After these last seven years, how can anyone not expect that any Republican who questions the unelected, Congress-defying security state won’t get the Trump treatment? If they can and will do it to Trump, they can and will do it to Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Robert Kennedy Jr., and anyone else who threatens their power. (Clueless candidates like Mike Pence and Nikki Haley don’t.)

Remember, even ineffective, regime-pleasing nice guys Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan were cast as a dog torturer and grandma murderer. But standard media smear operations pale in comparison to media functioning as a security state propaganda tool to frame dissidents for treason.

Any Republicans who think the security state wouldn’t frame others the same way it has Trump are in denial about the evidence repeatedly stampeded across their eyeballs for seven years. This means if D.C. Republicans want any president but Trump, their only ticket to that outcome is fighting back good and hard against his relentless persecution.

If the law is not equally applied to all, it turns into a weapon for injustice. If the powerful can break constitutional norms about legal equality for one man, they can — and will — break constitutional norms about legal equality for anyone else they want.

The Trump Treatment Is Already Spreading

We’re already seeing this lawless weaponization of government bleed past Trump. The security state has also targeted Republican senators who have gotten a little too close to its corruption, Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, and lower-profile Republicans like former Rep. Jeff Fortenberry. DeSantis has also started to get the Trump treatment with a Texas sheriff’s attempt to bring criminal charges over DeSantis’ lawful removal of illegal border-crossers.

Don’t forget, either, the FBI and DOJ entrapment of Mike Flynn, raid on pro-life dad Mark Houck, jailing of a pro-Trump meme creator, lawless allowance of violent mobs to pressure Supreme Court justices, pressuring of social media giants to help rig elections, unhinged pursuit of people accused of misdemeanors on Jan. 6, targeting of parents as “domestic terrorists” for protesting at school board meetings, and apparent spying on churches as hotbeds of anti-regime messaging.

Atop all these, how can anyone forget the lessons of Spygate, the bulk of the security-state iceberg we’re currently able to see? Spygate is an extremely dense saga, partly because of how many powerful institutions worked together to frame Trump as a Russian traitor to conceal evidence of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden’s own traitorous activities.

It took seven years to even get an accounting from a special counsel who brought zero accountability. In the meantime, a few dogged reporters — led by The Federalist — steadfastly blew away Democrats’ deep haze of lies. For a quick Spygate summary, here’s John Yoo and Robert Delahunty:

In 2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign fabricated false reports of ‘collusion’ between Trump and Russia and spread them to a sympathetic law enforcement and national security bureaucracy.

The ‘Russia hoax’ sparked a special counsel investigation that paralyzed the Trump White House for two years. The recent Durham Report fingered political bias by high FBI officials as the culprit.

Here’s a good place for more background on this credibility-killing operation from the federal agencies still cooperating to jail the nation’s top Republican. Spygate was intelligence agency election interference that boosted Democrats for two presidential election cycles, and now possibly a third.

This is what Democrats and U.S. security agencies are willing to do to get their way.

A Long Train of Abuses and Usurpations

Many more such operations occurred in the Trump era, probably many of them unknown. While the DOJ and FBI are obviously among the worst actors, they’re in plentiful company. Recall also the “Resistance” that involved insubordinate federal employees across all agencies working to thwart the policies of their constitutionally designated, democratically elected boss.

Here’s another: Several brazen, court martial-worthy acts by one of America’s top generals, Mark Milley. During Trump’s presidency, he secretly told Chinese officials he’d warn them if Trump ordered a strike on America’s chief foreign adversary.

According to Grassley and Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., Milley also “reportedly ordered senior officers to check with him before executing orders from then-President Trump.” The woke general who pushed Marxism on American troops also worked to prevent the president from repulsing nationwide rioting by Marxist agitators and pulling U.S. troops from Afghanistan. The inspector general has inexplicably declined to even investigate Milley despite such widely reported treasonous interference with the policies of the constitutionally appointed commander in chief.

Any future Republican president — and increasingly governors and senators — can look forward to similar behavior from an American bureaucracy that has come entirely unmoored from constitutional restrictions on their actions.

Indictment Is the Same Play as Spygate

After its successful 2016 election interference operation, the institutionally corrupt FBI interfered in the 2020 election by leaking about Hunter Biden’s laptop to boost Democrats’ false claim it was “Russian disinformation.” Since then, it is becoming more apparent the FBI wasn’t so much investigating the laptop as burying it, as it appears to be doing with other evidence of Biden corruption that endangers U.S. national security.

In their indictment this week, the DOJ’s special counsel boasted of “audio recordings of Trump appearing to confirm he’d retained a document he failed to declassify as president.” The same agency hid from elected lawmakers evidence about audio recordings of Joe and Hunter Biden allegedly taking $10 million in bribes from Ukranians.

Prosecutors also claimed Trump’s documents include major national security information, like nuclear secrets. How convenient that these documents are allegedly classified information that nobody can see. Regardless, “the president and the president alone decides what is a presidential record and what isn’t. He may take with him whatever records he chooses at the end of his term.”

Beyond that, Trump has been falsely accused of being dangerous with nuclear information so many times, anyone accepting this wild claim without good, hard, complete evidence is either a propagandist or an idiot. Remember how the security state’s narrative, formed by selective leaks about Trump’s call with Ukraine, was disproven by Trump releasing the transcript of the call? Of course, that didn’t stop Democrats from impeaching Trump while hiding key evidence and structuring the impeachment to make Democrat leaks the only way for information to get out.

As Grassley recently pointed out, deceptive leaks are now DOJ and FBI standard operating procedure. They constantly leak information out of context to form false narratives that benefit Democrats. That’s called disinformation and misinformation. It’s election interference, it’s authoritarian, it’s illegal, and it’s accelerating.

DOJ and FBI employees use misleading leaks to corporate media to legitimize their pursuit of jailing their top political opponent, like tyrannies from East Germany to Venezuela. No one can trust a word these agencies emit. They are staffed with hardened liars for whom facts stripped of context are weapons of power, not truth.

End Abuses of Power with Legitimate Uses of Power

It’s willfully blind to disregard this overwhelming evidence to presume any Republican who pushes what the party’s voters want will not receive the Trump treatment. There’s so much evidence, it’s impossible to fit it into even a long article. This hasn’t even touched on the Fulton County, Georgia prosecution of Trump that looks like a coverup of gross election abuses there, Trump’s ridiculous indictment from New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the FBI’s multiple coverups for Hillary Clinton established in the recent special counsel report, the FBI’s retaliation against whistleblowers, and lots more.

This is not about Trump himself. It’s about the voters he represents. As my colleague Jordan Boyd notes, “The left’s short-term goal may be hampering the right’s chances in the next presidential election, but the long-term goal was always to outlaw the ideological platform that made this new GOP competitive in the first place.” That’s why the tyrannical tactics used against him will expand — unless those who deploy such tactics are held legally accountable by something a lot stronger than no-consequence reports and made-for-TV hearings.

The first thing this unprosecuted history of institutionalized crime ought to teach is that the people willing to do things like this will do anything they can get away with. The second is that they must not get away with it. That’s not going to happen unless others in power stop these systemic abuses by applying their rightful authority. It will take a long time, and it will happen to a lot more Republicans on the way.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/15/do-any-republicans-really-think-desantis-wont-get-impeached-or-framed-by-the-fbi/