Trump’s Indictment Is Not Our Only Big Problem – The American Spectator

The only thing left unsaid about Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Donald Trump is that it’s almost certainly not the only indictment that will be issued against Trump before the 2024 election.

A Georgia grand jury’s report — which has remained sealed since it was issued in late February — recommended indictments against several people, almost certainly including Trump, for illegal interference in the Georgia 2020 election. Now that Bragg’s indictment has broken the ice, the Georgia indictments will probably follow quickly.

With all that legal melodrama, we need to take our eyes away from Trump’s legal woes for at least a moment. Important as it is, there is so much else going on that is as important and is damaging our legal justice system, our economy, and our national security.

As former Attorney General Bill Barr said, the indictment against Trump is abhorrent. But it is not an aberration in these times of President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland.

During the time between the May 2, 2022, leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the time when the opinion was published on June 24, there were several attempts to intimidate the justices. These included demonstrations outside the homes of individual justices whose addresses had been published by the “Ruth Sent Us” radical pro-abortion group. There was an attempt to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh in his home.

And now we’ve learned that the U.S. marshals, whose duty it is to protect the justices, were told they shouldn’t arrest people demonstrating outside the justices’ homes. As the Washington Times reported last week, deputy U.S. marshals were told “not to make arrests,” according to internal Justice Department documents Garland was asked about in a Senate hearing.

Earlier in March, Garland said the marshals didn’t make arrests because they didn’t believe them to be appropriate. The documents show he lied. Again.

Under Title 18 U.S. Code Section 1503, the demonstrators could have been charged with obstruction of justice. Directly on point, Title 18 Section 1507 specifically prohibits anyone from protesting outside a judge’s home with the intent to intimidate the judge.

That is precisely what the “Ruth Sent Us” gang and others were attempting to do between the time the Dobbs opinion was leaked and when it was finally published.

Arrests should have been made and cases prosecuted. Why weren’t they? Because Garland thought the pressures on the justices were just fine because the justices were voting against Biden’s — and Garland’s — political agenda.

That and the Trump indictment(s) are perversions of our legal system. They cannot be tolerated. The only way to prevent future abuses is to vote out Biden and his whole crowd.

We’re still living with the inflation Biden has created through his wild overspending of federal money. Inflation is defined as “too much money chasing too few goods” and services. That’s why the Federal Reserve is increasing interest rates to control inflation. And that’s why banks are failing, because they bought bonds at low interest rates, which are now almost valueless with the interest rate hikes.

The U.S. dollar has been the reserve currency of choice at least since the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement. A reserve currency is one that countries choose for its stability and keep millions or billions in their own banks as a hedge against their own currencies becoming devalued.

According to the International Monetary Fund, in the fourth quarter of 2022, there was about $6.4 trillion held by various countries. China is the biggest holder with about $3.5 trillion.

Xi Jinping’s China has, for at least a decade, aggressively sought to replace the dollar with the Chinese yuan as a reserve currency and the currency most used in global trade. It is gradually succeeding. Last week, Brazil, now governed by hard-leftist leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, agreed to use the yuan instead of the dollar for trading purposes.

Why do we care? Because if the dollar is not the chosen reserve currency, a country’s reserves in dollars are dumped into the market pretty rapidly. That means there are still more dollars chasing no greater quantity of goods and services. That means more U.S. inflation and a roughly proportional devaluing of the dollar.

The more nations China convinces to trade in and reserve in yuan, the more they will dump dollars, and the more U.S. inflation will grow.

Biden is still refusing to negotiate spending cuts in return for an increase in the U.S. debt ceiling. Were he a competent president, he’d be searching for every way to spend less and thus maintain the value of the dollar here and abroad. Of course, he won’t do that. He and his Pentagon crew are too busy finding more ways to politicize — and weaken — our military.

Last week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was asked by House Armed Services Committee member Jim Banks (R-Ind.) whether, like Marine Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. (who commanded U.S. Central Command at the time of the Afghanistan withdrawal), he had any regrets about how the withdrawal was conducted.

Austin said he had no regrets. This despite the hundreds of U.S. citizens left behind, not to mention the $7 billion or so in weapons, vehicles, and equipment abandoned to the Taliban. Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted last week that some U.S. citizens are still being held by the Taliban 19 months after the withdrawal debacle.

Austin is a nonentity, a political puppet of the White House. The latest evidence of that also was revealed last week.

Under Republican pressure, the Pentagon said its Department of Defense Education Activity — which is responsible for the schools for children on U.S. bases — was disbanding its “diversity, equity and inclusion” unit after its director was shown to have anti-white racial bias. But that’s not the end of the story.

The Pentagon announced that the department’s personnel would be reassigned to other units. Perhaps they will, like the Soviet Union did, assign political officers to every military unit. It’s entirely possible that the Biden Pentagon will do just that.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced he was calling up another 147,000 troops to reinforce his invasion of Ukraine. And he’s moved tactical nuclear weapons into Belarus, Ukraine’s northern neighbor. Those announcements bestirred nary a peep from the White House despite the fact that they portend a larger, longer war.

The indictment of Trump is being used as a shiny object to distract us from Biden and the Democrats’ other disastrous conduct. The indictment, as important as it is, doesn’t mean we can ignore everything else Biden is doing to weaken our nation.

READ MORE:

Putin’s Nuclear Itch

Woke Indoctrination Is Destroying the Military

Biden Must Own Inflation and High Interest Rates