Donald Trump now has his enemies by the short hairs, as the saying goes. Thanks to his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, the president now has clear evidence that the Obama administration rigged up a phony accusation of Russian “collusion” to undermine his first term in the White House. In releasing the damning proof, Gabbard said: “These documents detail a treasonous conspiracy by officials at the highest levels of the Obama White House to subvert the will of the American people and try to usurp the President from fulfilling his mandate.” And, the DNI further emphasized, she would be “turning over all documents to the DOJ [Department of Justice] for criminal referral.”
To say that Trump’s supporters are eager to see criminal prosecutions in the RussiaGate scandal is like saying that ravenous wolves are eager to dine on fresh mutton. After Gabbard dropped her evidence bomb Friday, social media lit up with demands that the guilty parties — up to and including Barack Obama — be sent to federal prison, at a minimum. There were many folks who, noting Gabbard’s description of the scandal as a “treasonous conspiracy” against Trump, pointed out that treason is punishable by death, and some few posted images of nooses. (RELATED: All the President’s (Obama’s) Men and Women)
“We live in strange times,” I texted one of my sons, “when I am the calm voice of reason.”
Having earned my stripes as a notorious right-winger — I was hate-listed by the SPLC before being hate-listed by the SPLC was cool — it felt odd for me to be the one urging restraint while the populist mob was howling for blood. Nevertheless, I felt compelled to pour cold water on their hopes that Attorney General Pam Bondi would soon be pursuing federal prosecutions against Obama and such of his henchmen as former CIA Director John Brennan, former DNI James Clapper, and former FBI Director James Comey. “As egregious as the RussiaGate scandal is,” I wrote Saturday, “the overwhelming likelihood is that nobody involved in this sordid mess will ever be charged with a crime, and that if somehow Bondi does find a way to get indictments against Brennan, Clapper, Comey, et al., the subsequent trial will end in a verdict of acquittal.” (RELATED: Corporate Media Disregards Russia Hoax Revelations)
Let’s begin by acknowledging that, in the wake of recent disappointments over the Jeffrey Epstein case, many conservatives have become unhappy with Bondi’s tenure as head of the DOJ. This explains why, after Gabbard’s RussiaGate revelations Friday, the actor James Woods responded: “This is Pam Bondi’s last chance to prove herself.”
She’s only been in office six months and is already on her “last chance”? What explains this attitude is a combination of pent-up frustration and high expectations. Everybody who voted for Trump — me, James Woods, all of us — got fed up with the “Russia! Russia! Russia!” stuff long before Trump’s first term ended. Then we had to endure the four-year misery of Joe Biden’s presidency before, at last, Trump obtained vindication with last November’s victory. And so now, with a winning margin of two million votes and a decisive sweep of the “battleground” states, there are 77 million of us who expect Trump to act decisively. He’s ended the border crisis in just a matter of months, rammed through the “Big Beautiful Bill” that extended his signature tax cuts, and wreaked havoc in the bloated federal bureaucracy.
The momentum of Trump’s second-term success has raised expectations and, as a result, his supporters have little patience with anything less than the complete satisfaction of their hopes. This was the subtext of the grassroots MAGA uproar over the Epstein case, for which Bondi became the scapegoat. Now, she is expected to pursue indictments against everyone involved in the RussiaGate scandal — everyone, Obama included — and if she doesn’t? Well, “last chance,” as James Wood said, and there are millions of Trump voters who share that attitude.
“Accountability” is the word used by many, and rightly so. What was done to Trump was clearly wrong — using the infamous Steele dossier as the pretext for spying on his campaign, then a months-long investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. If there are no consequences for such blatant wrongdoing, what’s to stop any future administration from similarly using intelligence agencies to sabotage their opposition? It’s not just an appetite for vengeance that fuels the MAGA grassroots demand to see the former heads of the FBI and CIA perp-walked in manacles and orange jumpsuits; it’s a desire to prevent a repeat of that “treasonous conspiracy” against Trump.
Alas, there are practical hurdles to the quest for accountability, beginning with the likely courtroom venue. To get indictments against the RussiaGate conspirators, Bondi must plead the case to a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C. Everything we’ve seen from the D.C. courts in recent years suggests that the odds against this are very high. Kamala Harris got 90 percent of the vote in the District of Columbia. Is a 90 percent Democrat grand jury going to approve criminal indictments for Brennan, Comey, Clapper, Susan Rice, et al.? To quote Joe Biden, “C’mon, man.”
No indictment, no perp walk, no trial, no verdict, no prison, no gallows — however much anyone might yell “treason,” the reality is that the perpetrators of RussiaGate will almost certainly never face any criminal penalty for their roles in this scandal.
Frustration at the lack of justice was given voice by Professor Glenn Reynolds, who said of the conspirators: “In the world they created, they can’t really complain if they’re just whacked instead.” (Which would be wrong, I hasten to add.)
One of the underappreciated aspects of our justice system, rooted in the English common law tradition and codified by the Bill of Rights, is how difficult it makes a prosecutor’s job. Leftists who complain of “mass incarceration” generally fail to acknowledge that it takes a heck of a lot of work to get a felony conviction and put a criminal behind bars. The right to a jury trial, the right to “plead the Fifth,” etc., all work in the favor of defendants and, given such considerations, it’s far more likely that the guilty will avoid prison than that any truly innocent person will be wrongly convicted.
As much as I — or James Woods, or Tulsi Gabbard, or Donald Trump himself — might wish to see Obama and his RussiaGate accomplices locked up in Leavenworth, there’s no real possibility of that happening. Maybe, in some sense, that’s a good thing.
Trump was elected on the promise to Make America Great Again. He probably didn’t have in mind, however, the sense of greatness once expressed by the founder of the Weather Underground terrorist group. After Bill Ayers surfaced in 1980 following a decade as a fugitive, all charges against him were dropped, and Ayers famously quipped: “Guilty as hell, free as a bird — America is a great country.”
Ayers was once a mentor to Obama, and certainly his erstwhile protégé has reason now to appreciate that kind of American greatness. The rest of us may not be so happy, but we shouldn’t make Pam Bondi a scapegoat for our disappointment.
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