Byron York writes for the Washington Examiner about President Biden’s use of the legal system as part of his re-election campaign.
The first thing to say about the Democratic lawfare campaign against former President Donald Trump is that it has been a smashing success. With help from a senior Biden Justice Department official and a Biden-donor judge, Manhattan Democratic District Attorney Alvin Bragg set out to convict the former president on 34 felony counts and ended up convicting the former president on 34 felony counts. By any measure, that is a triumph for a prosecutor — and his party.
Now, though, comes the task of converting a win in court into a win in the presidential election, which has always been the underlying goal of the lawfare campaign. Even with all of President Joe Biden’s liabilities, including his age, inflation, and the border disaster, some Democrats believed that if they could just call Trump a “convicted felon,” enough would-be Trump voters might abandon the Republican candidate to allow Biden to win a second term.
Maybe that will happen. Right now, though, it’s too early to know precisely what effect Trump’s conviction will have on the race. But it is not too early to see that the confusion, emotionality, and endless arguments surrounding the verdict raise the possibility that the political impact of Trump’s conviction will be muddled. If that is the case, the muddle might also affect the public’s view of the other Trump prosecutions that will go on between now and Election Day. The short version is that, despite the success in Manhattan, it is not at all clear that lawfare will be an electoral winner for Democrats.
It is hard to think of another high-profile trial in which there was so much argument and disagreement about what the defendant was charged with. It began with the indictment, in late March 2023, when Bragg announced he was charging Trump with the misdemeanor crime of falsifying business records but was also employing a legal twist to upgrade the crime to a felony. He then charged Trump with the same felony 34 times.
