Witch-hunt against Trump beggars belief

THE United States has just entered dangerous banana republic territory where law enforcement is weaponized by those in power to criminalise the opposition. How else to view the FBI raid on former president Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-lago, reportedly to retrieve documents he was supposed to have returned to the National Archives after he lost his re-election bid in 2020?

Whatever one might think about

Trump, the whole thing stinks to high heaven. After all, Hillary Clinton never received anything like this sort of treatment when she was not only found to have dealt with classified information on a private email server but alleged to have destroyed evidence to cover up what would for an ordinary American have been treated as a very serious crime.

And given that the approval for law enforcement agents to knock on the door of any former commander in chief would have all but surely gone all the way to the Oval Office for sign off, it is hard not to imagine the raid was part of the Democrats’ ongoing anti-trump effort. After all, this is the same FBI that in 2016 that used unverified information from the so-called “Steele dossier” to obtain warrants from a secret court to spy on the Trump campaign and push the narrative that the former president was, somehow, an agent of the Russian government.

One whistle-blowing FBI agent, William Barnett, would tell investigators that this and the subsequent special counsel investigation led by Robert Mueller was simply an effort to “get Trump”.

This is also the same FBI that only this week was accused of working during the 2020 campaign to cover up damaging information about Hunter Biden. Given all this it is hard to escape the conclusion that much of America’s federal law enforcement apparatus has become a tool of the left more focused on punishing its opponents than fighting actual crime.

So what is the upshot of this – and why, now, would the FBI choose to raid Trump’s mansion?

After all, the raid will all but certainly make Trump out to be a martyr in the eyes of his supporters – and plenty of other Americans who see this for the political act that it is.

Any doubts that remained about whether or not he would run again for president in 2024 have now been removed.

While Trump will likely weather this storm, even the perception that the justice system is being used for political purposes will cause far more damage to an America that is already fractured by politics.