Summary: Despite all of the hyperventilating from Donald Trump and Jill Stein and from their supporters, the evidence is beginning to mount that it is not Hillary Clinton who has been engaged in criminal activity in this election cycle. We all like to think that all politicians are crooks, but in 2016, it appears more likely than not that both Donald Trump and Jill Stein has skated uncomfortably close to the edge of criminality. Voters may come to realize that Hillary Clinton is in fact the only serious, noncriminal, choice for President of the United States. The Donald can’t seem to unclench his foot from his mouth, and his coziness with enemies national raises severe questions about his basic loyalty to the United States. Jill Stein suffers from much the same ailment; she should not have gone to Moscow and she certainly, while there, should not have engaged in a lengthy criticism of her own country which had the effect of giving aid and comfort to our enemies.
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What is happening in our politics the summer is extraordinary and unprecedented. Two of the four candidates running for president have skated so close to the edge of criminality as to disqualify themselves from serious consideration. Jill Stein has managed to make a pro-Russian fool of herself by criticizing the United States on the soil of an enemy of the state, and thus rule herself completely out of the running. Donald Trump has managed, with one ill considered twenty second soundbite, to add incitement to murder to treason to his list of factors that disqualify him from any office of trust or profit under the United States or any of them. Both Trump and Stein have managed to make their causes criminal or quasi criminal enterprises, in which no American should be complicit.
For years, one of the fondest tropes of American political discourse has been to criminalize the opposition: to paint one’s political opponents in the darkest possible terms and to suggest that they are criminals, and that their supporters are complicit in their criminality.
Certainly, both the right and the far left have sought diligently to frame Hillary Rodham Clinton as “the notoriousest traitor that was ever seen.” Partisans of Donald Trump and Jill Stein/Bernie Sanders had tried to tar the Democratic nominee with just about every crime conceivable, from treason right down to expired dog license. Yet curiously, despite their fondest hopes that this or that scandal might sprout legs, Hillary Clinton, like Ronald Reagan and, curiously enough, Donald Trump, has remained standing.
Despite numerous investigations of the so-called Benghazi scandal, as well as hyperventilating nonsense over the so-called email scandal, much of it ginned up by Donald Trump or by Jill Stein/Bernard Sanders supporters, all the so-called Clinton scandals have proven, in the jargon of the environmental movement, unsustainable.
And so the irony of this election season is not that the American public has been shown proof that Secretary Clinton is in fact “crooked Hillary,” but that her opponents Donald Trump and Jill Stein have in fact skated much closer to criminality then has the quondam Secretary of State. This may be the first election in American history since the Jefferson/Burr contest of 1800 in which credible criminal charges can be brought against failed presidential candidates, not only against Donald Trump but also against Jill Stein as well.
We’ve all seen how, in recent weeks and months, Donald Trump’s disturbingly cozy relationship with Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin has caused many Americans to entertain growing doubts about Mr. Trump’s loyalty to this country and his apparent willingness to sell this country’s interest to the highest, Russian, bidder. His expressed willingness to abandon the Baltic states to the tender mercies of Vladimir Vladimirovich’s military, and his equally expressed willingness to recognize Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea are just two indicators that Donald Trump is not to be trusted with America’s national security.
But a lot of Americans weren’t prepared to connect the dots. Right-wing Americans weren’t willing to see the possibility of any wrong in their chosen candidate, while the American left, perennially ready to self-sabotage at the drop of a hat engaged in its usual pious enterprise of hand-wringing denunciations of “McCarthyism.” rather than denounce Trump, too many on the American left chose instead to denounce those patriotic Americans who were themselves daring to tell the truth about Donald Trump. Worse still, many on the American left contrived to bootstrap their dislike of Hillary Clinton into a reflexive unwillingness to criticize Trump, on the rather absurd theory that to do so was to make oneself “complicit” in McCarthyism.
But in the last 48 hours, the defecation has hit the ventilation. In a speech to a rally of his supporters, Donald Trump utter these words: "Hillary wants to abolish -- essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know,” by which he plainly urged his more unhinged supporters to commit acts of violence against Secretary Clinton or against President Clinton should she be elected. It didn’t take long for the shit to hit the fan bigly, as Trump himself might put it.
Trump and Stein have managed this extraordinary achievement in self-criminalization all by themselves. Jill Stein went to Moscow, opened her mouth at a Kremlin dinner, and badmouthed her country — the country she wants to lead— in the presence of an enemy of the United States, and she didn’t seem to have the first degree of care or concern for how her remarks might be received here in the homeland. Donald Trump has been available himself assiduously of the resources made available to him by the Russian military and intelligence apparat at the behest of his good friend Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, and laundered through WikiLeaks, which a mounting preponderance of evidence demonstrates is, in effect, an unofficial organ of the Russian government.
When the evidence reaches critical mass and offers probable cause to believe that two of our four candidates for president are agents, either witting or unwitting, of Russia, that puts their supporters in a potentially untenable position. The position is untenable because if either Donald Trump or Jill Stein are traitors, their supporters are traitors, too. At common law, there are no distinctions of accessory liability when the crime involved is treason; every person connected with an actual treason or with a treasonable conspiracy is liable as a principal. This means, in theory, that any vocal supporter of Donald Trump or of Jill Stein could be indicted with Donald Trump or Jill Stein for treason.
Let that settle in for a moment.
If not only Trump and Stein, but also any of their vocal supporters, is a principal in treason, then the door is open for a terrifying recrudescence of the Palmer raids, HUAC, state legislative un-American activities committees, and a rebirth of McCarthyism in its fullest form, albeit with considerably greater justification.
If we are to save the Republic, however, from devouring itself in endless witchhunts, we must take some steps fairly quickly. Both Donald Trump and Jill Stein must discontinue their campaigns immediately, as the New York Daily News and other mainstream media publications have urged. Donald Trump should be indicted at once on a charge of seditious conspiracy. It should not be hard to do. Let a federal grand jury be impaneled in the Eastern District of Virginia (the historic go-to court for high-profile national security cases) and let a team of highly competent prosecutors present the case against him to the grand jury. If, as sometime New York Chief Judge Sol Wachtler once put it, “a good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich,” that team of highly competent, high-powered federal prosecutors should have no difficulty securing a true bill against a cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon.
Of course, indicting Donald Trump or Jill Stein is an extreme step, more worthy of a banana republic than of a great power. It should not be undertaken unless the weight of evidence is so clear that no reasonable prosecutor would not present a similar case if it involved a private citizen and not a presidential nominee. The development of the evidence must be conducted with excruciating care, and every inference that can be drawn must be drawn favorably to the accused and against the government. But if the evidence supports the growing consensus among the legal community that Donald Trump has, in fact, committed one or more crimes, he should, so to speak, be put to an election: he can plead guilty to a single low-level felony such as making a false or misleading statement to a federal investigator, and agree to discontinue his campaign at once, and never seek any public office, anywhere, ever again. Or he can face the full wrath and the full resources of a United States government determined to seek and obtain a conviction by any lawful means available to it. Not even the Donald has the resources to stand up against a government that has everything it needs to convict him out of the words of his own mouth.
We should not have had to have come to this place.
We should not have had to contend with a candidate whose sense of entitlement has bereaved him of his common sense and his basic loyalty to the United States.
We should not have had to contend with a fringe party candidate whose conviction that the United States is the source of all the world’s ills should have bereaved her of her common sense and basic loyalty to the United States.
Finally, we should not have had to contend with the unsubtle efforts of the Russian government to destabilize our politics, intrude in our elections, and possibly to hack the vote.
We can deal with the traitors among us, with fire and sword if necessary. But we should not have to defend the integrity of our political process by telling the Kremlin that its interference in our politics may be the casus belli that leads to World War III.
Oh, for a third Obama term!
Can we please be rid of Donald and Jill?!
