We want you to believe you can rely on us to give it to you straight. That’s what we try our best to do. For me, it’s especially important that you can be confident National Review is accurately and clearly explaining the pending investigations and prosecutions that are intersecting with, and sometimes overwhelming, our electoral politics as never before in American history.
We think we’ve made good on our commitments, and we’re more determined than ever to keep making good on them. That’s why I am asking you to contribute to NR’s ongoing webathon. To do what we’re trying to do, we need your help, plain and simple.
This doesn’t come easily for me. I’ve now had two careers, over 20 years in law enforcement and now over 20 in journalism — which for a guy who’s only 34 is quite something. It’s been an amazingly fulfilling run in both arenas, and that necessarily means no small amount of luck has been involved in the cases and issues I’ve gotten to work on, and the people I’ve been blessed to work with.
The legendary Brooklyn Dodgers’ general manager Branch Rickey observed that “luck is the residue of design.” The “design” Rickey had in mind was thoughtful, diligent effort. To me, that kind of work speaks for itself; I’ve never thought one should need to talk about it — just do it.
On lawfare, we’ve been doing it nonstop for eight years. NR has always brought you coverage of major legal issues and big criminal investigations. Since the run-up to the 2016 election, though, it has just never stopped.
The Hillary Clinton emails investigation not only transitioned seamlessly into the Trump/Russia “collusion” farce; we now know the latter was a fabrication crafted by the Hillary 2016 campaign, which needed to distract attention from the former. When Donald Trump was shockingly elected, the collusion probe, despite its baselessness, was ratcheted up — and when Trump not surprisingly objected and finally fired the FBI director, the ensuing Mueller probe added suspected “obstruction of justice” to the investigatory mix.
“Russiagate” proved to be such a debacle that, as soon as Mueller’s probe came up empty, the Trump Justice Department authorized the Durham investigation to figure out what happened — on the heels of internal DOJ inspector-general inquiries that exposed stunning FBI abuses of power in the Clinton emails and Russiagate probes. Meantime, Democrats impeached Trump, not once but twice.
In between, Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, was plucked from his mothballed basement to run against Trump in 2020, which sent the media-Democrat complex into overdrive to suppress evidence of Biden influence-peddling — indications of millions of dollars poured into Biden family coffers from agents of corrupt and anti-American governments, much of it from Hunter Biden’s now-infamous “laptop from hell.”
As the new Biden administration tamped down the corruption suspicions and tried to disappear the “Hunter” investigation (as if he were the main Biden of concern), Trump ramped up a campaign to get his old job back in 2020 — resulting in the prime-time spectacle that was the House January 6 Committee investigation of the post-2020-election “stop the steal” shenanigans that led up to the Capitol riot. That Democrat-dominated body demanded criminal charges. Voilà, Trump has now been indicted four times — twice by the Biden Justice Department, twice by “progressive prosecutors” in the states (i.e., elected Democrats who run district attorneys’ offices, in this instance in Manhattan and Atlanta).
Not content with that, other activist Democrats, including New York attorney general Letitia James — who campaigned for office vowing to use the state’s law-enforcement powers against the Democrats’ archnemesis — sued Trump civilly. As this is written, trial is under way in James’s lawsuit, which seeks to put Trump out of business — to eviscerate the iconic real-estate empire he has run from the Big Apple for half a century. Meantime, the House has opened an impeachment inquiry of Biden, Biden’s son has just been indicted on gun charges, and, as Trump surges in the GOP polls, progressive lawyers are asking courts — so far, unsuccessfully — to remove him from the ballot as an “insurrectionist,” pursuant to the 14th Amendment (ironically, a crime the Biden Justice Department hasn’t charged against him).
I’m short of breath just summarizing that wild ride. But doing it makes me proud because NR has served you through every twist and turn.
A lot of this is partisan bluster and abuse of power, but beneath it we find some real misconduct, some misconduct blown out of proportion, and some fraught constitutional questions arising from the collision of prosecution and politics. I don’t pretend that NR writers who cover this don’t have points of view about the players and the issues. But we’ve always seen our main mission as telling you, objectively and honestly, what is happening and why. Sure, we’ll tell you what we think of it — but only after we’re clear with you on what the “it” actually is.
That’s our commitment: to give you the best-informed grasp on what these investigations and legal controversies are about, what’s real, what’s spin, and what’s at stake. There’s a nice symmetry to it: We can’t fulfill that commitment without your help.
We are so grateful for you. It’s with that gratitude that I ask you to continue making it possible for us to do our job.