Just in time to give the Democrats’ January 6 Select Committee some more “evidence” to work with, the Department of Justice has released documents that allegedly show how former President Donald Trump pressed DOJ officials to challenge the results of the 2020 election. Democrats only ever had one strategy for trying to discredit Trump. It is painfully transparent, entirely dishonest, and it is evident, once again, in this latest attack.
The media has focused on handwritten notes made of a telephone conversation between then-President Trump and Jeffrey Rosen, who was at the time the acting attorney general. These notes were taken by Richard Donoghue, Rosen’s deputy, who apparently was on the call with his boss and Mr. Trump. Allegedly, the president told Rosen, “Just say that the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me.”
Democrats and their cadre of reporters have framed this as the 45th president ordering the Justice Department to overturn the election result. This is how the Trump attack strategy works; reinterpret what was said, frame the alleged misdeed, and then have the media repeat it ad nauseam. On July 30, House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney said the notes show the then-president “directly instructed our nation’s top law enforcement agency to take steps to overturn a free and fair election.”
If Donoghue’s notes are accurate, though, Trump did no such thing. One can only speculate as to what the president meant when he said “leave the rest to me,” but asking the DOJ to put out a statement that the election was “corrupt” is in no way the same as directing the department to nullify the result – something it had no authority to do, anyway.
This practice of taking Trump’s words entirely out of context and using them against him has been the aforementioned strategy, used time and time again by Democrats against the president whose personal destruction was for four years their only goal.
Trump was impeached in the House of Representatives – the first time – for a phone call he made to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. During the call, Trump suggested to Zelensky that he should investigate a web of corruption in his own country; a web that allegedly stretched as far as Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Democrats re-engineered the transcript of that phone call and packaged it to the American people as an attempt by Trump at coercing the Ukrainian leader into providing him with compromising information he could use against Joe Biden.
Donald Trump
Trump’s second impeachment was based upon the same strategy. While addressing his supporters in Washington, D.C. on January 6, the president told them they would have to “fight like hell” or lose their country. Completely disregarding the fact that countless politicians, at one time or another, have urged their supporters to “fight,” the Democratic Party’s impeachment managers portrayed this one particular occasion as a literal call to arms.
Another example of this disingenuous tactic was on display back in 2016, during the presidential campaign. On at least one occasion in speeches to his supporters, Trump jokingly suggested that perhaps the Russians would be able to find Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. At the time, he was accused by Democrats of directly calling on the Russians to obtain and disclose the said emails. It is quite possible, of course, that Vladimir Putin’s intelligence officials already had copies of them, but that is beside the point. Trump’s words were deliberately twisted out of context and then presented in an entirely different light.
As usual, the media is going along with the Democrats’ subterfuge. A July 31 article in Newsweek, for example, carried the title “Trump Says He Didn’t Ask DOJ to Call Election ‘Corrupt,’ Demands Voter Fraud Investigation.” It is true that the former president has indeed demanded a fraud investigation, but the Newsweek piece does not provide evidence that Mr. Trump denies asking the Justice Department to describe the election as “corrupt” – and that is because he has made no such denial.
When Trump’s political enemies once again claim the man said something he clearly did not say and the left-wing media is putting words that were never spoken into the former president’s mouth, it becomes obvious that this entire episode is nothing more than another case of political persecution.
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Read more from Graham J. Noble.
