By Chris Hedges
March 29,
2023:
Information Clearing House
-- "ScheerPost"--Donald
Trump — facing four
government-run investigations, three criminal
and one civil, targeting himself and his
business — is not being targeted because of his
crimes. Nearly every serious crime he is accused
of carrying out has been committed by his
political rivals. He is being targeted because
he is deemed dangerous for his willingness,
at least rhetorically, to reject the Washington
Consensus regarding neoliberal free-market
and free-trade policies, as well as the idea
that the U.S. should oversee a global empire. He
has not only belittled the ruling ideology, but
urged his supporters to attack the apparatus
that maintains the duopoly by declaring the 2020
election illegitimate.
The Donald Trump problem is the same as the
Richard Nixon problem. When Nixon was forced to
resign under the threat of impeachment, it
wasn’t for his involvement in war crimes and
crimes against humanity, nor was it for his illegal
use of the CIA and other federal agencies to spy
upon, intimidate, harass and destroy radicals,
dissidents and activists. Nixon was brought down
because he targeted other members of the ruling
political and economic establishment. Once
Nixon, like Trump, attacked the centers of
power, the media was unleashed to expose abuses
and illegalities it had previously minimized or
ignored.
Members of Nixon’s re-election campaign
illegally bugged the
headquarters of the Democratic National
Committee in the Watergate office building. They
were caught after they broke
back into the offices to fix the listening
devices. Nixon was implicated in both the
pre-election illegality, including spying on
political opponents, as well as attempting to
use federal agencies to cover up the crime. His
administration maintained an “enemies list”
that included well
known academics, actors, union leaders,
journalists, businessmen and politicians.
One 1971 internal White House memo entitled,
“Dealing with our Political Enemies” — drafted
by White House Counsel John Dean, whose job it
was to advise the president on the law —
described a project designed to “use the
available federal machinery to screw our
political enemies.”
Nixon’s conduct, and that of his closest
aides, was clearly illegal and deserving of
prosecution. There were 36 guilty verdicts or
guilty pleas associated with
the Watergate scandal two years after the
break-in. But it was not the crimes Nixon
committed abroad or against dissidents that
secured his political execution but the crimes
he carried out against the Democratic Party and
its allies, including in the establishment
press.
“The political center was subjected to an
attack with techniques that are usually reserved
for those who depart from the norms of
acceptable political belief,” Noam Chomsky wrote in
The New York Review of Books in 1973, a year
before Nixon’s resignation.
As Edward Herman and Chomsky point
out in their book,
“Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of
the Mass Media:”
The answer is clear and concise: powerful
groups are capable of defending themselves,
not surprisingly; and by media standards, it
is a scandal when their position and rights
are threatened. By contrast, as long as
illegalities and violations of democratic
substance are confined to marginal groups or
dissident victims of U.S. military attack,
or result in a diffused cost imposed on the
general population, media opposition is
muted and absent altogether. This is why
Nixon could go so far, lulled into a false
sense of security precisely because the
watchdog only barked when he began to
threaten the privileged.”
What led to the unraveling of Nixon’s
government, and what lies at the core of the
attacks against Trump, is the fact that, like
Nixon, Trump’s targets included “the rich and
respectable, spokesmen for official ideology,
men who are expected to share power, to design
social policy, and to mold popular opinion,” as
Chomsky noted about
Nixon at the time. “Such people are not fair
game for persecution at the hands of the state.”
This is not to minimize Trump’s crimes. Trump
— nearly
even in the polls with President Joe Biden
in the 2024 presidential race — appears to have
committed several misdemeanors and serious
felonies.
In November 2022, the Department of Justice appointed a
special prosecutor to investigate Trump’s
retention of classified documents at his
Mar-a-Lago home in Florida and any potential
criminal liability resulting from that act, as
well as any unlawful interference with the
transfer of power after the 2020 presidential
election.
Separately, a district attorney in Georgia is
working with a special purpose grand
jury in relation to Trump’s attempts to
overturn the 2020 election result. A key piece
of evidence is the notorious phone
call between Trump and Georgia’s Secretary
of State, Brad Raffensperger, in which the
president kept insisting he needed more votes to
be found. Charges in this case could include conspiracy
to commit election fraud, racketeering and
pressuring and/or threatening public officials.
The Manhattan district attorney has been investigating the
$130,000 Trump used to pay off the porn star
Stormy Daniels, with whom Trump allegedly had a
sexual relationship. This payment was
misreported in the Trump Organization’s records
as a legal retainer in violatation of campaign
finance laws.
Finally, New York Attorney General Letitia
James is bringing a
civil lawsuit alleging the Trump Organization
lied about its assets in order to secure bank
loans. If the attorney general’s lawsuit is
successful, Trump and other members of his
family may be barred from doing business in New
York, including buying property there for five
years.
Trump’s alleged
offenses should be investigated. Though, the
cases involving Daniels and the retention of
classified documents seem relatively minor and
similar to those committed by Trump’s political
opponents.
Last year, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign
and the DNC agreed to
pay a fine of $8,000 and $105,000 respectively,
for mislabelling a
$175,000 expenditure on opposition research,
namely the long-discredited “Steele Dossier,” as
“legal expenses.” The improper retention of
classified documents has typically resulted in a
slap on the wrist when other powerful
politicians have been investigated. Clinton, for
example, used private
email servers instead of a government email
account when she was secretary of state. The FBI
concluded that she sent and received materials
classified as top secret on her private server.
Ultimately, FBI director James Comey declined to
prosecute her. Trump’s former vice president
Mike Pence and Biden also had classified
documents at their homes, though we are told this
may have been “inadvertent.” The discovery of
these classified documents, rather than
triggering outrage in most of the media,
initiated a conversation about
“overclassification.” Former CIA director David
Petraeus was given two
years probation and a $100,000 fine after he
admitted to providing highly classified “black
books” that contained handwritten classified
notes about official meetings, war strategy,
intelligence capabilities and the names of
covert officers to his lover, Paula
Broadwell, who was also writing a
fawning biography of Petraeus.
As was the case with Nixon, the most serious
charges Trump may face involve his attack on the
foundations of the two-party duopoly, especially
undermining the peaceable transfer of power from
one branch of the duopoly to the other. In
Georgia, Trump could face very serious criminal
charges with potentially lengthy sentences if
convicted, likewise if the federal special
prosecutor indicts Trump for unlawful
interference in the 2020 election. We won’t know
until any indictments are made public.
Yet, the most egregious of Trump’s actions
while in office either received minimal media
coverage, were downplayed or lauded as acts
carried out in defense of democracy and the
U.S.-led international order.
Why hasn’t Trump been criminally investigated
for the act of war he committed against Iran and
Iraq when he assassinated Iranian
Major General Qassem Soleimani and nine
other people with a drone strike in Baghdad
airport? Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi condemned the
strike and told his
parliament that Trump lied in order to get
Soleimani exposed in Iraq as part of peace talks
between Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Iraq’s
parliament passed a resolution demanding that
all foreign troops leave the country, which the
U.S. government proceeded to reject.
Why not prosecute or impeach Trump for pressuring his
secretary of state to lie and say that Iran
wasn’t complying with the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action, known as the Iran nuclear deal?
Trump ultimately fired
him and resumed unilateral, devastating and illegal sanctions against Iran,
in violation of international
law and quite possibly domestic
U.S. law.
Why wasn’t Trump impeached for his role in
the ongoing attempts
to engineer a coup and overthrow the democratically elected
president of Venezuela? Trump declared a
previously unknown right-wing
politician — and would-be coup
leader — Juan
Guaido to be the true Venezuelan president
and then illegally handed him
control of the Latin American country’s U.S.
bank accounts. The illegal U.S. sanctions that
have facilitated this coup attempt have blocked food,
medicine and other goods from entering the
country and prevented the
government from exploiting and exporting its own
oil, devastating the economy. Over 40,000
people died between
2017 and 2019 due to the sanctions, according to
the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
That figure is certainly higher now.
Nixon, like Trump, was not impeached for his
worst crimes. He was never charged for directing
the CIA to destroy the
Chilean economy and back a far-right military
coup that overthrew the democratically elected
left-wing government of Salvador Allende. Nixon
wasn’t brought to justice for his illegal,
secret mass
bombing campaigns in Cambodia and Laos that
killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, and
his government’s role in the slaughter of
Vietnamese people, resulting in at least 3.8
million killed according to
a joint report from Harvard University and the
University of Washington and even higher
casualties according to
investigative journalist Nick
Turse. Nixon wasn’t held accountable for
what then-President Lyndon Johnson privately blasted as
“treason” when he discovered that the
yet-to-be-elected Republican candidate for
president, and his future National Security
Advisor, Henry Kissinger, were deliberately and
illegally sabotaging his
peace negotiations in Vietnam, ultimately
prolonging the war for another four years.
Articles of impeachment against Nixon were passed by
the House Judiciary Committee. Articles I and
III focused on allegations related to Watergate
and Nixon’s failure to deal properly with
congressional investigations. Article II related
to allegations of violations of citizens’ civil
liberties and abuse of government power. But
they became moot once Nixon resigned, and in the
end the disgraced former president didn’t face
charges related to Watergate. A month after
Nixon left office, President Gerald Ford pardoned him
for “all offenses against the United States”
that he “committed or may have committed or
taken part in during the period from January 20,
1969 through August 9, 1974.”
This pardon cemented into place the imperial
presidency. It entrenched the modern notion
of “elite immunity,” as the constitutional
lawyer and journalist Glenn
Greenwald notes.
Neither Republicans nor Democrats want to set a
precedent that might hamstring the unchecked and
unaccountable power of a future president.
The most serious crimes are those that are
normalized by the power elite, regardless of who
initiated them. George W. Bush may have started
the wars in the Middle East, but Barack Obama
maintained and expanded them. Obama’s crowning
achievement may have been the Iran nuclear deal,
but Biden, his former vice president, hasn’t reversed Trump’s
trashing of it, nor has he reversed the decision
by Trump to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from
Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in violation of
international law.
Trump, like most of his opponents in the
Republican and Democrat parties, serves the
interests of the billionaire class. He, too, is
hostile to the rights of workers. He, too, is an
enemy of the press. He, too, backs the diversion
of hundreds of billions of federal dollars to
the war industry to maintain the empire. He,
too, does not respect the rule of law. He, too,
is personally and politically corrupt. But he is
also impulsive, bigoted, inept and ignorant. His
baseless conspiracy theories, vulgarity and
absurd antics are an embarrassment to the
established power elite in the two ruling
parties. He is difficult, unlike Biden, to
control. He has to go, not because he is a
criminal, but because he is not trusted by the
ruling crime syndicate to manage the firm.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning
journalist
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