Where is Hillary’s Indictment on the Same Charges as Trump?

By Daniel Greenfield August 14, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog  

On December 12, 2016 (or D12), the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign endorsed a call by Christine Pelosi, the daughter of then House Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi, as well as other electors to receive an “intelligence briefing” on how “Russian interference was performed to help Donald Trump get elected” from Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Hillary Clinton and her senior campaign officials were aware that they had concocted the lie that the Russians had gotten Trump elected, outsourced it to a former British intelligence operative, Christopher Steele, who produced the infamous Steele dossier, and distributed it through the FBI and were exploiting it to subvert the Electoral College and hijack the presidential election.

The Clinton campaign was endorsing a move to influence members of the Electoral College to set aside their duty and corrupt the electoral votes. Electors are bound to vote in accordance with the ballot count. There was no purpose to a “briefing” on the conspiracy theories that were manufactured by the Clinton campaign except to persuade them to corrupt the vote.

The Wall Street Journal correctly described the move as an “Electoral College Coup”. Pelosi’s daughter and other Democrat electors were requesting “a briefing on all investigative findings, as these matters directly impact the core factors in our deliberations of whether Mr. Trump is fit to serve as President of the United States.” And they were asking it from Clapper who would go around pushing the Steele dossier and defending its conspiracy theories as based on facts.

Clapper, using similar language to the Democrat electors, would describe Trump as unfit.

The Clinton campaign endorsed this proposed Electoral College coup by claiming that the “electors’ letter raises very grave issues involving our national security. Electors have a solemn responsibility under the Constitution and we support their efforts to have their questions addressed.”

The attempted coup was backed by the Clinton campaign, members of Congress and assorted celebrities from Michael Moore to Martin Sheen. An Atlantic article by anti-Israel activist Peter Beinart contended that “The Electoral College Was Meant to Stop Men Like Trump From Being President”. More seriously, House Democrats made the case for a coup and a power grab.

“I do think the Electoral College should choose someone other than Donald Trump to be president. That will lead to a fascinating legal issue, but I would rather have a legal issue, a complicated legal problem, than to find out the White House was now the Kremlin’s chief ally,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) argued.

The elector coup letter was signed by former Rep. Carol-Shea Porter, future New York State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, D.C. Councilwoman Anita Bonds and backed by many other Democrats. None of them have been treated like Trump’s alternate electors.

The faithless electors coup ultimately collapsed and has been largely forgotten. But the Trump indictment has made it relevant again.

The indictment of the former president by Clinton ally Jack Smith covers the same bases.

Smith has indicted Trump for, in his words, having “spread lies” and then engaging in a conspiracy to “obstruct” the “lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted and certified by the federal government.”

Rather than creating alternate slates of electors, Democrats set out to corrupt existing ones.

The Clinton campaign and Democrats spread lies that they knew were false about the 2016 election because they had invented them. The electoral college coup was an attempt to undermine the proper process by inciting faithless electors to choose Hillary over Trump. All of this was done through fraudulent efforts based on conspiracy theories to “create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger” that could be used to overturn an election.

The Clinton campaign and the Democrats were not just engaging in a “conspiracy against the right to vote” of individuals, but of large groups of people through a campaign to corrupt electors.

All of the ingredients that Jack Smith shaped into his indictment of Trump were there.

Back when the Clinton campaign and the Democrats were perpetrating this coup, no one had seriously given thought to criminalizing it. Dirty electoral politics aren’t actually illegal. If they were, nearly every other president before the 20th century would have been locked up.

Alexander Hamilton had proposed much more radical remedies in the 1800 election. Some elections, like that of 1876 and 1888, were simply stolen through various shenanigans. There’s a line between legal and illegal shenanigans. Voter fraud, for example, is illegal, while slates of alternate electors and faithless electors are an election issue for the courts to decide.

The decision by Jack Smith, following up on the work of the House Democrat J6 committee, to criminalize the disputing of elections is deeply dangerous and it also reopens the issue of Russiagate. Beyond the various illegal acts and abuses committed by the government in the pursuit of Russiagate, the proposed electoral coup and the ways in which the Clinton campaign utilized its fraudulent claims of Russian intervention, ought to trigger similar indictments.

Obviously Jack Smith, a Democrat operative, is not about to indict his former boss. But if Democrats want to criminalize election challenges, they should face the consequences. Especially since if they lose in 2024 they will try some of the same stunts all over again.

A system of double standards in which prosecutions and exonerations are based on political party, rather than the specific acts committed, is worthy only of a corrupt banana republic.

Laws cannot apply to only one political party.

Democrats claim that the exigent threats to democracy entitled them to call for an electoral coup in 2016 and then to criminalize election challenges in 2020 and then perhaps to call for another coup in 2024. But that is how totalitarian regimes and their kangaroo courts function.

In 2016, Christine Pelosi was advocating an electoral college coup, while in 2022 her mother was pushing the J6 committee which criminalized electoral college election challenges.

The corrupt hypocrisy here could not be any more blatant.

Following up on the work of the J6 committee, it may be time for ethical members of Congress to begin exploring the proposed electoral coup in 2016 and the role of House Democrats and the Clinton campaign in this subversion of a vital government function. And then, suddenly, Democrats will discover that electoral coups are actually the ultimate expression of patriotic democracy and that only fascists would attempt to suppress them or to criminalize them.

Because what’s good for the goose ought to be shoved down the craw of the gander.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.