Donald Trump’s efforts to politicize the law enforcement system have now become his shield as he tries to deflect accusations of wrongdoing, as he claims he is a victim of tactics he once deployed.
Two days after the 2020 election that Trump refused to admit he lost, his oldest son Donald Trump Jr. made an urgent recommendation: “Fire Wray.”
Donald Trump Jr. did not explain in the text why FBI director Christopher Wray needed to be thrown out, someone who his father had appointed more than three years before. He did not need to explain. Everyone understood that Wray, in the view of the Trump family and its hardcore followers, was not personally loyal enough to Trump.
In his four years at the White House, Trump tried to turn the law enforcement apparatus into his own personal instrument of political power, existing to carry out his demands and wildest wishes.
Now as the FBI under Wray has executed an unprecedented search warrant at Trump’s Florida estate Mar-a-Lago, Trump is accusing the nation’s justice system of being exactly what he wanted it to be: a political weapon for a president.
There is absolutely no evidence that the current president Joe Biden had any role whatsoever in the investigation into Trump’s Florida home. Biden did not public demand that Trump should be locked up, as Trump demanded Biden and other Democrats be. Nor has anyone contradicted the White House statement that it was not informed about the search before it happened, much less involved in ordering the search.
But Trump has a long, long history of accusing adversaries of doing what he has done or would do if the tables were turned.
Trump’s broad efforts to politicize the law enforcement system have now become his shield to deflect accusations of wrongdoing.
Just as Trump asserted that the FBI search was political persecution, he made the same claim about the New York attorney general’s unrelated investigation into his business practices, invoking the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying.
Experts said that Trump is flipping the script and falsely claiming he’s a victim of the exact tactics he deployed before, making it the “rankest hypocrisy.”
“Consistency, logic, evidence, truth — those are always the first to go by the board when a democracy comes under assault from within,” said Norman Eisen, who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment.
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