Guilty, Until Proven Innocent

Chris Talgo ([email protected]) is editorial director at The Heartland Institute.

Less than a week before Donald Trump was officially indicted on 34 counts of allegedly falsifying business records, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) tweeted: “No one is above the law, and everyone has the right to a trial to prove innocence.”

Apparently, the former speaker of the House is unaware of how American jurisprudence works. In the United States, unlike in tinpot dictatorships, people are deemed innocent until proven guilty.

However, Pelosi’s tweet represents the left’s new approach to “justice,” which seems to be predicated on Lavrentiy Beria’s notion of the term: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” For those unaware of Beria, he was Joseph Stalin’s longest-serving secret police chief.

Of course, Pelosi’s tweet is in line with how the mainstream media is framing this sordid affair. In a nutshell, according to the vast majority of legacy news outlets (also known as fake news), Trump is guilty, and the onus is on him and his legal team to prove his innocence.

Fortunately, for Trump, that should be relatively easy, considering that the case against him is flimsier than Alex Murdaugh’s alibi.

For starters, Trump is being pursued by a district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who boasted during his campaign that he would leave no stone unturned in his quest to get Trump. In fact, the very case Bragg is pursuing was not pursued by his predecessor, Cy Vance, or the Federal Election Commission because it lacks merit. In other words, no crime took place.

Moreover, as has been widely reported, the statute of limitations on the alleged crimes has expired. And, in order to bring the charges against Trump, Bragg had to bend longstanding legal logic on its head, twisting it into a pretzel that no legal scholar would dare defend.

In reality, Bragg is a far-left zealot who is soft on crime and beholden to George Soros. In his two years on the job, Bragg has bent over backward to ensure that violent criminals are treated with kid gloves.

Consider this stunning juxtaposition. To date, Bragg has downgraded 52 percent of felonies to misdemeanors. Over the same period, Bragg has emptied out New York City’s prisons even as crime has soared throughout New York City.

Yet, while appearing before the media to announce the Trump indictment, Bragg had the gall to say, “These are felony crimes in New York state, no matter who you are. We cannot and will not normalize serious criminal conduct.”

That sure sounds like a two-tiered justice system.

But, for those of us who pay close attention to these things, this is nothing all that new. Ever since he announced his candidacy for president in 2015, Trump has been in the crosshairs of the left. From the Obama administration’s spying on the Trump campaign to the Russia collusion hoax to the two bogus impeachment attempts to the January 6 show trials put on by Pelosi to the hasty raid on Mar-a-Lago, the left has been out to get Trump.

However, over the same period of time, we’ve witnessed Hillary Clinton pay no price for deleting 33,000 government emails or for her attempt to smear Trump with the totally false Steele dossier.

We’ve also seen Hunter Biden and the Big Guy remain unscathed, even as the evidence of the Bidens’ shady deals with foreign governments, including China, Russia, and Ukraine, could not be clearer. Oh, and what about Hunter’s laptop, which allegedly documents a litany of crimes committed by the family? Unbelievably, the laptop still remains in FBI custody, while Hunter remains free as a bird, despite ample evidence of blatant criminal behavior that he should be indicted upon.

Perhaps the worst part of this entire spectacle is that this is just the opening act. To date, there are three other ongoing investigations into Trump’s alleged misdeeds, all of which reek of political retribution, not the pursuit of blind justice.

Although many Americans may be of the mindset that this is wrong, but it doesn’t affect me directly, so I am not all that concerned about it, I remind you that if our so-called justice system can treat a former president like this, it surely can do the same to any one of us.

As the German pastor Martin Niemöller said, describing the situation in Nazi Germany, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”