The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson –

UNDISCLOSED LOCATION, N.C. — So if you are like many of my vocal Facebook friends, fans and followers, you may be chomping at the bit to see Donald Trump frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs or a straight-jacket and hauled off to a padded or unpadded cell.

Maybe his pedophile friend Jeffery Epstein’s cell is available in New York?

I must admit that after a couple of IPAs, a shot or two of Larceny Bourbon whiskey and a toke or two, that image brings a smile to my face and sweet dreams of a post-Trump era.

If Trump continues to try to steal this election in the courts or state legislatures, monkeying with the Electoral College, and refuses to vacate the coronavirus infected White House so it can be disinfected by January 20, 2021, that might happen yet. It would fall to U.S. Marshals who enforce laws in federal courts to do the deed.

And considering how Trump treated the Secret Service by putting them at risk with his hospital and campaign shenanigans, infecting more than 180 agents, there will be no loyalty there. That law enforcement agency would have no choice but to transfer its loyalty to the new duly elected president, Joe Biden.

It looks highly unlikely at this point that the military or the Supreme Court are going to get involved. The vote in the election is too clear and not close enough to raise any serious doubts about the will of a majority of voters and the final outcome.

My readers should have no doubt about my opinion about this now, since I called Trump a traitor right after the Fourth of July in 2018.

No Equivocation: Trump is a Traitor Against the United States and Should Be Arrested…

But our opinions may not win the day when President Joe Biden is sworn in on Jan. 20. Biden may be no scholar, but he knows enough about how the American Civil War ended that his moderate instincts might be to let Trump off the hook like Lincoln and Grant let Robert E. Lee and Confederate President Jefferson Davis off the hangman’s noose after that war.

It could be argued that we are in a new civil war of sorts in the Trump era, or at least a continuation of the war we fought for the hearts and minds of Americans from 1861-65.

If Biden chooses Alabama’s U.S. Senator Doug Jones as his Attorney General, that would be a bit of an irony considering that the Trump chose Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions as his AG. And knowing Mr. Jones myself, he might be more forgiving of Trump than you or me. But we will wait and see.

There’s no sense in me asking him this question now, because he’s not going to answer it. He has so far even deflected questions from other news outlets about whether he would consider a position in the Biden administration. If he is appointed and goes through a Senate confirmation hearing for AG, he might very well be asked these questions for the public record.

Should the Biden Justice Department open an investigation of Trump’s crimes during his tenure in the White House? Should a new special prosecutor be appointed to finish the work left unfinished by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the House impeachment investigation and Senate trial?

If asked to serve on a jury in such a trial, I would have to recuse myself. I’ve already documented Trump’s guilt here in this publication, and it is crystal clear to me. But that would make me a biased juror.

Trump’s loyalty to dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin over U.S. intelligence agencies, including the F.B.I., mark him as a traitor to me. Plus, he has to be considered the most corrupt president ever for his blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clauses against profiting from his office.

I’m still disappointed we never got to cover that trial about Trump doing business with foreign governments at his D.C. hotel in federal court in Greenbelt Maryland. The case is still sitting there waiting to go forward once Trump is out of office. Trump is also being investigated on state corruption and tax evasion charges in New York, which would be exempt from any federal pardon.

If I was advising the incoming Biden administration, or the new attorney general nominee, I might recommend opening up a back channel of diplomacy to see if Trump would be amenable to giving up his fight to remain president and vacate the premises at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in exchange for a promise of legal leniency.

But then, I can’t help but think back on the leniency on the part of President Abraham Lincoln and Union Lt. General Ulysses S. Grant in issuing pardons to Confederate General Robert E. Lee and his fellow officers after the Civil War. Some prosecutors charged and held Confederate President Jefferson Davis for a short time after the war and after Lincoln died and considered trying him for treason and hanging him as a non-enemy combatant.

The momentum for a trial evaporated at the time, according to Civil War Historian William Blair, author of With Malice Toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era, for a host of complicated reasons, including the lack of political will. Since the primary goal of the war was reunification of the United States as a Union, politicians didn’t want to create martyrs. Losing legal cases would have also established bad precedents.

“As the battles intensified between President Andrew Johnson and Congress over the goals of Reconstruction, concern over the fate of rebels indicted for treason faded,” Blair writes.

Even abolitionist newspaper publishers like Horace Greeley were against hanging the rebels, since they considered capital punishment ineffective and repugnant.

It might be worth recalling what Lincoln said about this in his Second Inaugural Address:

“With malice toward none with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

In other online discussions, hanging Lee and Davis could have established another kind of bad precedent, holding all Confederate soldiers responsible. Instead, in many cases, Southern farmers were not forced to give up their weapons, allowed to keep their hunting rifles and go back to their farms, as destroyed as most of them were by the war.

If the war had not ended with surrender, forgiveness and peace, a violent backlash could have continued indefinitely.

“The nation desperately needed peace after such a lengthy Civil War,” one commentator pointed out. “It was a time for healing.”

Also recall Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Recall that when Lee surrendered to Grant in Appomattox, Virginia, one of the terms Lincoln had promised was that no soldier, including Lee, would be prosecuted for their involvement. This enraged Congress as well as his own cabinet, particularly Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.

When Lincoln died there was a push to indict Lee and to punish Confederate soldiers.

But General Grant was not pleased. He had delivered the terms of surrender to Lee in good faith, and felt that if the terms he promised were not honored then it would make him a liar. He was prepared to resign if necessary. Having the hero of the nation resign in disgust frightened the government enough to back down. President Johnson ended the debate when he issued a pardon of all Confederate combatants.

Being a noncombatant, Jefferson Davis was arrested and held for two years without trial at Ft. Monroe, Virginia. In the end, though, it was thought that a trial would be problematic. Many legal experts at the time, and more than a few now feel that secession was legal. Since there was nothing in the Constitution preventing a state from leaving the Union, the United States government felt that there was a strong chance that he could win a court case.

Davis was pardoned upon payment of $100,0000 bail, which incidentally was raised by Northern millionaires.

But I still pose the question for William Blair.

“So I’m reading some of your work on why Lincoln and Grant wanted the Confederate traitors pardoned and not tried and hanged. Was that the best course or could it now been seen as a historical mistake?”

“Also, should the new President, Joe Biden, and his new Attorney General, maybe Doug Jones of Alabama, let Trump off the hook for his crimes if he will give in, concede and walk away? Or should there be a special counsel to investigate his ‘traitorous behavior’ and other crimes from the White House, including violations of the emoluments clause?”

Related – We Can End the Civil War Once and For All Time on Tuesday, Nov. 3.

I don’t know. What do you all think?