Sunday, Feb. 25, 2024 | 2 a.m.
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Donald Trump and his supporters are right: The Department of Justice has interfered in elections far too often. In fact, the department helped Trump win the presidency in 2016.
It twice interfered to the benefit of Trump. In July of that year, FBI Director James Comey announced Hillary Clinton had not committed a crime. Defying department protocol, he went further.
“Now let me tell you what we found: Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” Comey proclaimed.
Eleven days before the election, when polls showed Clinton clinging to a small lead, Comey intervened again, announcing a reopening of the email investigation despite being warned by a young department lawyer he’d be handing the White House to Trump. Days later, he revealed it was a false alarm, that there had been no new evidence after all. It was too late. Clinton’s lead had evaporated, and Trump became president while losing the popular vote by a few million.
Special counsel Robert Mueller investigated Trump’s ties to Russia. Though falling short of saying a conspiracy had been established, the Mueller report outlined numerous incidents of wrongdoing by Trump — things no other campaign, Republican, Democrat or independent, had done — but that Mueller had decided not to break a long-standing Justice Department tradition of refusing indicting presidents.
Within the past few weeks, yet another special counsel took a public dig at yet another Democratic candidate, painting President Joe Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory,” despite once again finding no evidence of a crime. Now we are learning an FBI informant had been secretly working with Russian officials to lie about the president and his troubled son Hunter Biden. You read that right. On the FBI’s payroll was a man helping fuel Republican fever dreams about alleged criminal activity by the Bidens that never occurred.
Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., recently said on Fox News that she sees “a two-tiered system of justice, a double standard, one for Donald Trump, and one for everybody else.”
She’s right. Despite overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing throughout his adult life, only now is Trump being charged or convicted of things such as fraud and being civilly held liable for rape.
Trump’s power and influence kept him out of prison when those without his wealth would have been behind bars long ago. The calls to let voters decide are just the latest effort, unintentionally or not, to ensure that Trump remains above the law, in effect claiming the judicial system isn’t a legitimate part of the democratic process.
Those making that case too often don’t apply that standard to the poor and downtrodden, people who are subject to the harshest sanctions from our “justice” system despite having the fewest resources with which to defend themselves.
More than 5% of Black would-be voters can’t cast a ballot because of our system. But Trump can become president again while facing multiple felons and despite the Colorado Supreme Court and a district court judge finding that he incited a violent insurrection.
Trump isn’t a victim of the system, but rather one of its primary beneficiaries.
Issac Bailey is a columnist for The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer.
