The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — It’s been an extraordinary week of news, with the death of conservative televangelist Pat Robertson and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, the surprise ruling by this conservative Supreme Court that Alabama’s congressional map did indeed dilute the power of Black voters, and the biggest political-legal news of all time to date, the unveiling of the indictment of former president Donald Trump.

Yet we woke up Sunday morning to a lede story in The New York Times all about the threats of more violence from Trump’s supporters, more commentary about this alleged coming “civil war.”

Trump Supporters’ Violent Rhetoric in His Defense Disturbs Experts: The former president’s allies have portrayed the indictment as an act of war and called for retribution, which political violence experts say increases the risk of action.

If I was writing for the Editorial Board of The New York Times, or advising the Department of Justice and the FBI, there is one obvious solution to immediately stopping Trump from inciting more violence and more violence from his brain washed followers: #LockThemAllUp! Let them see the inside of the federal prison system for themselves for a good, long while.

As the Times editorial board indicated over the weekend: “It is hard to overstate the gravity of the criminal indictment issued against Donald Trump.”

We are facing this historic moment when we are witnessing the first time a former president has been charged with violating federal laws and a Constitution he took an oath to uphold, the first time a former head of the executive branch of the U.S. government has been charged with obstructing the very agencies he swore on a Bible to lead honestly, and the first time a former commander-in-chief has been charged with seriously endangering national security by playing fast and loose with classified documents critical to the national defense in violation of the Espionage Act.

The indictment, unveiled on Friday, accuses Trump of 37 crimes, including 31 counts for “willful retention of national defense information,” all violations of the Espionage Act. One count charges him with “conspiracy to obstruct justice” for conspiring along with a personal aide to hide classified documents from the FBI. He is also charged with withholding documents, corruptly concealing documents and making false statements to law enforcement authorities.

The potential prison sentences for Trump add up to as much as 420 years, the Times reports, “even though conviction almost never results in the maximum sentence.”

“But this indictment confronts the country with the harrowing prospect of a former president facing years behind bars, even as he runs to regain the White House.”

Trump and his Republican allies are already trying to politicize the indictment, falsely accusing the Biden administration of a political “witch hunt” and “insisting that the charges issued by 23 randomly chosen residents of South Florida were an attempt by President Biden to demolish his rival.”

“But the evidence compiled by the government is so substantial that it is clear the Justice Department had no choice but to indict,” the Times says.

The indictment indicates that Trump not only took classified documents from the White House on purpose, not by accident as others have done who cooperated with the FBI, including President Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence. Trump knew and admitted knowing he was not authorized to possess the documents. He openly showed them to visitors and political cronies at his country club in New Jersey. None of the people he showed them too had any level of a national security clearance.

One of the documents involved a potential attack on another country, which The New York Times has reported was Iran.

“Isn’t it amazing?” he asked one visitor, brandishing the document. During that conversation Trump acknowledged that he knew the document was “a secret,” the indictment shows as evidence.

The details in the indictment make it clear that Trump knew that he was not authorized to keep national security secrets in his possession, and that he played a cat-and-mouse game to conceal them from the FBI and other federal officials, including his own lawyers, who he tried to bait into colluding with him in the crime.

At one point he suggested his lawyer take some documents to his hotel room and “pluck” out anything really bad, the indictment says.

“Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” he asked his lawyers, adding: “Well, look, isn’t it better if there are no documents?”

He instructed his lawyers to falsely inform federal investigators that they had cooperated fully.

“With these actions, the former president demonstrated once again his contempt for the rule of law, his disregard for America’s national security and his mockery of the oath he took to support and defend the Constitution,” the Times writes.

Trump walked out of the White House with details of the nuclear capabilities of the country and a foreign government, descriptions of support for terrorist activities by a foreign country and communications with the leader of a foreign nation. It is the willful retention of this material that led to the 31 charges of violating the Espionage Act, which makes it a crime if someone deliberately retains national defense material “and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it.”

“Trump’s recklessness in retaining and showing off military secrets is both arrogant and breathtaking. It put the lives of American soldiers at risk. These are some of the United States’ most closely guarded secrets — so sensitive that many top national-security officials can’t see them — and Mr. Trump treated them like a prize he had won at a carnival. These actions underscore, yet again, why he is unfit for public office.”

What makes the spectacle all the more stunning, the national newspaper of record says, “is that it was entirely unnecessary. Had Mr. Trump responded to the many formal requests to return the wrongfully taken documents by apologizing and handing them over immediately, he would have avoided any confrontation with federal law enforcement. That’s what responsible public servants like Mr. Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence did when classified material was found among their papers.”

While the former president’s defenders rushed in to call it political persecution, making an accusation that a prosecution is a purely political act, risks further undermining the public’s faith in an independent judiciary.

“There is no support for that charge, because it requires ignoring two years of evidence painstakingly collected by nonpolitical law enforcement investigators. The Justice Department appears to have followed the basic processes and rules already in place to reach this decision. The public is now able to judge for itself whether the government has a serious case and whether it is actually the Republican critics who are the ones doing the instant politicizing.”

Trump will be afforded due process, including a trial by a jury of one’s peers and the right to appeal a guilty verdict, all the protections the Constitution guarantees.

“The Justice Department’s role is to apply the law equally, without regard to the status or political affiliation of the accused lawbreaker. That’s what makes this indictment so necessary,” the Times says. “Federal prosecutors have sought and won convictions in dozens of classified-document cases involving behavior less egregious than Mr. Trump’s. And that’s why the claims of a witch hunt are lamentable.”

Even Trump’s own former attorney general, Bill Barr, who acted as a lackey for Trump for years after replacing Jeff Sessions of Alabama as the nation’s top law enforcement officer, said on “CBS Mornings”: “This says more about Trump than it does the Department of Justice. He’s so egotistical that he has this penchant for conducting risky, reckless acts to show that he can sort of get away with it. There’s no excuse for what he did here.”

Indeed, and in case after case, including many of the cases against Trump’s followers who heeded Trump’s seditious call to come to Washington and engage in a violent insurrection to halt the peaceful transfer of power and attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, the defendants were held in federal prison without the opportunity to post bail.

So my advice to the DOJ is simple.

When Trump shows up to appear in Federal District Court in Miami on Tuesday afternoon for a hearing before a federal judge he appointed to the bench — Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the Florida judge who last year appointed a special master in the case and temporarily halted FBI access to classified documents taken in a court-approved search — Trump should be arrested on the spot and held without bail until his trial.

Take away his cell phone and cut off his access to social media. Stop him from traveling around the country holding rallies and telling people to attack his opponents. That is the ONLY way to stop him from continuing to incite more violence against the FBI, President Joe Biden, other Democrats, and members of the news media who honestly report on his actions.

I know this is not what will happen, and it may seem like a scary option for this administration to take considering the perceived political implications. But the alternative is even more dangerous.

You want to stop a civil war from happening? Lock the son-of-a-bitch up.

And while you are at it, lock up Trump’s ally Steve Bannon, the top podcaster fomenting a traitorous overthrow of the United States government, who has already been convicted and sentenced for contempt of Congress. He is only free because a Trump judge let him remain so while his appeal could be heard.

Related: Steve Bannon Found Guilty of Contempt of Congress for Refusing to Cooperate with the Capitol Attack Investigation

A Political Prosecution

I am sick and tired of people calling this a stolen election and a political prosecution. It is not, and believe me, I have witnessed and covered a stolen election and a political prosecution before, back during the Bush years.

There is no doubt that there was election fraud in the election for governor of Alabama in 2002, when a hacker working for Republican Bob Riley’s campaign in Bay Minette in collusion with a Republican probate judge switched 6,334 votes overnight from Democrat Don Siegelman, who was declared the winner on election night by the Associated Press and everybody else. But when we woke up the next morning, it was reported that Riley won the election by 3,120 votes, a statistical impossibility according to a study by an academic expert.

Related: How the 2002 Election Was Stolen in Bay Minette

I was living in New Orleans at the time, but was dispatched to Bay Minette by The New York Times to investigate the possibility of voter fraud, in part because I had sources there. It’s where I began my news career, at The Baldwin Times.

But when Siegelman graciously conceded, I was sent back home and called off the story. I later investigated it for my own publication, The Locust Fork News Journal.

And the politicized justice in the Bush years was so harsh that the former governor was not allowed to remain out of jail while his appeal was heard. He was ordered handcuffed and locked up immediately by U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller, who was appointed to the court by President George W. Bush and later ran off the bench for beating up his drunk wife in Atlanta and other things.

Related: Judge Fuller Sentences Siegelman and Scrushy to Jail

You want to stop the incitement of further violence and insurrection? Lock up the people fomenting it, including members of Congress who are using their public positions to mislead the American public and incite more domestic terrorism and violence.

This is a major priority for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, as indicated in a recent National Terrorism Advisory Bulletin.

“Recent tragic events highlight the continued heightened threat environment our nation faces, and these threats are driven by violent extremists who seek to further their ideological beliefs and personal grievances,” Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas said in the announcement.

Lone offenders and small groups motivated by a range of ideological beliefs and personal grievances continue to pose a persistent threat to the United States, he said. Both domestic violent extremists and those associated with foreign terrorist organizations continue to attempt to motivate supporters to conduct attacks, including through violent extremist messaging and online calls for violence.

In the coming months, DHS expects the threat environment to remain heightened and that individuals may be motivated to violence by perceptions of the 2024 general election cycle and legislative or judicial decisions pertaining to sociopolitical issues. U.S. critical infrastructure, faith-based institutions, individuals or events associated with the LGBTQIA+-community, schools, racial and ethnic minorities, and government facilities and personnel are likely targets of potential violence.

Stop the violence. #LockThemAllUp

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