Jailing Trump? What a fine banana republic we’ve become

Sherman R. Frederick/Properly Subversive

The Biden Administration indicted its primary political foe – former President Donald Trump – making America the world’s newest banana republic.

It feels like we are at the end of the first Planet of the Apes movie when Charlton Heston finds the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand and yells: “We finally really did it. You maniacs!”

The Justice Department – and let’s please not pretend there’s an impenetrable  firewall between the Justice Department and the White House – unveiled an indictment charging former President Donald J. Trump with 37 criminal counts relating to his alleged hoarding of “sensitive” government documents after he left office.

No one really knows the details of the felony charges. We only know what the DoJ will tell us. The truth contained in the actual documents is now, and forever shall be, shrouded in the secrecy of court rules and the vagaries of our deeply flawed classified system. 

Now, look, I know that there are not enough Trump supporters in Marin to get up a decent poker tournament. Hell, I didn’t vote for him either. But, whether you politically like Trump or hate him, that’s not the point. Step back and look at what’s happening. We’re about to arrest an active  political figure for an esoteric crime – a crime that could easily be applied to Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Mike Pence, to name a few. 

How does Hilliary Clinton set up a rogue server in her bathroom, compromising secret State Department communications for months and months, only to get a verbal rebuke. But Trump gets charged with felonies just as the 2024 election starts to heat up?

Pence took classified documents. He’s not being charged. 

Biden took documents home when he was a senator and a vice president. State secrets stayed stored in his garage for years. Some of the documents were at the fingertips of Chinese agents at a university “program” facilitated by Biden and Chinese money.

But Trump’s the guy “above the law”? 

This is a bad time in American history. This is a political prosecution by the Democratic Party establishment and the “deep state” sympathizers against a political opponent they both fear and hate. 

They tried to assassinate the character of Trump in 2016 with Russia-Gate. This, we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt, was a dirty trick hatched by the Hillary campaign aided and abetted by anti-Trumpers in the FBI and CIA. In the course of that “investigation,” the  FBI flat-out lied to the FISA court to keep the probe “trumped” up.

This is undisputed. 

We are also beginning to understand that while the FBI was pressing the gas pedal on a Trump prosecution, it was also making up excuses for how Clinton classified documents found their way to pervert Anthony Weiner’s laptop and slow-walking an investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop. 

We can’t say exactly how the Hunter Biden gambit worked, but to a normal, non-partisan person it looks like straight-up corruption involving Joe Biden – a variation on the Clinton Foundation playbook. By the way, the Clinton Foundation probe was deep-sixed by the FBI when it looked like Hillary was a lock for the presidency in 2016.

All of this makes it look like a “Get Trump” exercise, not an honest attempt by non-partisan arbitrators trying to protect classified material.

Postscript: At the risk of sounding even more dark than I already have, if Trump goes to jail do we need to worry that he might end up like Jeffrey Epstein? You damn well better believe it.

RIP CHUCK OLDENBURG

I was sorry to read of the passing of Mill Valley’s Chuck Oldenburg in the blog EnjoyMillValley.org. He wrote a history piece for this newspaper for many years. Sometime during the Great Pandemic, that Mill Valley history piece fell by the wayside. Not really sure what happened, but if the Mill Valley history folks want to resurrect that weekly piece, contact me at shermfrederick@gmail.com.

AND THE PEOPLE SAY

From Marin social media: “I was at the Safeway on Nave Drive and was very shocked to see a person pushing a shopping cart with a medium sized dog in it. Besides the dog, there were numerous grocery items in the cart as well. I had a very negative gut reaction to this wondering about public health, hygiene, etc. I am mindful of ‘service animals’  but would like to know how others feel.”

ONE MORE THING

– The Grateful Dead are putting out an 80-disc live box set. No word yet on which Grateful Dead song it will be.

– About 7.6 billion years from now,  the sun will reach its maximum size as a red giant: It’s surface will extend beyond Earth’s orbit today by 20 percent and will shine 3,000 times brighter. The Sun’s expansion will engulf Earth, burning it to a crisp and extinguishing all life. Have a great day!

Thanks for reading. Until next week, avoid sore heads, laugh a little and always question authority. 

(“Properly Subversive” is a commentary written by Sherman R. Frederick for Marinscope Community Newspapers, the “mother ship” of the Novato Advance, San Rafael News-Pointer, Mill Valley Herald, Ross Valley Reporter, Twin City Times and the Sausalito Marin Scope. Mr. Frederick is an award-winning journalist and co-founder of Battle Born Media, a news organization dedicated to the preservation of community newspapers. You can reach him by email at shermfrederick@gmail.com.)