Pollak: Donald Trump, Political Prisoner

The left finally got its wish: they arrested former President Donald Trump, abusing the justice system to make up a crime for which no one else would have been charged.

Donald Trump is effectively a political prisoner.

As expected, Trump was indicted for allegedly falsifying business records relating to a payment in 2016 to porn actress Stormy Daniels (Stephanie Clifford), who claimed that she had an affair with him several years before.

No other authority — not the federal prosecutors, not the previous Manhattan district attorney, not even the Federal Election Commission (FEC) — thought that what Trump did was unlawful or that it broke any rule.

Some on the left are claiming that Trump defrauded the public, because he supposedly used the payment to hide a scandal before the 2016 election. But he would not have had to report that payment until 2017 anyway.

Not one elected Democrat has dared speak out against this case — not the legal vacuity of the charge, not the flimsiness of the available evidence, and not the terrible precedent that it sets for future political prosecutions.

Some have hid behind the idea that we have to wait to see the evidence, or that the judicial process must be allowed to take its course. That ignores the obvious fact that the process itself is part of Trump’s punishment.

The prosecutor, Alvin Bragg, elected with help from one of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, ran on a promise to prosecute Trump, convinced a majority of voters in New York to support that aim, and delivered.

Donald Trump is a political prisoner. He has lost some of his liberty, and stands to lose more, in a political prosecution that interferes with the 2024 election.

The left may celebrate today, but there will be a reckoning.

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 new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.