This week’s decision by Fani Willis, the Democratic district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, to impeach President Trump and 18 others for interference in the 2020 presidential election was met with swift and acute criticism legal experts on both sides. The 98-page indictment alleges, in part, that Trump and his co-defendants “knowingly and willfully engaged in a conspiracy to unlawfully alter the outcome of the election in Trump’s favor.”
Moreover, the timing of her move against the former president – less than 18 months before the 2024 presidential election in which Trump, the runaway frontrunner in the Republican primary, is running his likely but weakened opponent Joe Biden according to the last few surveys – it seems many as itself partisan election interference, much like Trump’s three previous impeachments.
Beyond the timing and merits of the Georgia case, the Democratic prosecutor’s aggressive, partisan move against Trump, along with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith, has undoubtedly set a unsafe precedent. in the eyes of many expertsand calling for similar indictments by Republican state and federal prosecutors for fraud and election interference against Democratic presidential candidates during their election campaigns.
Although Joe Biden is immune from prosecution as a sitting president, under the logic of Willis, Bragg and Smith, he could be impeached while in office or charged after leaving office for at least two similar instances of election interference in his own office. This is completely different from the stern allegations Biden faces bribery AND improper handling of secret documents which, if proven, could lead to his impeachment, conviction and removal from office.
Biden’s first instance of election interference involves his apparent and documented suppression of reports about his son Hunter’s laptop when its existence was revealed a month before voters went to the polls in 2020.
When was the New York Post published? stories based on the contents of the laptop, which contained evidence contradicting repeated claims Biden made during his campaign he has no knowledge of Hunter’s overseas business contacts and has never discussed themBiden campaign he robbed a phony letter from 51 former intelligence community officials, including Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan, former Obama DNI James Clapper, and former CIA Director Michael Hayden, among others, alleging that the laptop was phony and based on Russian disinformation.
Based on testimony earlier this year from former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morrell, letter signatory, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner, R-Ohio said the Biden campaign “played an active role in the initial public statement that ultimately helped suppress the Hunter Biden story and prevented the American people from making a fully informed decision during the 2020 presidential election… This concerted effort to minimize and stop the public dissemination of serious allegations against the family The Bidens were a serious disservice to the informed participation of all American citizens in our democracy.”
Indeed, a year ago Key survey found that “79 percent of Americans suggest that President Donald Trump would likely have won re-election if voters had known the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop – that it was real and not ‘Russian disinformation,’ as intelligence officials allied with Joe Biden falsely led the public to believe.” This is true election interference, in this case involving at least 51 – not 18 – “co-conspirators.”
A second, equally real example involves Biden arming his Justice Department to go after Trump as the former president emerges as his main opponent in the 2024 election. According to the New York Times, Biden was a year ago he said He wanted his “inner circle” to have the former president “put on trial” on January 6.
Since then, his Justice Department has prosecuted Trump for alleged crimes that, once again, were allegedly committed by Biden himself – interfering in the election and mishandling secret documents. The same Biden Department of Justice a few weeks ago offered his son a plea deal to be released from prison for a misdemeanor under which he immediately fell after his conditions were revealed in a court in his home state. Last week, Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, appointed the prosecutor who agreed to that sweetheart deal as special counsel in the Hunter case, even though the rules require it such an official should be elected “from outside the United States Government.” Without a doubt, Biden’s Justice Department is clearly tipping the scales in its favor against its 2024 election opponent, and is doing so supposedly towards him.
Once again, regardless of the timing and legal issues surrounding Democratic prosecutor Fani Willis’s controversial prosecution of former President Trump, he and two other Trump hunters are sliding down a slippery slope by criminalizing “election interference” that could easily and more thoroughly: to reach out to her own party’s leaders, including President Biden. The only question left is whether House Republicans will follow in Biden’s words“to do the hard work to ensure that equal justice under the law is not just a phrase carved in stone over the Supreme Court, but a reality for all Americans” by holding it to the same standard and launching an impeachment inquiry that includes this additional issue fee?
Mr. Ullyot is a United States Marine Corps veteran and former Deputy Assistant to the President.
