an outlandish decision on Hur’s part, neither was it inevitable. Clearly, the fact that recommending charges against Biden would have been a thermonuclear political event, potentially affecting the election outcome, helped stay Hur’s hand. He could have gone by the strict letter of the law but allowed prudential considerations — again, not unreasonably — to play a role.
The ongoing bout of civil cases and criminal indictments against Donald Trump and, soon enough, a criminal trial raise the question: Why, if Trump wins election, should his Justice Department accept Hur’s judgment? Why wouldn’t it simply take Hur’s report and fashion it into an indictment of former president Biden?
After all, if there’s anything we’ve learned recently, it’s that no one is above the law.
Since there are now new rules, why shouldn’t we play by them? Make the Democrats eat their words. They like to trot out “no one is above the law” when it concerns the opposition, but you know they’ll scream bloody murder when it’s applied to them.
See? No one is above the law. That statement, of course, is a truism. In the hands of Trump enemies, though, it becomes something more — a rationalization for hostile prosecutors subjecting a political opponent to whatever they can possibly get him on.
By this standard, what would stop prosecutors in a Trump administration from trying to nail Biden? All the evidence is right there in the 350-page Hur report.
To which I say, “go for it.” Joe Biden has no sympathy from me. If they could nail him on the charges detailed in Hur’s report and send him to prison for whatever is left of his time on earth, I’d be good with that.
Maybe a case against Biden wouldn’t succeed. But since when is that the standard? An indictment would harry and humiliate him, and drain him of resources. It would provide enjoyment to his political enemies. In short, it would do everything that’s been done to Trump, but with lower stakes — and no chance of interfering in an election — since Biden wouldn’t any longer be a candidate for office.
As Letitia James insists, “There simply cannot be different rules for different people.”
Exactly.