Trump ruled out prosecuting Hillary: For him to do so would make U.S. look like ‘banana republic’

by WorldTribune Staff, April 5, 2023

As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton used an unsecure private email system to conduct top-secret public business. During the 2016 election campaign, Hillary paid to have Donald Trump falsely smeared as a traitor.

If anyone in American politics was going to be charged with multiple felonies, investigative journalists and others say, it would have been Hillary Clinton.

According to Bill Barr’s memoir, Donald Trump as president said he would not greenlight a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton.

“Did FBI agents ever show up at Hillary Clinton’s house over her clearly criminal and treasonous ‘documents dispute?’ ” asked The Federalist’s Joy Pullman.

“Nope. The FBI’s director instead essentially confirmed she had committed multiple felonies but decided not to investigate or prosecute her for it because she was a presidential candidate for a major political party.”

The Federalist’s Elle Purnell pointed out that, when Trump elicited chants of “lock her up” at his campaign rallies over Clinton’s never-penalized repeat criminal behavior, “Democrats lost their minds, and insisted this was the stuff of dictatorships, tyranny, and political repression.”

“Dictatorships lock up the opposition, not democracies,” said intelligence official Michael McFaul.

“Since when do Americans advocate jailing political opponents?” asked Julia Ioffe, then at Politico.

Barack Obama himself said in 2016: “In a democracy, you can’t threaten to jail your opponents. We have fought against those kinds of things.”

“In America, we don’t send our political opponents to jail,” tweeted an official Democratic National Committee Twitter account.

Of course, when they said “political opponents” they meant “Democrats.”

Still, Trump as president had the chance to prosecute Hillary, and decided not to pursue it.

Attorney General Bill Barr said “Trump brought up the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and surprised Barr by saying that he had wanted the matter to be dropped after the 2016 election,” according to a review of Barr’s memoir in the fall 2022 Claremont Review of Books.

“ ‘Even if she were guilty,’ he told Barr, for the election winner to seek prosecution of the loser would make the country look like a ‘banana republic.’ ”

Pullman noted: “Ever since riding down his golden escalator, Trump has been ceaselessly vilified as a tinpot dictator, an evil supervillain, an authoritarian, the second coming of Adolf Hitler. But Democrats cannot change the facts, which include that Trump had fully legitimate justification to prosecute his horribly corrupt political opponent and refused to do so. They can make no such argument for themselves.

“So if it is indeed the stuff of banana republics and ending democracies to jail one’s political opponents, let’s all be clear about which political party is dragging the nation down that route. And let all in authority who care about equal justice under the law begin fiercely applying Democrats’ standards to them until they stop perverting justice to destroy our country.”


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