Those “rule of law” lovers on Fox News and in the MAGA GOP have not just pre-acquitted criminal defendant Donald Trump, they’re demanding retaliation against Democrats.
House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-KY) had a friendly chat about Trump’s New York City indictment with his Fox Friends yesterday. Nobody cared about Trump inciting violence against New York City District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Instead, they suggested he deserved it.
Cohost Steve Doocy called the indictment “a hit job” and Comer called it “a political scam.” Never mind that it was a grand jury who did the indicting, after weighing the evidence and never mind that no trial has even started.
Really, though the Fox/MAGA target is Biden, not Bragg. The prosecutors “better have a seat and about a pallet of Kentucky bourbon when they see what all the Biden family has done over the past decade,” Comer said. Doocy laughed heartily. “Every day we find another LLC affiliated with the Bidens that they were using to launder money from our adversaries around the world,” Comer added. He called the evidence against Biden “breathtaking.”
He continued with this:
COMER: I had two calls yesterday, one from a county attorney in Kentucky and one from a county attorney in Tennessee. They were Republican, obviously, both states are heavily Republican. They want to know if there are ways they can go after the Bidens now.
And they’ve opened up a can of worms. They’ve set precedents now that we can’t go back on. And now we’re going to see a judicial system that’s already bogged down with doing what they’re supposed to do, and that’s going after real criminals, people that are committing real crimes, burglaries, rape, robberies, things like that. And now you’re going to start having ambitious political people like Alvin Bragg try to make a name for themselves and go after big pie-in-the-sky federal cases. And it’s just not a good path that we need to go forward on in our judiciary.
But you can best your MAGA hat that Comer will have no complaints about going down that path against Democrats.
Media Matters notes that there were other calls for retribution from Fox figures. For example:
“Here’s what I hope happens next,” former Bush White House press secretary and Fox contributor Ari Fleischer told Sean Hannity [Tuesday] night. “I earnestly hope that conservative prosecutors in rural areas of America indict Bill Clinton, indict Hillary Clinton, indict Hunter Biden."
How much of this comes to pass remains to be seen. But you know they’re going to try.
You can watch Comer and Friends below, from the April 5, 2023 Fox & Friends.
In reality, Dems who have misbehaved over the years have been appropriately prosecuted or dealt with in other manners. Rod Blagojevich went to jail, Eliot Spitzer was humiliated and forced to resign, John Edwards was prosecuted and wound up out of public life. And there are plenty of others.
But somehow angry Right Wingers think their own criminality should be held above the law “for the good of the country.” In reality, this misguided thinking led to one of the greatest mistakes in US political history, when Gerry Ford pardoned Nixon rather than allowing him to be prosecuted and imprisoned as should have occurred. That pardon sadly taught angry Right Wingers the wrong lesson – that they could get away with criminal behavior and never be held accountable. Which led us directly to the criminality of the Reagan and W White Houses, which in turn led to the blatant and open criminality of the Pence White House. Because Pence’s childish former spokesman somehow believes there will never be any consequences for him when he breaks the law.
In reality, it would be extremely helpful and educational for Trump to spend some time in prison – both to teach him his lesson and to teach his followers that there are indeed lines they shouldn’t be crossing.
As for Comer’s infantile threats to prosecute the Biden and Clinton families, they’re just noise. If Comer has something he can actually prove, as opposed to the hollow nonsense he’s been slinging around in his committee these days, then maybe a prosecution could happen. But for all that hot air about “lock her up”, nothing was ever shown of criminality by Hillary Clinton. For all the hot air around the Bidens, the best angry Right Wingers have been able to come up with are a question about whether Hunter Biden paid his full tax bill one year and whether Hunter Biden improperly owned a firearm while in rehab a few years ago.
Frankly, it’s more than appropriate that the first indictment of Donald Trump is for his hamhanded attempt to cover up his payoff of Stormy Daniels. And if Trump is “delighted” to have been indicted for this, then he’s likely to be “overjoyed” after he gets indicted for racketeering in Georgia and for far worse by Jack Smith. We can only hope that Trump’s attorney gives him the same kind of representation that Arthur Kirkland gave the Honorary Henry T. Fleming.
Mr. Comer is basing his comments on only two people who are clearly neither Christian (as in inclined to turn the cheek) nor American (as interested in the rule of law). If they were, they’d be bent on doing their jobs as impartial guardians of the law.
