Initial comments on the federal indictment of Donald Trump: A thing that could not happen, but needed to happen

 G'morning.  Somewhere knockin' around the ole' noggin', I had a hankerin' to bang out a morning post today in which I not only used excessive and needless contractions, but called the nonexistent reader's attention to an obscure happenin' in Congress.  For you see, every leftist's favorite anti-Semite, Ilhan Omar, has been rewarded for her good, old-fashioned Jew-hatin' by an elevated position in the Democratic Party because that's how they roll.  Rail about it when it comes out of Marjorie Taylor Greene's Karen-mouth, but Ilhan gets away with it because she's a leftist with so many intersectional identity markers that the only "folks" who can beat her in the oppression olympics, as Latina feminist, Betita Martinez put it, well, shhhh....  Anywho, Omar getting rewarded for her anti-Semitism seems to be rather minor at the moment.  It's just the Democrats being Democrats.

Donald Trump has been indicted.  It could not happen.  It needed to happen.  What do I mean by this?  I have made two contradictory arguments at different points in time on the Mar-a-Lago Papers.  When the FBI executed the search warrant, the argument I made here was that it committed the Feds to a path.  You cannot execute a search warrant on Donald Trump's, sure, let's call it a home, and then walk away saying never mind.  At that point, the DoJ was pretty much pot committed.

Indictment City, baby.  Population: Trump.

And then Biden's attorneys found papers that he shouldn't have had.  Were the cases comparable?  No.  Not even close.  Biden found them, instead of the National Archives saying, hey, were are these documents we are supposed to have?  With Biden, we have every reason to believe it was unintentional.  With Trump, he has acknowledged it was intentional.  With Biden, he gave the papers back immediately.  With Trump, he lied and obstructed at every stage, and is still withholding documents, including the Iran documents, which he was recorded admitting he never declassified, putting the lie to his current favorite defense ("I declassified everything by thinking about it"), which doesn't even provide a legal defense in the Espionage Act, because the Espionage Act only requires that the materials relate to national security, not that they be classified.

From a legal perspective, does it make sense for the DoJ to decide that it must charge both Trump and Biden, or let them both go because they are the same cases?  Not even close.

But there are these things called "juries."  As soon as Biden found papers, my assessment was that Trump skated on the Mar-a-Lago papers because there would be no way to keep literally every Republican off the jury, and no juror would be able to separate that.  Jurors are what we call "people," and people are, in technical terms, "stupid."  Specifically, they are partisans, and Republicans are Trump cultists.  So sure, a prosecutor could tell a jury every fact in the world, but at the end of the trial, the Republicans on the jury would say, "yeah, but Biden."

They'd be wrong, but they'd do it anyway.

So would the DoJ be able to get a conviction?  No.  Working backwards, unable to get a conviction, the DoJ would not indict.

Hence my two contradictory statements.  They must indict because they were pot committed as soon as they got that search warrant, and they couldn't indict once Biden found his own classified documents.

No matter what happened, I was going to be right.

No matter what happened, I was going to be wrong.

After the E. Jean Carroll verdict, which I did not expect, I noted that this changed the calculus.  At least a bit.  Much was made of a juror being a fan of some guy named Tim Pool, as though we were all supposed to know him.  Ha-HA!  A juror was a Tim Pool fan!  This means he's a total Trump cultist!

So did you bother to go learn anything about this guy?  I was curious.  He's... weird.

Here's a quick test.  Can you tell the difference between me and Rachel Maddow?  Hopefully.  A Trump cultist cannot, because to a Trump cultist, there is one and only one thing that matters:  fealty to Donald Trump, and that is part of the set of things on which I agree with Maddow.  How large is the set of things on which I disagree with her?  Large.  However, the Trump issue is so all-consuming, to the Trump-cultist, as to obscure anything else and make any one Trump detractor indistinguishable from another.

Those wrapped up in the left-wing bubble have a similar problem.  Am I going to endorse Tim Pool?  No.  My quick readings sent me to some wacky conspiracy theories, in addition to some run of the mill Reason libertarianism.  He's net favorable on Trump, but if you can't tell the difference between that and a Hannity-type Trump sycophant, that's the left-wing analog to someone who can't tell the difference between me and Maddow.

Show me a Tucker Carlson superfan who does nothing but watch Fox all day, who votes to convict Trump, or at least for the plaintiff in a rape/defamation case, and then you really have something.  Still, there had to have been at least a Republican or two on that jury.  The Tim Pool fan?  Statistically, that was either a Republican or a weirdo libertarian, which means probably positively disposed towards Trump, but not as described to you by those who draw a hard line at Ilhan Omar and say that everyone to the right of Ilhan Omar is exactly the same.

Point being, that E. Jean Carroll verdict may have mattered.  No prosecutor wants to bring a case with zero chance of conviction, and the fact that the jury sided with Carroll, even though the standard was "preponderance of evidence," still means that it gives the DoJ some confidence that they go into this thing without all hope being lost, all ye who enter the courtroom.

That said, if I had to bet, would I bet on conviction?  No.  No, I would not.  All it takes is one Republican juror thinking to himself, yeah, but Biden!  Or, yeah, but I like Trump!  Just one.

The law is absolutely clear, but this is not a nation of laws, because there ain't no such thing.  This is a nation of men.

Normally, I do jazz on Fridays, but when I end a post like that, we gotta go with the Godfather of Soul.