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Tuesday, March 19, 2024 - 04:23 AM

INDEPENDENT CONSERVATIVE VOICE OF UPSTATE SOUTH CAROLINA

First Published in 1994

INDEPENDENT CONSERVATIVE VOICE OF
UPSTATE SOUTH CAROLINA

President Donald J. Trump 2023

This Thursday, following weeks of rumors swirling about a potential indictment by a New York grand jury, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg led the indictment of former U.S. President Donald Trump. The indictment centers on more than 30 counts related to business fraud over alleged hush money paid to a pornography actress known as Stormy Daniels with the intentions of hiding a prior affair while he campaigned president in 2016.

Conservative thinkers, regardless of their personal support for Trump’s 2024 presidential bid, have widely decried the indictment as being politically motivated, observing that the Manhattan district attorney has a spotty record of pursuing more serious criminals.

“Anybody else other than Donald Trump would never be charged with this in Manhattan,” asserted Andrew McCarthy, former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, in an interview on “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.” “The pattern of Alvin Bragg, as long as he’s been the district attorney, has actually been the opposite of that. It’s to take actual, real criminal activity by hardened offenders and basically deflate it from serious felonies down to misdemeanors or even not pursue it at all here.”

McCarthy added, “In Trump’s case, he’s taking something that’s a trivial, stale misdemeanor at best — and whether he’s got the proof of that remains to be seen — and he’s trying to inflate it into a felony that could result in a four-year prison sentence. So, the only way you can explain this is politics.”

Some commentators have raised speculation about how political maneuvering behind the indictment may play into Democratic strategy related to the 2024 election. Before the indictment, Twitter CEO Elon Musk said, “If this [an indictment] happens, Trump will be re-elected in a landslide victory.” Meanwhile, after news of the indictment broke, conservative pundit Ann Coulter stated, “They’re trying to make [Trump] our nominee. Would they do that because they think he’d be tough to beat or easy to beat?”

Regardless of the intended outcome, it appears that many operatives on the Left are eager to see the former president in handcuffs. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), former Democratic Speaker of the House, stated, “The Grand Jury has acted upon the facts and the law. No one is above the law, and everyone has the right to a trial to prove innocence. Hopefully, the former president will peacefully respect the system, which grants him that right.” Pelosi received many replies retorting that the American legal system is built on the basis of those accused being treated as innocent until proven guilty.

McCarthy summarized the progressive weaponization of the mechanisms of government against political opponents, saying, “First, it’s the history of the progressive movement, particularly in its late 20th century and early 21st century ascendancy and iteration that it uses. Basically, it uses the levers of power as a penalty and uses processes in a punitive way. That’s sort of how it operates, and we’ve seen it in a bunch of different scenarios.” He went on to add, “And secondly, unlike prosecutors in the federal government, prosecutors in the state government, district attorneys, and also even state attorneys general are elected officials. They are not appointed, and they’re not vetted by the Senate to make sure that they won’t use their powers in a partisan way.”

McCarthy concluded, “I think it’s better to look at Alvin Bragg as an elected progressive Democrat in Manhattan than it is to look at him as a law enforcement official. His actions make much more sense if you see him that way.”

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