https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/09/20/even-with-an-impeachment-trial-and-an-indicted-son-biden-will-still-come-out-on-top/

The obstacles facing the US President are probably not yet enough to cost him his job in next year’s election.

US President Joe Biden was last week hit with a nasty double whammy: the launch of an impeachment inquiry in the House of Representatives and the indictment of his son, Hunter. The impeachment inquiry may ultimately prove less of a headache. This is hardly the first such probe, but it is the only instance in which the House has launched one on the basis of no evidence.

No break-ins and erased tapes. No blue dress. No shaking down of foreign leaders. No assault on Congress. Nothing.

After House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced that he had unilaterally created the inquiry – after months of vowing never to do so without a vote of the full House – Republicans struggled mightily to explain its rationale. Representative Nancy Mace, in particular, gave numerous TV interviews in which she insisted that there was ample evidence of bribery or corruption associated with Mr Biden, but was unable to point to anything in particular. Asked by CNN’s Kaitlin Collins if such an inquiry didn’t need to be based on evidence, Ms Mace gave the game away by replying, “Well, that’s what the inquiry is for. It’s to get more evidence.”

Representative Michael McCaul insisted: “We don’t have the evidence now, but we may find it later.” That’s highly reminiscent of Donald Trump’s attorney Rudolph Giuliani saying to an Arizona official about his own overwrought allegations of fraud in the 2020 election: “We’ve got lots of theories. We just don’t have the evidence.”

The impeachment push against Mr Biden is so weak that Mr McCarthy had to be forced to launch it by Republican right-wing extremists. Both the Speaker and many GOP representatives from centrist districts will surely be hoping that whatever hearings and other measures are undertaken, they drag on indefinitely and without much fanfare. Otherwise, there’s every danger of a significant public backlash if the country gets the sense that this is baseless, frivolous and partisan, and worse – in part because it’s true – that it’s simple automatic payback on behalf of the twice-impeached Mr Trump.

Republicans have been diligently digging around Mr Biden and his son since last year’s midterms and have discovered absolutely nothing directly connecting the president with the financial dealings of his formerly drug-addicted adult child. It’s largely been a campaign of innuendo, elaborating unproven criminal or unethical dealings, apart from the younger Mr Biden’s evident and unsavoury, but sadly typical, willingness to try to profit from his last name.

Right-wingers then suggest that the President must have also been involved in dealings that were not merely unsavoury or even unethical but downright illegal. Based on this chain of groundless implications, they have made a fetish out of the preposterous phrase “the Biden crime family”, as if the whole clan is corrupted and constitutes the equivalent of a Mafia gang. This creates a huge contradiction in Republican messaging: Mr Biden cannot simultaneously be the mastermind controlling a multinational criminal enterprise and a doddering, senile old fool.

Their inquiries thus far have not only failed to uncover evidence of any of this, they frequently left Republican congressional leaders looking desperate and foolish. So, unless Mr Biden actually has something to hide, which seems very improbable, he likely has little to fear politically from this impeachment agenda, which is liable to deliver some significant self-inflicted wounds to his Republican adversaries or fade into the background.

That’s much less true of the indictment and likely upcoming trial of Hunter. The president’s son is accused of purchasing and possessing a gun while using outlawed narcotics and lying on a gun purchase form about his use of these controlled substances. He had reached a plea deal with a Trump-appointed prosecutor that probably would have allowed him to avoid incarceration, but that was thrown out as insufficient by a judge. Because he and his lawyers continued to insist that the plea deal was binding, he has been indicted.

In a rational world, being patiently faithful and forgiving of the foibles of a wayward and drug-addicted child wouldn’t be considered a stain on any parent’s character. Hunter Biden, after all, has never run for or held office, or occupied any government position, and even Republicans don’t suggest Mr Biden was responsible for his son’s drug use or alleged gun violations. Indeed, the strident protection of gun ownership with few restrictions by the ultra-conservative present Supreme Court may provide Hunter’s legal team with their most potent arguments.

But politics is rarely rational. Mr Trump and his followers claim the gun charges were brought precisely because the president is obviously not involved in them while implying more serious charges were avoided because they could have implicated Mr Biden. None of that is based on any evidence either.

Still, many Americans may gather over the next 14 months before the 2024 election that Mr Trump is on trial for something or other, and so is Mr Biden’s son, and therefore there is some kind of equivalency. The fact that the charges brought against Mr Trump and Hunter Biden are essentially on opposite ends of the spectrum of nonviolent criminal offences – with the former president facing some of the most serious imaginable accusations and the incumbent’s son accused of minor technical violations of the law – may be lost on a great many people, even those who don’t depend on Fox News for current events consumption.

Some anxious Democrats are renewing their appeals to Mr Biden not to run for re-election, citing his age and the fact that he is currently running neck and neck with Mr Trump in polls. His supporters retort that Mr Trump is nearly as old, and frequently makes rather less sense when speaking in public, and that virtually every first-term president is in relative polling parity against hypothetical opponents a year out from re-election.

Yet the indictment of his son is a genuine headache as well as heartache for the President. It will deprive Republicans of plausible claims that Hunter is receiving preferential treatment from the Justice Department, but it sets up a potential, albeit entirely invalid, offset to Mr Trump’s own coming trials.

Still, with inflation down and GDP up, plus an impressive string of domestic legislative and foreign policy successes, Mr Biden still seems on course to win a second term, although most Americans, including most Democrats, would prefer someone younger. He certainly wouldn’t want to change political, let alone legal, positions with Mr Trump.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/israel-saudi-arabia-us.html

The Biden administration is working overtime to consolidate what is arguably Washington’s most significant advantage over its great power rivals, especially China. That advantage lies in the Middle East.

More specifically, the United States has been pushing hard to forge a deal in which Washington would give formal security guarantees to Saudi Arabia and, in return, the Saudis would establish diplomatic ties with Israel, with Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. At the Group of 20 gathering in New Delhi, President Joe Biden and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia exchanged a warm handshake. Last week, a high-level U.S. delegation visited Riyadh to pursue the potential agreement, following two separate trips this summer by the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

It’s easy to see what the Saudis and Israelis, facing security threats in the region, particularly from Iran, would gain. Saudi Arabia would win reliable American protection, among other potential benefits. For Israel, establishing formal ties with Saudi Arabia would bolster its position against Iran. It could also be Israel’s greatest diplomatic breakthrough since its 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, and would give other Sunni Muslim-majority states incentive to follow suit.

Yet neither Saudi Arabia nor Israel appears to be showing much urgency in getting the deal done, while the Biden administration has made it a clear priority. So, beyond a diplomatic victory, what’s in it for Washington?

The main advantage the triangular deal offers the United States is a tightened grip over three vitally important waterways around the Arabian Peninsula: the Strait of Hormuz, the Suez Canal and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Those arteries are critical links for China, a focus of American concern.

The Strait of Hormuz, which links the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea and more widely the Indian Ocean, is arguably the most important maritime choke point in the world. About one-third of seaborne petroleum, and a slightly lower percentage of liquid natural gas, passes through it each year. The overwhelming majority of this energy goes to Asia, including over 45 percent of China’s annual oil imports.

The Suez Canal, which links the Red and Mediterranean Seas and connects Asia, Africa and Europe, is just as significant. Approximately 12 percent of global trade passes through it annually, and China is its biggest user. Chinese ships account for 10 percent of those passing through the canal. Those ships carry, for example, over 60 percent of the goods China sends to Europe.

At the other end of the Red Sea, a third key passageway, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, controls the entrance into the Red Sea leading to the Suez Canal and is similarly significant to global trade. It’s no accident that the only overseas Chinese military base is in Djibouti, just 68 miles from Bab el-Mandeb, or that Beijing invested billions of dollars in that country.

As part of a more aggressive effort to expand its presence along its trade and resource routes, China has attempted to woo both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to gain a strategic foothold in the Persian Gulf, and has been constructing a relatively modest port facility near Abu Dhabi that Washington has warned could serve military purposes.

For now, China doesn’t have much room to maneuver. The United States and its partners dominate the three o waterways surrounding the Arabian Peninsula. A deal with Israel and Saudi Arabia could secure that advantage for decades to come. It would bring the two main U.S. military partners in the Middle East together in open cooperation, and effectively create an interlocking regional chain consisting of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Israel, Egypt and Jordan, all longstanding friends of Washington, nearly encircling the Arabian Peninsula.

Moreover, U.S. security guarantees for Riyadh would undoubtedly ensure that Saudi Arabia’s increasing flirtation with China never leads to a significant strategic foothold for Beijing in the kingdom, a line the Saudis have thus far carefully avoided crossing.

If this reinforced network of waterway control were to come to pass, it could allow the United States to finally realize its longstanding goal of reducing some of its huge military bases in the Gulf region, including Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, that are effectively remnants of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Smaller bases, with the probable exception of the one in Bahrain, which is home to Naval Forces Central Command and the Fifth Fleet, could be reconfigured for rapid responses to local threats in coordination with regional partners.

The Biden administration has been energetically pursuing this triangular deal because it would secure an invaluable global competitive advantage. What remains unclear is whether Washington has sufficient leverage over the Israeli government, which appears allergic to the concessions toward the Palestinians that Saudi Arabia reportedly seeks, or whether there is enough time before the president’s re-election bid to hammer out such a complex arrangement.

It seems that Washington and Riyadh might be ready to overcome their bilateral differences. But without Israeli participation and Saudi-Israeli normalization, a simpler bilateral agreement won’t give Washington what it needs: a potent network of friendly states based on a rapprochement between the United States’ two key strategic partners in the Middle East.

The triangular nature of this initiative makes it particularly difficult to achieve. But the vast potential strategic benefits readily explain why the administration is taking on this huge task now, with potentially enough time before the election and the seeming receptiveness by the Saudis. Both Israel and Saudi Arabia would benefit in important and obvious ways, but the United States would be the biggest winner.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/09/04/if-trump-returns-he-might-replace-thousands-of-federal-staff-with-his-supporters/

Purging thousands, much less tens of thousands, of qualified civil servants though on ideological grounds isn’t all that simple.

Public opinions regarding former US president Donald Trump by now are virtually set in stone. Yet he has consistently proven still capable of shocking, if not surprising. The January 6 insurrection and his broader failed efforts to overturn the 2020 election are an obvious example. Another is his apparent purloining and retaining of classified government documents.

This element of surprise is also reflected in radical advance planning by the Trump campaign and allied groups for a second term, including an unprecedented ideological purge of the federal workforce. Few Americans have heard about this extraordinary agenda, which bears all the hallmarks of what political extremists typically attempt when seizing power. Supporters and critics agree that Mr Trump and camp were simply unprepared after his surprise 2016 victory and are determined to attempt a sweeping reconstruction of the American state from day one of any second chance.

A recent Associated Press-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research poll found that the two words Americans most associate with Mr Biden are “old” and “confused”, and with Mr Trump “corrupt” and “dishonest”. It would appear the former president’s criminal indictments have been taking their toll.

Mr Biden is indeed showing his age more than Mr Trump, who’s only three years his junior, and has at times appeared confused or said inexplicable things – although I know two people who are in no way connected to the administration, the Democratic Party or the political process, and have had lengthy meetings with him, in both cases in excess of one hour, discussing highly complex policy questions, and both highly credible sources insist he is well-informed, alert and sharp.

The negative views of Mr Trump among most Americans would hardly be enhanced by a detailed understanding of what his camp is planning. Not that he’s making a secret of his intentions. On the contrary, Mr Trump has been regaling audiences with the vows that “I am your retribution”, and “your justice”. There’s little doubt whom he intends to target with such vengeance.

While Trump’s base, yearning for ‘retribution,’ might applaud a political purge, the rest of the country would react with shock and horror

The Republican fixation on condemning Mr Biden’s supposed “weaponisation” of the federal government and justice system to attack his presumed enemies is not only a fact-free defence of Mr Trump from federal indictments, but also a rather obvious and crude, although effective, characteristic piece of political projection. In the Trump era, Republicans have perfected the art of accusing their opponents of precisely what they are doing or intend to do.

Mr Trump has promised to investigate and prosecute the “Biden crime family”, alleging that Mr Biden and his son made millions overseas by leveraging government roles (which his son has never had). There is no evidence Mr Biden did this despite intensive investigations by House Republicans, though his son evidently and disgracefully did try to profit from the family name. And, of course, Mr Trump and his immediate family – all of whom had official government positions despite nominal and ineffective rules against such nepotism – made that a virtual art form.

Moreover, hardline House Republicans appear to be making significant progress in coercing Speaker Kevin McCarthy to open impeachment hearings against Mr Biden, although potential charges have never been specified and are hard to imagine.

While all of that could be dismissed as simply politics, although not by any means as usual, plans by Trump-aligned groups such as the Heritage Foundation envision a huge purge of the federal workforce, dishonestly billed as “dismantling the deep state” (which does not exist in the US). It’s also likely to be sold as a libertarian effort to “shrink the size of government”, although the up to 50,000 civil servants facing ouster aren’t going to be rendered redundant but instead replaced by sympathetic, and possibly often unqualified, ideologues from around the country.

The almost 1,000-page “Project 2025” campaign blueprint calls for an “army” of Trump-supporting hardliners from around the country to, as one of its architects, Paul Dans, puts it, “flood the zone [of the federal workforce] with conservatives”. Following the example of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has mobilised the power of his state’s government to attack secondary and higher education and major corporations such as Disney, this agenda is about taking over and, indeed, weaponising, the federal government and its vast administrative authority rather than shrinking it.

Nothing like this has ever been attempted or contemplated. Franklin Roosevelt, the 32nd US president, hugely expanded the size of the federal government to combat the depression and fight the Second World War, and he recruited mainly liberals to the new positions. And every president routinely replaces about 4,000 senior officials. But none has planned or attempted to purge tens of thousands of civil servants on ideological grounds.

This would be accomplished by attempting to revive Mr Trump’s last-ditch 2020 executive order that created a new “Schedule F” category for federal workers, which Mr Biden immediately rescinded. It would allow any civil servant with even the most tenuous connection to policy formation and implementation to effectively be subject to instantaneous dismissal without cause.

The plans also range from the legally dubious such as deploying the military to suppress crime and dissent, to forcing politically correct and ideologically purified “patriotic education” on public schools and universities, and even an absurd proposal to create 10 new major “freedom cities” by government fiat. Mr Trump has even made it clear that he wants to use federal authority to insist on certain architectural styles in existing cities and ensure that schools and streets are named “not after communists but patriots”. So much for smaller government.

Even a vast government is, of course, incapable of magically creating 10 large new American cities, and there are significant obstacles facing many of these alarming ideas. Even if “Schedule F” is implemented and legally upheld, a re-elected Mr Trump might find getting rid of thousands, much less tens of thousands, of qualified civil servants on ideological grounds isn’t all that simple.

While his base, yearning for “retribution”, might applaud a political purge, the rest of the country would surely react with shock and horror. Mr Trump isn’t giving the swing voters who decide national elections any reason to come back to him after a decisive break in 2020 and, more dramatically, the 2022 midterms. The less most Americans hear about “Project 2025”, the better it will be for its authors, not to mention Mr Trump.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/08/28/republican-politics-has-seen-in-trump-a-triumph-of-the-personality-cult/

Trump was the big winner at the Milwaukee debate even though he wasn’t there.

When Donald Trump burst on the American political scene, surprisingly seizing the Republican nomination and the White House in 2016, until his unsurprising defeat by Joe Biden in 2020, US politics was reduced to a single, inescapable and usually nightmarish tragicomedy: The Trump Showaka Presidential Apprentice. Since that defeat, he has lost exclusivity but not a disproportionate share of the limelight. In the Biden era, what Americans have been routinely viewing is a split screen effect, with Mr Trump’s latest antics and travails on one side and whatever else may be happening on the other.

Last week provided an excellent example of how that works (badly) in practice. The Republican presidential primary campaigns began in earnest with the first national debate, featuring eight hopefuls but not the former president. Instead, Mr Trump sought to upstage the debate with a simultaneous interview with the bigoted former star at Fox News Tucker Carlson. Mr Trump’s plan didn’t exactly work since the debate got a lot more coverage and attention than his attempted counter programming. But the split screen moment prevailed in a manner much less advantageous to the former president.

Although he wasn’t there, Mr Trump was clearly the big winner at the Milwaukee debate. None of the other candidates had a breakout moment, and he was subject to very little criticism, so his position as the head of the party and clear front-runner went effectively uncontested.

Things went particularly badly for his highest-polling rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and his bitterest critic in the group, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley solidified her popularity with those who timidly yearn for the pre-Trump era, while political novice Vivek Ramaswamy continued to build his popularity with the hard-core Trump base by taking the most extreme positions on many of their preferred bugbears. The other four were essentially also-rans, at least on that night.

The tone, tenor and much of the substance of the conversation again underscored just how extreme the Republican Party has become compared to almost all other mainstream conservative parties in Western countries. But the low point, without a doubt, was when the moderators asked which of the candidates would support Mr Trump if he were both the Republican nominee and simultaneously a convicted criminal.

Only former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson and Mr Christie declined, and neither of them is likely to qualify for the next Republican debate because of their low poll numbers. The rest of the Republican field, apparently, would have no problem backing Mr Trump for another four years in the White House even as a convicted felon. It’s the ultimate triumph of Republican politics as a pitiable personality cult, largely devoid of substance, integrity and even self-respect.

But if the debacle in Milwaukee was one side of the interminable contemporary American split screen, the other side didn’t feature Mr Biden, or Mr Trump’s interview, but instead his arraignment in Atlanta, complete, for the first time, with a mugshot. As his Republican rivals impotently debased themselves under a large banner reading “democracy” – while demonstrating little respect for its guiding principles – Mr Trump’s visage scowled forth from the notorious Fulton County Jail.

The image-obsessed Mr Trump may well have been preparing in front of countless mirrors for the pose for months, although he may not have hit upon the optimal affect. As his rally performances and even official portraits demonstrate, he has long confused glowering and grimacing with looking “tough”. He has reportedly told aides he believes he has succeeded in looking “like Churchill”. It’s another example of how easily he deceives himself.

Mr Biden, on the other hand, is apparently in on the unintended joke. When asked about the degraded spectacle, he chuckled “handsome guy”. Mr Trump does not possess a detectable sense of humour and especially has no appreciation for sarcasm, above all when aimed at himself. Otherwise, he certainly would have lashed back.

Reinforcing his alienation from irony, Mr Trump claimed, with a straight face, that he never knew what a “mugshot” was until his own was taken. Yet there is little doubt that the accumulation of serious criminal charges against him, coupled with his brief visit to the infamous jail on Rice Street, are starting to fray his nerves. Even though he was whisked there by a huge police motorcade and quickly processed and released in about 20 minutes, the great complainer whined about his “terrible experience”. It’s clearly all starting to get to him.

The fact that the Fox News hosts at the Milwaukee debate asked the other eight declared Republican candidates if they would support him as the nominee despite a major criminal conviction is arguably even more significant than the fact that six of them, including all of the other serious contenders, said they certainly would. The question itself suggests that the Republican Party, its media allies and the US conservative constituency more broadly, all now must contend with the very real possibility that Mr Trump might be tried and convicted of serious criminal offences before the 2024 presidential election.

For the Party, it would mean that the candidate who, at this stage at least, is unstoppably popular with its base is also almost certainly unelectable with the general public in almost any plausible scenario in the next 15 months. For Mr Trump personally, it means that there’s a very real prospect that he could end up serving time in prison.

That prospect is also a headache for state and federal prison authorities, since, as a former president, Mr Trump is entitled to round-the-clock Secret Service protection for the rest of his life. Arguably it’s easier to protect someone in a fortified cell rather than travelling around the country or in the world, but the logistics would be tricky for both the Secret Service and whichever prison is involved.

Mr Trump is the king of courtroom appeals and delays, and actual incarceration often waits upon lengthy appeals processes and other potential manoeuvres that play into his preferred legal strategy. He may well even hope he can drag such proceedings out beyond his lifetime, though both his parents were impressively long-lived.

Nonetheless, the enduring image from last week’s US political split screen, his scowling mugshot, leaves little doubt he’s getting extremely nervous.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/2023/08/22/trump-legal-georgia/

He needs to convince jurors that he did not intend to disrupt the US constitutional system to keep his grip on power

The fourth indictment of former US president Donald Trump may have given rise to the ridiculous phenomenon, or at least media conceit, of “indictment fatigue,” but it adds invaluable new factors to the effort to hold him accountable for his failed effort to remain in power despite losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

The Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, has taken the opposite tack to that of federal prosecutor Jack Smith who indicted Mr Trump alone on four very limited charges, disconnected from the violence of the January 6 assault on Congress. Instead, Ms Willis has issued a sweeping, even sprawling, racketeering indictment – a total of 41 criminal counts in connection against 18 defendants, including Mr Trump – for a range of interconnected crimes designed to invalidate the election in Georgia, which was won by Mr Biden.

That means that Ms Willis’s state-level case is bound to take much longer than Mr Smith’s federal prosecution, and there is almost no chance her trial will begin before the 2024 election. But that’s where things start to get really interesting. If Mr Trump is re-elected, he could try to pardon himself, or simply order the Justice Department to abandon the prosecution.

There could be complications with both approaches, but a sitting president can surely eventually quash a federal indictment against himself. The same is true if another Republican wins, and pardons Mr Trump or orders the prosecution abandoned.

That would be the end of Mr Smith’s efforts to hold Mr Trump accountable. But Ms Willis would still be unencumbered in pursuing the same essential set of facts as applied to Georgia. Under the federal system, there is nothing Mr Trump or any other president can do to stop, or seriously interfere with, a state-level prosecution.

Moreover, no president can issue a pardon pursuant to state-level crimes, and even a Republican governor in Georgia would not be able to issue a pardon until five years after the sentence is served. The only real hope Mr Trump will have if Ms Willis is successful in the long run is for some extraordinary intervention to save him by the Supreme Court inventing novel constitutional claims, probably about federalism, or that a jury in Atlanta acquits him.

There is nothing to stop Mr Trump from running for and even winning the presidency despite these federal and state prosecutions, or from serving if he wins. So the US could be treated to the spectacle of a serving US president being criminally tried in a court in Georgia for seeking to stay in power despite the constitutional system he has twice vowed to “defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

Moreover, while the federal court system has a solid ban on televising trials, state-level proceedings are routinely televised, so that Ms Willis will be overseeing the next major public inteerrogation into and explication of the failed coup and attempted insurrection since the House select committee wrapped up its work before the 2022 mid-terms. The nation, and much of the world, will undoubtedly be riveted by the spectacle, particularly if Mr Trump is in the White House while on trial in Fulton County, Georgia.

The latest polls indicate that Mr Trump remains solidly the front runner in the Republican primaries, including in the first-in-the-nation voting in the Iowa caucuses, where he apparently holds a commanding lead. Yet his reputation with the general public, and especially the crucial swing voters in a few toss-up states that will decide the outcome of the 2024 election, continues to take a severe beating.

He is refusing to take part in the first Republican debate this week, and attempting to seize the limelight with simultaneous counter-programming through a taped interview with the ousted former Fox News anchor and white nationalist rabble-rouser Tucker Carlson. This risks allowing other candidates to potentially upstage him on that night, and possibly unsettling his position as front runner. More importantly, perhaps, it gives Mr Biden an obvious rationale to decline to debate Mr Trump should they end up in what looks like an extremely likely rematch.

Mr Trump seems to understand the danger that the two prosecutions over his failed coup attempt pose for him, even if the rest of the Republican field now looks pathetically weak.

Between Mr Smith and Ms Willis, he is squeezed between a pair of legal perils that complement and reinforce each other. If Mr Smith has been too narrow, Ms Willis has been expansive. If Ms Willis’s case is too complex and lengthy, Mr Smith’s may be quick and simple. If a Republican victory in 2024, even by someone other than him, can save him from Mr Smith, Ms Willis is still there with a parallel prosecution on the same essential facts to which that victory provides no answer.

Everywhere he looks, he appears checkmated – unless he can convince jurors that he did not do, or at least intend to do, what every known piece of evidence suggests he manifestly did intend to do, which is to effectively end the US constitutional system to maintain his own personal political power.

Intellectuals and jurists, including many highly respected conservatives, are buzzing about a bombshell legal paper that persuasively argues that because Mr Trump indisputably sought to destroy the US constitutional system, he is by definition ineligible for the presidency. The authors of the study, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulson, argue powerfully that this prohibition requires no further judicial or political action because it is “self-enforcing”.

Yet, actually enforcing such a prohibition would, in fact, require additional judicial and political action, even if the prohibition is theoretically self-enforcing. It would practically have to be enforced at least by the Supreme Court and, if Mr Trump were president and lost such a case, possibly by the armed forces – or at least part of them that sides with the law.

The bottom line is the grim reality that the only real way to defeat Mr Trump is at the ballot box. If his Republican opponents can’t do it, it’s going to be up to Mr Biden. He’s demonstrated his ability to do so before, and there is every reason to think that he is going to be able to do it again. If not, the US may have to brace itself for the spectacle of not only a former president being repeatedly indicted, but a sitting president on trial in Fulton County, Georgia.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/2023/08/15/ohio-abortion-roe-v-wade/

From abortion and corruption to Trump and Biden trials, courts have achieved undue and unhealthy preeminence.

US political realities are being dominated by the legal system and the judiciary to a virtually unprecedented degree. An activist, ultra-conservative and highly assertive Supreme Court is setting itself up as the premier national decision-making body. State Supreme Courts are also asserting extraordinary powers. And high-profile criminal cases may, more than anything else, define the next presidential election.

The Supreme Court’s reactionary Catholic majority is simultaneously pleasing and roiling both friends and foes. In particular, the 2022 Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation ruling that stripped women of a 50-year-old constitutional right to reproductive choice early in a pregnancy is having a devastating effect on women seeking health care in much of the country. But it’s also proving even more of a political bombshell than many liberals hoped and some conservatives feared.

No one was sure if the initial outpouring of anger from women’s rights groups and others would have a sustained long-term political impact. After all, other issues could overtake reproductive rights for attention, or the politics of abortion access could find its own equilibrium in various states. But the issue has remained a top national political force.

It’s clear that the Supreme Court ruling is more profoundly at odds with majority American public opinion than initially understood, not only in liberal or moderate states, but in some highly conservative ones. That certainly helped the Democrats perform far better in the 2022 midterms than was widely expected. It seems likely to be a major asset to Democratic candidates in general, and President Joe Biden’s reelection bid in particular, in 2024.

Every time voters have been able to make their voices heard directly through state referenda, abortion access has won decisively. Nonetheless, conservative courts are working to maintain these restrictions despite the popular will. This is likely to maintain and exacerbate the sense of outrage.

In highly conservative Kentucky, voters overwhelmingly sided with abortion access. Nonetheless, the state Supreme Court, following the national court’s lead, ruled that two highly restrictive 2019 state laws, one banning nearly all abortions and the other banning all beyond six weeks of pregnancy, should remain in place for now, despite the will of most voters.

The right-wing state legislature in Ohio – which used to be reliably liberal but has become distinctly conservative in recent years – has taken note of this trend. It sought to prevent voters from amending the state constitution to protect reproductive rights in an upcoming November ballot initiative.

Even though Ohio conservatives have been campaigning against August referenda as bad for democracy because they typically produce low voter turnout in the lazy summer months, that’s exactly when they introduced a ballot initiative to require many more signatures to introduce a measure and a 60 per cent supermajority, rather than the existing simple majority, to amend the state constitution. 

They were obviously counting on the very qualities about an August vote against which they had complained so bitterly. And even though the referendum issue was only indirectly about reproductive rights, turnout was unusually large and the anti-choice measure was trounced by a massive 14 points. Given voting patterns from the past two elections, it’s obvious that plenty of Republicans and conservative voters joined liberals in rejecting the cynical ploy.

Ohio’s anti-choice laws are so strict that a pregnant 10-year-old rape victim had to flee to nearby Indiana to access healthcare that saved her from likely dire physical and personal consequences of giving birth at her age. Such cases are happening throughout the country, and the backlash is proving broad, deep and long-lasting. So, the Supreme Court has delivered individual women and the Republican Party massive, albeit very different, crises at the national level and in many states.

The Supreme Court itself is increasingly bedevilled by unprecedented corruption accusations, particularly regarding the longest-serving justice, Clarence Thomas. Hardly a week goes by without new revelations of gifts and benefits he has received from numerous wealthy “friends,” including underwriting his motorhome, purchasing and refurbishing his mother’s home, paying his ward’s tuition and lavish vacations – including 38 trips abroad, 34 private jet or helicopter rides, numerous yacht voyages, resort vacations and exclusive club memberships – among many others.

In November 2022, I wrote in these pages that the Supreme Court has become “the most corrupt, corrupted and corrupting” major national institution. The case for that has grown significantly stronger since then. A reasonable person would surely see this as public office being used for private gain.

From this “exalted” level of constitutional jurisprudence to more down and dirty criminal prosecutions, both sides in the likely rematch between Mr Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, are being haunted by criminal prosecutions.

An investigation of Mr Biden’s son, Hunter, begun during Mr Trump’s presidency over alleged tax and gun offences was continued by the Biden administration under the same federal prosecutor, David Weiss, to avoid accusations of favouritism.

A plea deal that probably would have spared him prison time was rejected by a judge and is now being renegotiated, although the charges might go to trial. Mr Weiss has been elevated to special counsel status, providing him additional independence. For President Biden, the danger is a constant drip-drip of news about his son’s legal travails – dovetailing with evidence-free Republican accusations that the two Bidens partnered in corruption schemes – could harm his reelection prospects.

It could even help offset the tsunami of criminal trials facing his likely opponent, Mr Trump. Though the charges against the younger Mr Biden are trivial in comparison to the over 100 already facing Mr Trump, much of the public may assume a false equivalence. Mr Trump has now been criminally indicted for a fourth time over an alleged plot to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. The prosecutor has introduced a sprawling racketeering case involving 18 defendants, the opposite approach to that of special counsel Jack Smith, who has charged Mr Trump alone to promote speed and simplicity.

Either way, unless Hunter Biden secures a stable plea agreement with his father’s Justice Department, his trial could attenuate public dismay with Mr Trump.

With the corruption-contaminated US Supreme Court and state-level equivalents deeply at odds with public sentiments, and criminal trials bedevilling the likely Republican nominee and, possibly, the son of his Democratic opponent, US courts find themselves inappropriately at the centre of the national political maelstrom. That’s unhealthy, alarming and bad for almost everyone.

https://agsiw.org/obstacles-from-all-sides-face-a-u-s-saudi-arabia-israel-grand-bargain/

Israel may at last be incapable of taking yes for an answer, even from the most influential Arab and Muslim country.

Beginning with a bombshell July 27 commentary by New York Timescolumnist Thomas L. Friedman, reports have continued to build that the White House is seriously working on developing a triangular grand bargain with Israel and Saudi Arabia that would dramatically reshape Middle Eastern strategic and political realities. Additional reporting by The Wall Street Journaland The Washington Post confirmed that recent trips to Saudi Arabia by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and White House Middle East policy chief Brett McGurk involved detailed conversations about possible terms, with The Wall Street Journal reporting that U.S. officials expressed “cautious optimism” that details could be worked out “in the next nine to 12 months.”

However, despite that note of optimism, there is widespread skepticism regarding the prospects for such an agreement. In an August 3 AGSIW webinar, Friedman agreed that doubts are fully justified that an agreement along these lines can be completed at all, let alone before the White House is fully engulfed in President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s reelection campaign. And the White House has been emphasizing that talks are at an early stage and not as advanced as some reports have implied. In return for normalizing relations with Israel, Saudi Arabia is seeking formal U.S. security guarantees, assistance with a civilian nuclear program, and access to more sophisticated U.S. weapons as well as significant concessions toward the Palestinians in the occupied territories. The obstacles to such a momentous and complex three-way deal are significant, despite the massive potential benefits to all three parties.

Obstacles on the Saudi Side

Saudi Arabia faces a much more complex and riskier set of calculations in normalizing relations with Israel than its Gulf Cooperation Council allies, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, did when they signed the Abraham Accords in September 2020. In addition to far more intricate and brittle domestic politics and a potential backlash at home against any such agreement, as the Abraham Accords have been growing more unpopular in the Arab world according to recent surveys, Riyadh must also carefully weigh possible negative impacts on its Arab regional and global Islamic leadership roles. Saudi Arabia’s adversaries, such as Iran and its network of armed militia groups in neighboring Arab countries, led by Hezbollah in Lebanon, or Salafist-jihadist groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in the Iraq and the Levant, would likely take maximum advantage of the ensuing populist dismay among some Arabs and Muslims.

However, Saudi enthusiasm for a formal security relationship with the United States, with guarantees that might be stronger than those afforded major non-NATO allies but not fully equal to the commitments Washington offers its NATO partners, probably makes Saudi Arabia the least problematic of the three potential partners. Indeed, if the guarantees were strong and formal enough, it’s possible they would prove sufficient to overcome any lack of progress on the other two big Saudi asks of Washington on nuclear assistance and a more streamlined process of obtaining the most advanced U.S. weapons. Both issues present challenges on the U.S. side, but if security assurances are sufficiently robust, Saudi Arabia might prove flexible on nuclear support and access to sophisticated weaponry.

However, Saudi Arabia has made it clear in recent years that it will not normalize relations with Israel absent some significant, but unspecified, movement by the Israelis to bolster prospects for a two-state solution, such as strengthening the Palestinian Authority and expanding areas under its control, limiting settlement activity, or committing not to annex any additional occupied Palestinian lands. But such steps may be extremely difficult for the United States and Saudi Arabia to secure from the current Israeli government.

Obstacles on the U.S. Side

The biggest challenge in Washington probably resides in the Senate, which, depending on the scope, would likely need to approve the formal security partnership Saudi Arabia is seeking. Significant opposition can be expected from the progressive left among Democrats and the hard-right Republican faction, both of which harbor strong neo-isolationist impulses. Although approval will not be required by the House of Representatives, in which both tendencies are well represented, passage in that body would be far harder. However, the Senate remains dominated by both left- and right-wing foreign policy centrists, many, like Biden, harboring views shaped by the Cold War.

Presented with an agreement that greatly strengthens Washington’s hand in the Middle East and ties to Saudi Arabia, coupled with Riyadh normalizing relations with Israel, passage in the Senate is likely. Indeed, once senators have protected themselves politically by expressing some reservations, even a super-majority ought to be attainable. This is assuming that the Biden administration makes an all-out effort to rally Democratic support and makes the case that such an agreement would enormously strengthen the strategic posture of the United States and its partners and constitute a significant blow to Iran’s short-term and China’s long-term ambitions in the Middle East.

The bigger question in the Senate would probably center on support for a Saudi civilian nuclear program. Washington is used to demanding a “123” agreement, which goes far beyond the strictures of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, to provide such support to nonnuclear powers. Critics of any deviation from this norm when it comes to Saudi Arabia will point out that the UAE agreed to such restrictions in 2009. However, this kind of arrangement makes little sense when it comes to Saudi nuclear development.

Uniquely among nonnuclear powers that seek to develop civilian nuclear energy production on a large scale for economic reasons, Saudi Arabia possesses and intends to mine its own uranium. Under a 123 process, it would have to essentially mine that uranium, export it to be processed into usable rods, reimport the rods for use in Saudi reactors, and then export the spent rods again for disposal. This wouldn’t be profitable and makes little sense from a Saudi perspective. Therefore, a modified arrangement involving oversight, but not the pinball-style movement of Saudi raw and enriched uranium or spent rods, is more reasonable. This might be a hard sell in the Senate because of the normative expectation of 123 agreements and suspicions about Saudi Arabia’s supposed nuclear weapons ambitions. Riyadh will therefore likely have to make significant concessions on oversight and other restrictions and commit never to develop its own nuclear weapons program as long as the security agreement with Washington remains in effect. Israel’s views on how far the United States should go to satisfy Saudi demands for help with its nuclear program are also likely to be pivotal.

A similar dynamic might play out in the Senate regarding Saudi access to advanced U.S. weapons. Recent objections have largely been based on the Yemen war, though Saudi Arabia is now seeking a viable exit from the country. Some senators will certainly register objections to Saudi Arabia’s human rights record and the 2018 assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, but the logic of the deal, which rests so heavily on U.S.-Saudi security cooperation, means that the weapons component would likely be overwhelmingly approved by the Senate, especially with the strong support of Israel and its Jewish American and evangelical Christian backers.

Obstacles on the Israeli Side

By far the biggest obstacle lies on the Israeli side. The conundrum facing Washington and Riyadh is that such an agreement only makes sense, particularly from the U.S. perspective, in a triangular form. A bilateral U.S.-Saudi security treaty would be prohibitively difficult to achieve in Washington politically and wouldn’t provide the transformational, generationally locked-in strengthening of the U.S. strategic position that a trilateral agreement would.

In the abstract, Israel faces the lightest lift of all three. All it will likely be asked for is to come somewhat more in line with international law and United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding the occupied Palestinian territories. It won’t be expected to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians or end the occupation, merely to rein in settlement activity – which is prohibited by international law – or commit not to engage in additional unlawful annexation of territory. In addition, Israel, arguably, has the most to gain. This would be the biggest diplomatic breakthrough at least since the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, and arguably in Israeli history since admission to the U.N. General Assembly, because the normalization of ties with Saudi Arabia would virtually guarantee the eventual diplomatic and commercial normalization of Israel’s relations with the broader Arab and Islamic worlds.

However, the current Israeli Cabinet, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his largely pro-annexation Likud and several smaller extremist parties, seems unlikely to offer significant concessions on the occupation or toward Palestinians. Some senior Israeli officials have said that any potential moves on the occupation would be minimal and others have suggested that they are flatly out of the question. In a Wall Street Journal commentaryadvocating for a U.S.-Saudi security agreement similar to the one Washington maintains with South Korea, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen did not mention the Palestinians or the occupation at all.

Friedman has repeatedly emphasized that one of the main reasons he is enthusiastic about this initiative, though unpersuaded of its prospects, is that it would rupture the current extremist Israeli government as well as maintain dwindling prospects for a two-state agreement. It does seem impossible that the current coalition would be able to make whatever concessions Saudi Arabia would demand on the occupation or Palestinians. The hope is that Netanyahu would eventually form a new Cabinet, possibly in an alliance with centrist politician Benny Gantz.

However, Netanyahu still faces a corruption trial, and his current coalition is committed to so-called judicial reform initiatives that could protect him from potential imprisonment. Such judicial changes would almost certainly not be feasible with a new, more moderate Cabinet. He therefore faces personal as well as political considerations that might restrain such a maneuver even if he concludes that this agreement is viable, reasonable, and a vital national interest. Yet it is by no means certain an alternative coalition without the stridently extremist small parties would produce a government capable of making meaningful concessions to what many Israelis see as an adversary, the Palestinians, with no practical leverage over Israel. Would national morale in today’s Israel sustain any major restrictions on the country’s ambitions in much of the occupied West Bank? It’s questionable that there is any potential governing coalition in the Knesset that would be ready, able, and willing to do that, even to secure one of the most significant diplomatic achievements in the country’s history.

Yet, the security guarantees that Riyadh seeks and strategic benefits that Washington wants both practically depend on Israeli flexibility toward the Palestinians and occupation where none may exist under any practicable governing coalition. Such an agreement is not impossible because, as Friedman noted in his July 27 column, it would be massively beneficial to all three parties. These benefits provide the initiative significant momentum and explain the Biden administration’s bold leap into the dark grasping for it. The biggest question isn’t in Riyadh or Washington. It is undoubtedly in Israel, which may have reached the stage of annexationist ambitions leaving it, at long last, flatly incapable of taking yes for an answer, even from the most influential Arab and Muslim country.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/08/07/can-prosecutors-prove-trump-knowingly-lied/

Even if Trump has convinced himself he won the 2020 election, intentional ignorance of verified facts isn’t and must not be a viable legal defence.

“You’re too honest!” then-US president Donald Trump thundered at his vice president on January 1, 2021. Mike Pence had just flatly rebuffed demands that he abuse his ceremonial role in Congress on January 6 to unlawfully reject certified votes and, as he recently explained, “essentially overturn the election” of Joe Biden.

That stunning quote leaps out of the August 1 indictment by special prosecutor Jack Smith charging Mr Trump with a failed conspiracy against the US constitutional system.

Mr Trump and six unnamed (though easily identified) and as-yet unindicted co-conspirators stand accused of a complex multi-stage plot to keep him in power despite his election defeat. The indictment outlines four charges: two related to a broad conspiracy to defraud the US through numerous schemes to undo the election; attempting to disrupt the official proceeding in Congress on January 6 to confirm the results; and conspiring to defraud citizens of their voting rights by overturning that outcome.

The indictment suggests a mountain of additional and underlying evidence. It is summarised in a key sentence: “The purpose of the conspiracy was to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by using knowingly false claims of election fraud to obstruct the federal government function by which those results are collected, counted, and certified.”

When he was arraigned in court in Washington on Thursday, Mr Trump appeared more subdued than ever. He is reportedly angered and alarmed in private, although aggressively defiant and energetically fundraising from the new charges in public. He already faces criminal trials for fraudulent business records in Manhattan and stealing government documents in Florida.

The Trump camp is outraged that these once-unthinkable charges of a presidential effort to destroy the US constitutional order for personal political benefits have been brought in Washington, a notably liberal, overwhelmingly Democratic, 44 percent African-American, and distinctly Trump-unfriendly city.

Mr Smith was plainly thinking ahead. He filed the documents case in the Trump-friendly federal district of southern Florida, because, he explained to upset liberals, the alleged offences had occurred there. Neither side objected, despite the obvious advantage that gave to Mr Trump. The same logic now leads squarely to the new, and far more consequential, charges being filed in Washington where, again, the alleged offences took place.

Mr Trump’s attorneys will undoubtedly demand a change of venue, but Mr Smith may have outmanoeuvred them already, using the Florida documents case to secure a Washington venue for the coup plot trial.

There’s an additional symmetry. Federal judges are randomly assigned from pools in given districts. In the documents case, Mr Trump again drew one of his own nominees, the inexperienced but highly conservative Aileen Cannon. Many liberals feared that she would again issue bewildering rulings in his favour, though she hasn’t repeated her earlier biases yet.

Now Trump supporters are fuming that Tanya Chutkan – a highly experienced liberal judge and black female Jamaican immigrant (some might call that Mr Trump’s worst nightmare) – will preside over his Washington trial. A Barack Obama nominee, she has already handed down stiff sentences against January 6 insurrectionists.

It makes little sense to approve of Judge Cannon and a Florida venue in one case and object to Judge Chutkan and a Washington venue in another, when precisely the same logic and processes produced both results.

By shrewdly charging Mr Trump alone, Mr Smith has acted on the national imperative of holding the trial before the 2024 presidential election, with Mr Trump overwhelmingly favoured to be the Republican nominee. Voters have every right to observe this unprecedented trial of a former president who allegedly sought to overturn the constitutional system to remain in power, and learn the outcome, before deciding Mr Trump’s political fate.

Conversely, Mr Trump will certainly seek to delay proceedings as much as possible. With additional defendants, there would be little chance it could proceed rapidly. But with just one man on trial, if Judge Chutkan and Mr Smith both believe the public interest demands an outcome before the election, that could and should happen.

As with most non-violent white-collar cases, conviction might, but shouldn’t, hinge on Mr Trump’s state of mind at the time. His lawyers have signalled that their defence will centre on assertions he sincerely believed the election was stolen from him and was acting in good faith.

This defence is much weaker than many experts surmise.

There is ample evidence that Mr Trump privately understood that he lost. But even if he ultimately somehow managed to convince himself that he won, US law does not allow wilful ignorance to eliminate criminal intent.

His former attorney general, William Barr, has described how Mr Trump dismissed verified facts from his own officials, and sought any argument, no matter how outlandish, that the election was stolen. He privately described allegations by “co-conspirator 3”, attorney Sidney Powell, as sounding “crazy”, but promoted her crackpot theories in public.

US law provides a potent rebuttal to such a defence. If a defendant wilfully avoided learning of a fact, or deliberately convinced himself of an obvious falsehood despite known facts, criminal intent can be inferred.

His supporters filed more than 60 lawsuits challenging the election. All failed miserably. As “co-conspirator 1”, attorney Rudolph Giuliani, told an Arizona official: “We’ve got lots of theories. We just don’t have the evidence.” They didn’t and never will.

Mr Trump will also argue he was merely following the advice of lawyers (many of the unnamed co-conspirators). In fact, he rejected the advice of almost all legal officials within his administration and campaign attorneys to accept defeat, instead embracing the few who told him what he wanted to hear.

Mr Trump realised he lost. Even if he eventually convinced himself he won, intentional ignorance of objectively verified and known facts isn’t a viable defence. No belief justifies conspiracies to defraud the US, deprive citizens of voting rights, or obstruct an official proceeding. If prosecutors can show he did those things, even a good faith belief that the election was stolen can’t excuse them.

The whole saga is perfectly encapsulated in Mr Trump’s telling outburst at Mr Pence: “You’re too honest!” Too honest for what? Unfortunately for Mr Trump, this inescapable question answers itself.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/08/01/trump-is-leading-the-us-republican-front-despite-tim-scotts-popularity/

Tim Scott may be a rising star, but Trump’s infamous claim he could ‘shoot someone’ and still hold the base is evidently true.

It’s five months before voting begins in party primaries for the 2024 US presidential election, but both races are starting to look decidedly over. No remotely serious Democrat challenging US President Joe Biden, and former president Donald Trump appears increasingly unbeatable among Republicans. That’s great news for Mr Biden.

The plot has thickened somewhat lower down in Republican ranks, with Florida governor Ron DeSantis stumbling, dropping in important state polls including first-to-vote Iowa, and abandoned by major donors. Rising is South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, the only prominent African-American Republican.

Mr Scott has gained quiet support among establishment leaders and has proven a fundraising tornado, gathering over $21 million in this year’s second quarter. But a New York Times investigation revealed a whopping six million of those dollars were dispensed without meaningful reporting to recently established companies without any known history or leadership.

Between April 1 and June 30, his campaign paid a pop-up company with no online presence or other clients $4.3 million for vague services. The identity of its only purported representative, “Barry M Benjamin,” couldn’t be established by the Times or other media. Mr Benjamin was also the only reputed official of another company that received almost $1 million from the Scott campaign.

Mr Scott is using a practice pioneered by Mr Trump and his family members in 2016 and, especially, 2020, of funnelling donations into pop-up companies for practically unspecified services. The government watchdog organisation that is supposed to police campaign financing, the Federal Election Commission, seems permanently deadlocked in a partisan stalemate, and has been unable and unwilling to act against this growing form of corruption, especially on the Republican side (although Democrats will probably eventually follow suit). So, Mr Scott is likely to get away with it.

This level of wealthy and quiet establishment support reflects Mr Scott’s potential viability as a general election candidate. He’s almost tailor-made for the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan and George W Bush: a relentlessly upbeat and cheerful African-American campaigner who insists his own success is proof the US has overcome its racist past, relatively youthful at 57, a hard-core Christian fundamentalist, and a small-government conservative with libertarian leanings. But in 2023, such a candidate probably doesn’t stand a chance.

The biggest question is whether the rising star is really hoping to overtake Mr Trump, position himself for 2028 or, as most pundits argue, angle to be Mr Trump’s vice-presidential nominee.

Mr DeSantis is still polling second to Mr Trump nationally, but a recent New York Times/Siena College poll found the former president not only commanding a vast 37-point lead over the Florida governor, but also beating the combined field of all other candidates with ease. His support cuts across all demographic, ideological and regional groups, and appears to represent something like a consensus among Republican voters.

It’s almost too late for any credible Democrat to create a viable campaign to challenge Mr Biden. Given the recent poll numbers, which aren’t out of sync with most other surveys, Mr Trump may similarly have the Republican nomination virtually wrapped up.

Barring unforeseeable circumstances, 2023 could prove the earliest moment in modern US political history that the presidential nominees of both parties emerged in such a clearly obvious fashion, possibly with no real fight on either side.

Mr Trump’s legal woes could theoretically convince enough Republicans to abandon him, but why would they suddenly change their minds given what is already established? One possible, albeit unlikely, answer could lie in the superseding indictment filed by special prosecutor Jack Smith in the purloined documents case.

The new charges purportedly tell a stunning saga of bungled criminality. They massively raise the stakes in this looming trial set to begin in May next year, while introducing a new character and third defendant, Carlos De Oliveira, property manager at Mr Trump’s Florida hotel, to the drama.

According to the updated indictment, Mr De Oliveira worked closely with Mr Trump’s original co-defendant, Walt Nauta, in the former president’s crude attempts to hide purloined documents from the FBI and his own attorney, Evan Corcoran. The original indictment outlined how Mr Nauta allegedly moved boxes of documents around the property so Mr Trump could remove whatever he wanted to surreptitiously and unlawfully keep before a scheduled search by Mr Corcoran on June 2, 2022.

After his search, Mr Corcoran gave the FBI 38 classified documents along with an untruthful affidavit signed by another Trump attorney, Christina Bobb, falsely attesting that no additional documents remained un-surrendered.

The plot fell to pieces when, on June 23, prosecutors told Mr Trump’s attorneys they had learnt of extensive security camera footage they were preparing to subpoena.

Mr Trump and his two subordinates then attempted to get the footage, which they knew would record how and when documents were hidden from the FBI and Mr Corcoran, erased in an absurd series of slapstick misadventures and inane pratfalls.

The pilfered documents trial may well hinge on whether prosecutors can prove these new allegations. If so, they would incontrovertibly establish the most straightforward form of obstruction of justice imaginable: a conspiracy to destroy and hence conceal key evidence. If the government shows that “the boss” indeed ordered his minions to erase the footage, perhaps with Mr De Oliveira testifying against him, Mr Trump will surely be convicted of numerous serious felonies.

However, if the government fails, these explosive new allegations may become a textbook example of the backfiring perils of overcharging. If jurors conclude the government was overstretching on the most disturbing allegations, they may disregard the whole case and acquit everyone.

Astonishingly, it doesn’t appear that any of this alleged criminality is, or could be, capable of seriously eroding Mr Trump’s astonishing popularity among Republicans of literally every variety. When he boasted in 2016 that he could “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue” and not lose base supporters he was, amazingly enough, not exaggerating at all.

This may all be very bad for the country, but it’s very good for Mr Biden. Even his biggest worry, inflation, appears to be unexpectedly quickly coming under control. Mr Scott could give the ageing President a tough battle for the White House. Even the 44-year-old Mr DeSantis might pose a tricky challenge. But, despite Mr Trump’s overwhelming popularity among Republicans, and the number of Americans who will vote for whomever their party nominates, the almost equally elderly former president is looking increasingly like the ideal opponent for Mr Biden

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/06/28/us-iran-nuclear-deal-talks/

An informal nuclear agreement will keep in check the likely drift towards war.

Over recent weeks it became increasingly evident that Iran has shifted its policy and once again became open to serious nuclear negotiations with the US. Reports suggest a limited informal or unwritten understanding is being developed through indirect negotiations in Oman. Despite the hand-wringing by critics on all sides, that’s definitely good news.

Confidence between the parties has grown such that, through carefully orchestrated leaks by diplomats, the basic outlines of a potential arrangement have been widely reported by the media.

The understandings begin with the long overdue release of three dual US-Iranian citizens imprisoned in Iran that Washington and much of the world consider hostages in exchange for the release of restricted Iranian funds. The US has allowed Iraq to pay Iran $3 billion for gas and electricity purchases, and South Korea $7 billion for Iranian oil already received. Both payments are limited to humanitarian purposes, specifically purchasing food and medicine. South Korean banks will receive indemnification assurances from the US Treasury Department that sanctions will not be triggered when they transfer these funds. The three prisoners may therefore be released in the near future.

Iran will reportedly limit uranium enrichment to 60 per cent, with 90 per cent considered weapons-grade. Although there are concerns Iran could potentially weaponise the enriched uranium it has already stockpiled, 60 is obviously far better than 90. In exchange, the Biden administration will commit to not imposing new sanctions on Tehran and to providing additional waivers on payments up to a total of about $2 billion, all targeted for humanitarian purposes.

Critics of the 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and the Barack Obama administration, especially some staunch supporters of Israel, are outraged. The usual suspects have already been chanting their usual refrain of “pallets of cash, pallets of cash,” echoing Long John Silver’s parrot constant squawks of “pieces of eight, pieces of eight” in the classic novel, Treasure Island.

In truth, the Obama administration never delivered “pallets of cash” to Iran in return for the nuclear deal or anything else, and the Biden administration isn’t doing that either. It is releasing Iranian money that has been withheld as leverage precisely for purposes such as achieving a diplomatic breakthrough like this, no matter how limited.

Money, like oil, is fungible, so the restrictions to humanitarian purposes may be somewhat coy. Arguably, it still frees Iranian assets up for other uses, including military and nuclear ones. However, it is by no means certain that the Iranian regime would voluntarily be spending such funds on food and medicine. So, the payments could just as easily provide otherwise non-existent relief to innocents.

The crucial point is that such concessions are well worth the risks if such a limited, and even informal or unwritten, understanding can provide a real breakthrough. The revival of a functional dialogue between Washington and Tehran that begins to chip away at the mountainous edifice of distrust that has formed since the US withdrawal from the nuclear deal is absolutely indispensable.

That disastrous withdrawal is especially significant because these developments are unfolding in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, which could well feature a rematch between Mr Biden – who served as Mr Obama’s vice president during the implementation of the defunct nuclear agreement – and his presidential predecessor Donald Trump, who scrapped the nuclear deal in favour of a campaign of “maximum pressure”.

Those sanctions perhaps limited Iran’s ability to fund the malignant activities of its network of armed gangs in neighbouring Arab countries, but they did nothing to mitigate its aggressive policies.

On the contrary, after about a year of trying to weather the sanctions, Tehran decided to strike back with its own campaign of “maximum resistance”, which involved a series of nefarious but deniable “grey zone” attacks against shipping and other targets in the Gulf. That culminated in the September 2019 attack on Saudi Aramco facilities that significantly reduced Saudi oil production for several days and rocked global petroleum markets. Meanwhile, Iran’s economy survived “maximum” sanctions, defanging what had long been a potent threat.

Republicans in Congress will be demanding oversight of anything discussed with Iran to prevent Mr Biden from achieving a crucial, albeit limited, diplomatic breakthrough and begin to repair the colossal damage done by Mr Trump’s error. They are counting on the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, which provides a limited role for Congress in overseeing nuclear agreements with Iran.

However, the Act places no restrictions on presidential waivers of sanctions, does not require that Congress is informed of all details of every understanding, or even agreement, with Iran, does not provide a means for Congress to re-impose sanctions, and does not mandate a timeline or process for congressional review of whatever is submitted by the White House.

On the other hand, the president has the authority to conduct the foreign policy of the US, and both the language of the 2015 Act and the history of US policymaking and implementation suggest Mr Biden has great leeway when it comes to limited agreements and understandings with Iran, regardless of congressional heckling and grandstanding.

Mr Trump will claim that he had the situation entirely under control when he was president, especially after he withdrew from the nuclear agreement, and that Iran was about to fully capitulate to him. But that will be just another outrageous lie from a compulsive fabricator.

In reality, his policies infuriated Iran, but gained little for the US and its regional partners. Instead, they left a legacy of instability and peril. Hence the resumption of dialogue and diplomatic relations with Iran by key Gulf countries. Even when it comes to an apparently implacable adversary as Iran, international relations are very rarely reducible to a zero-sum equation.

Critics will be right that this potential limited understanding will resolve nothing. But it will come at an equally small cost. The real value lies beyond its specific terms. Successful indirect negotiations that produce reciprocal concessions on both sides are an indispensable prerequisite for taking the next step forward – if possible – with Iran regarding its nuclear programme and other egregious, unacceptable conduct.

Without a functional dialogue that can produce results, however limited, for both sides, the drift towards a ruinous and catastrophic war that will benefit no one will remain dangerously unchecked.