The Los Angeles Times editorial board has called for former President Donald Trump to be charged with “conspiring to defraud the United States and conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding, the electoral vote count” on January 6, 2021.
The Times takes at face value the case presented by the one-sided January 6 Committee, without any cross-examination or even the opportunity to see the full testimonies of witnesses — some of whom say their testimony was misrepresented.
Many congressional proceedings are met by protests, some of them unruly; Democrats staged a sit-in on the House floor in 2016 to demand gun control, and blocked traffic last week to protest the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs case. The Times is demanding that the Department of Justice ignore the First Amendment and single out Trump alone for punishment.
The editorial board argues that Trump “was told many times, by several close and well-informed advisors, that there was no evidence of voter fraud or ballot irregularities that would have altered the outcome of the election.” It ignores the possibility that Trump, along with millions of Americans, nevertheless believed that there was fraud; and the fact many of Trump’s policy successes came precisely because he trusted his instincts and ignored the assessments of “close and well-informed advisors.”
The Times also ignores the fact that the January 6 Committee has produced no direct evidence of any kind linking Trump to violence at the Capitol. It writes: “He invited them to come to Washington for a ‘wild’ demonstration at which he gave an inflammatory speech to a crowd he knew was armed — and then directed them to march to the Capitol.” Few in the crowd, were “armed”; moreover, the Times, like the Democrats who ran Trump’s second impeachment trial last year, omits Trump’s admonition “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard,” which most of the participants in the rally obeyed.
The Times explains the failure of that second impeachment because by the time he was impeached, “only two weeks remained of his presidency, so Congress didn’t have time to mount a thorough impeachment proceeding.” That flimsy excuse fails to note that Congress did not decline to hold an impeachment trial even after Trump had left office; it set its own schedule and could easily have conducted a thorough inquiry, but rushed to exploit passions in the wake of the riot for political reasons.
The editorial board acknowledges that prosecuting Trump could produce a political “backlash.” It ignores the massive, and possibly fatal, damage that prosecuting Trump would do to the perception of impartial justice, which is already in danger.
With Black Lives Matter rioters going free, and the FBI allegedly quashing legitimate complaints about President Joe Biden’s wayward son, Hunter Biden, as “misinformation,” the effect of a political prosecution on the rule of law could be profound.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.