NEW YORK POST
Democrats and their allies in the press are melting down at Donald Trump’s talk of “retribution” through the legal system.
They’re the last people in the world who should talk.
As Trump has endured a criminal conviction, three other indictments and a huge civil-fraud judgment — all prosecuted by the Biden Justice Department and elected Democrats — he has spent months threatening to retaliate in kind: “I will be your retribution.”
Some Trump allies have already started drawing up lists of Democrats to prosecute.
Joe Biden’s campaign, without a shred of self-awareness, has warned that “convicted felon Donald Trump” is “raising plans to jail his political opponents” in “just the latest proof that he will do anything to…seek revenge on anyone who opposes him.”
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe told CNN he’s hearing from FBI employees who feel they may have to flee the country to avoid prosecution if Trump is elected.
“When Biden goes out and everyone says, ‘Bye bye,’ and then he gets indicted two days later — the country doesn’t want that,” Trump said. “I want to bring the country together.”
He insisted that this was why he never followed through on his 2016 “lock her up” threats to prosecute Hillary Clinton.
Vindictive prosecutions on the part of a second Trump administration would be bad.
Worse would be abusing the legal system by bringing legally bogus cases, submitting false evidence, establishing secret surveillance, stretching the law in all manner of unprecedented directions and charging opponents for things that allies got away with.
All of that has already been done to Trump.
If he retaliates, Democrats will have nobody to blame but themselves.
If you’re going to break longstanding norms and indict a former president, you should have the goods to show that he committed something everybody knows is a crime.
You should be able to point to a clear record of the law being used against both sides without fear or favor.
Democratic prosecutors have done the opposite.
Trump’s New York conviction for lying to his own checkbook should never even have gone to trial.
Nobody had ever before been charged under state law for violating federal campaign laws, and prosecutors never even tried to prove the central element of the charge: that Trump created false business records with intent to use them to defraud someone.
There was no evidence that the private records were ever meant to see the light of day.
There was no victim in that case, just as there was no victim in Letitia James’s civil-fraud case that smacked Trump with almost half a billion dollars in fines.
Trump was charged with the same thing Hillary’s campaign did: taking campaign expenses and misrecording them as legal expenses.
Hillary got a modest fine, Trump got branded a felon.
