(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) It is fitting that Judge Arthur Engoron’s courtroom at the New York County Courthouse is less than a mile away from the World Trade Center site.
Like the terrorist attack on America that took place on Sept. 11, 2001 (if you believe that’s what really happened), the spectacle currently unfolding at 60 Centre St. is also designed to topple America both symbolically and, in a way, literally, by undermining its structural integrity.
And like the 9/11 attack, it is a slow-burning plot that began, in earnest, roughly five years ago.
The Khalid Sheikh Mohammed-like mastermind may be New York Attorney General Letitia James, who openly campaigned in 2018 on the promise of waging a lawfare attack to punish the then-sitting president, Republican Donald Trump, even before she knew exactly how she would achieve it.
Her first major assist came from New York’s far-left legislature, which in July 2019 signed into law the so-called TRUST Act “to allow state officials to access the New York State tax returns of certain federal, state, and local government officials—including the president—if those tax returns are requested by congressional tax committees” for a specific legislative purpose, according to a press release from James’s office.
Of course, no such legislative purpose existed in the Democrat-controlled Congress that, after gaining power in January 2019, immediately proceeded to target Trump. Partisan shills like then-House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., undoubtedly colluded with James and then-Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. as part of an information-sharing venture designed to snare their political nemesis simultaneously at the local, state and federal level.
ANY MEANS NECESSARY
The goal was to get Trump’s taxes by any means necessary and then, through legal acrobatics worthy of Stalin’s secret police, to determine the crime after obtaining the evidence.
However, when the legal process failed to yield an immediate result, Charles “Chaz” Littlejohn, a contractor with Booz Allen Hamilton—a company headquartered in McLean, Va. (more on that later)—illegally purloined the materials and delivered them to the New York Times ahead of the 2020 election just so there was some sort of political ammunition to work with.
In early 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court granted access to the taxes for the Manhattan D.A.’s investigation, allowing Vance’s successor, Alvin Bragg, to continue his probe into hush-money payoffs.
It wasn’t until a year ago, in November 2022, that the court finally ruled that Trump’s taxes were fair game for the prying eyes of the Democrats in Congress—on its way out the door after losing the House majority—even though it was, in many ways, a moot decision.
For James, however, the work was just beginning. Having finally obtained the pretense she needed to indict, it was time to go judge-shopping, and she found her perfect soul-mate in Engoron—who sent clear dogwhistles from the bench that he, too, was part of the Trump “resistance.”
@yahoonews Replying to @kendrawiley This isn’t an episode of “The Office,” it’s U.S. history. Former President Donald Trump appeared in court for the second day of his fraud trial in New York, where Attorney General Letitia James is seeking $250 million in penalties and a ban on Trump doing business in the state. #news #yahoonews #Republican #currentevents ♬ The Office Theme Song – Zach Caleb
HEDGING THEIR BETS
The New York Assembly pushed other laws that blatantly were designed to target Trump—most notoriously the so-called Adult Survivors Act, an effort that the legislature began in 2019, signed into law by Gov. Kathy Hochul in May 2022.
It conveniently coincided with a highly suspicious rape claim by E. Jean Carroll, a Manhattan socialite and former gossip columnist who, like Trump, is now in her late 70s.
She vaguely claimed to have been sexually assaulted by the real-estate mogul in the mid-1990s, a charge long past its statute of limitations—that is, until Democrat lawmakers retroactively changed the law.
Carroll was subsequently revealed to have been bankrolled by billionaire anti-Trump leftist Reid Hoffman, and she had been an active lobbyist in the effort to pass the ASA, which offered a temporary window for those wishing to file assault charges that otherwise would no longer be legally actionable.
Conveniently, Carroll’s spurious allegations went to trial in Manhattan and succeeded, despite her fuzzy recollections and inconsistent testimony. Meanwhile, New York’s former Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo, on whose watch the ASA legislation began, faced no such accountability for the 11 more recent (and more credible) assault allegations against him.
It does not even take a sympathetic legislature, however, to act in concert with a corrupt prosecutor such as Letitia James or Alvin Bragg.
In Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis likewise campaigned on a platform of attacking the U.S. president as one of her top priorities, even as her Atlanta-area district saw surging rates of violent crime, as well as frequent clashes between minorities and law enforcement.
Willis, the daughter of a radical member of the Black Panther Party, had cultivated a specialty in building racketeering cases, and she applied that in her sweeping indictment of Trump and 18 associates over their efforts to challenge the 2020 election outcome.
The flaws in the case, from a legal standpoint, were apparent from the outset. But after one Trump-supporting GOP legislator, state Sen. Colton Moore, sought to rein in the out-of-control prosecutor, Moore was rebuked and punished by members of his own caucus—who likely faced pressure from anti-Trump Gov. Brian Kemp to let it play out, thereby validating whatever corruption transpired at the state level.
A DAY OF RECKONING?
While there are several interesting races to watch on Tuesday, including Kentucky’s gubernatorial race to see whether African-American rising GOP star Daniel Cameron prevails over Democrat Gov. Andy Beshear—most eyes will be on results for the Virginia General Assembly, and with good reason.
Democrats have, once again, invested considerable money and manpower into swaying the state races in the Old Dominion, even recruiting the assistance of former President Barack Obama to deliver prerecorded robocalls.
Democrats control the Virginia state Senate by a four-vote margin, and Republicans control its House of Delegates by the same margin, with four seats currently vacant.
But amid polling released over the weekend that showed Trump dominating President Joe Biden in several key swing states, it isn’t hard to guess which way this traditional bellwether for the presidential election is likely to tilt, despite what some suppression polls may be forecasting.
A red shift in Virginia would mean major political capital for Gov. Glenn Youngkin, whose name would immediately rise to the top of discussions for the 2028 presidential race—if not sooner (several establishment GOP donors have been actively courting him to challenge Trump, although Youngkin would be wise to focus on his own task at hand unless Trump is rendered ineligible to run).
It also would be a full reversal of the political engineering set in motion by former Clinton stooge Terry McAuliffe when, a decade ago, he used the full force of corrupt Democrat party politics—in a drama-filled 2013 campaign interlaced with now-familiar names like Jack Smith and Marc Elias—to defeat then-state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli by the narrowest of margins.
McAuliffe’s policies—such as restoring the votes of thousands of felons while flouting the state constitution, using a legal loophole to circumvent the spirit of the law—became the prototype for Democrat governors nationwide to secure their own advantages through brazen, often extralegal, means in the 2016 and 2018 elections—and especially in 2020.
For several election cycles, it looked as if the state had turned permanently blue, until Youngkin routed McAuliffe in a 2021 shocker, bringing in tow Lieutenant Gov. Winsome Sears and state Attorney General Jason Miyares.
A legislative majority now would allow the governor to reverse the reign of terror presided over by McAuliffe and his successor, Ralph “Blackface” Northam, which included a raft of radical laws attacking Second Amendment rights, voting laws and other controversial measures that had nearly led some of the state’s rural counties to consider secession.
A DEMOCRAT NIGHTMARE SCENARIO?
Yet, there are possible national implications for Virginia’s return into the red category, as well. Not only would it drastically change the electoral map calculus that Democrats have come to rely on, making it more difficult to plausibly pull off a steal even with a well-coordinated scheme like the one in 2020, but it could potentially force them to live by their own rules.
And that prospect should be terrifying after the abuses they have heaped on, with impunity, since Trump’s election.
It is clear that one of the ways the corrupt entities within the federal government have avoided any sort of accountability is that the judiciary in Washington, D.C., has itself been utterly corrupted.
Many of its key district judges were installed late in the Obama presidency, after then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, changed the rules by ending the filibuster on judiciary appointees to ram through Obama’s radical nominees.
One need only to look at the Justice Department’s overzealous prosecutions of Jan. 6 political dissidents (compared with the zero arrests recently of Hamas rioters in the capital) to recognize the dark turn that this has taken.
Nonetheless, the government’s efforts could be severely hindered if the Virginia General Assembly and Miyares were to begin acting like their New York counterparts.
Many of the leading government contractors, such as the aforementioned Booz Allen, are subject to Virginia law. So are the Pentagon, the CIA headquarters and several portions of the FBI (such as its Quantico training facility).
That means a lot of crimes may have happened south of the Potomac that could bear investigating.
Unfortunately, Miyares’s hands would likely be tied on many of these due to the statutes of limitations—the same problem that special counsels such as John Durham and David Weiss have encountered (or perhaps leveraged to their advantage to aid in the cover-ups).
With help from the General Assembly, though, Miyares could follow the road map that the Empire State laid out in enacting legislation broad enough to apply universally, while also narrowly targeting nefarious, deep-state conspirators including Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, John Brennan, James Clapper and others who have yet to face charges for plotting to usurp the presidency in 2016.
Do Miyares and a handful of state lawmakers have the political will to take on these forces of evil—some of whom likely are still within arm’s reach of the button that could launch a drone strike?
That is another question entirely. But without a conservative in-kind response that is willing to inflict the same degree of punishment on those threatening America as the bad guys are willing to invest in their efforts to attack it, the country is all but lost.
In the meantime, it all begins with four seats in the state capitol. Before taking on those rich men north of Richmond, the first goal has to be Richmond itself.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.
