Trump’s indictment marks a historic reckoning

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Literally unprecedented The impeachment against Donald Trump is an absolutely dangerous — and politically fraught — moment for the United States and serves as a reminder of the unprecedented level of criminality and conspiracy surrounding the 2016 election.

It’s easy to look back on the 2016 election and see the outcome as inevitable — Hillary Clinton was so weak as a candidate that years of high-priced rhetoric cost her her connection with working-class voters in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. That “but her emails” and Jim Comey’s repeated, inappropriate and flawed election meddling turned the tide. But Trump’s new impeachment is an important historical correction, a moment that clearly shows how America as a nation must count Trump’s unexpected victory not as one, but as an accessory. two A separate criminal conspiracy.

In the year In the final push of the 2016 race, in which the election came down to narrow victories in three states — 10,704 voters in Michigan, 46,765 in Pennsylvania and 22,177 in Wisconsin — and where Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million votes, he was aided by the vast and extensive Russian government operation. That effort was funded in part by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the oligarch behind the Wagner Group’s mercenary army in Ukraine, which has targeted American social media companies and activists on the ground. According to a comprehensive report released by the US Department of Justice, Part Two of the Russian operation, the military intelligence service GRU hacked into top Democratic officials, leaked their emails, and changed the national narrative around Clinton and other Democrats. (Not forgetting that this gave rise to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and, arguably, QAnon.)

And then there was the separate criminal conspiracy that is the subject of today’s new New York indictment: the conspiracy by the Trump campaign in the final weeks of 2016, involving Trump family activist Michael Cohen and the National Enquirer To pay hush money to bury the stories of the two nominees, including porn star Stormy Daniels.

While news of this kind of affair seems to end up being a no-brainer in the final weeks of the campaign, it’s worth remembering the unique context in which Cohen and the Trump orbit faced each other in those final hours of the campaign. They were performing a delicate and knife-edge balancing act to capture support from conservatives and evangelicals at the devastating event. Access to Hollywood Tape, the moment Vice Presidential nominee Mike Pence himself considered throwing in the towel. Pursuing stories that aren’t family-values-friendly can be a spiral of no return. (It’s worth remembering the still dubious connection between these two threads, how one Friday in October 2016, US intelligence chiefs publicly announced for the first time that Russia was behind the election meddling. The Washington Post He took the existence of immorality Access to Hollywood tape, and hours later, WikiLeaks began releasing newly stolen emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.)

The new criminal indictment filed by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in connection with the second Stormy Daniels conspiracy recalls the U.S. Justice Department’s historic mistake in not pursuing its own indictment against Trump in the same case. It was a mind-boggling abdication that the Justice Department—in the middle of Donald Trump’s presidency, no less!—indicted Cohen in a similar conspiracy, calling Trump “Individual 1” of the charges against Cohen. Elie Honig’s new book reveals Trump’s personal direction and involvement in the affair in a sketchy indictment.

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