REASON #1:  “It’s not about the case.  It’s about the mug shot.”

Jesse Watters mentioned this on his FOX NEWS show Tuesday evening.  And sure enough, a source told the U.K. DAILY MAIL that Trump is “expected” to be indicted today (Wednesday).  The grand jury is scheduled to convene today, and even if only 12 of the 23 grand jurors agree it’s likely a crime was committed, that will be it, and then the DA’s office will reach out to Trump’s Secret Service detail to “make arrangements for his surrender.”  The arraignment will likely take place before a New York judge sometime next week.  That’s when he’ll be fingerprinted and pose for that mug shot.

A picture with the DAILY MAIL story shows two anti-Trump protesters standing outside the DA’s office building, dressed in black and holding signs --- bold, pre-printed ones --- that say “ARREST TRUMP” and “TRUMP IS OVER.”  And doesn’t that last sign say it all?  They just want Trump to be over, and they don’t care how we get there.  In fact, if it involves spitting on the law and the Constitution to get there, that’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11886761/Trump-indicted-WEDNESDAY-wont-appear-court-week.html?ito=windows-widget-push-notification&ci=555714

Radio host Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent, is furious, saying Tuesday that if they deem it a security nightmare, the Secret Service does NOT have to agree to Trump going to New York (he’s reportedly in Florida now) and personally appearing in a courtroom before a judge.  By law, they can say, “This is unsafe, and it’s not going to happen, period.”  As courtrooms did routinely during COVID, they could handle this remotely.  Someone could come to his home to fingerprint him (!!!) and take his photo.  We’ll see how they choose to deal with this potentially very dangerous situation for the former President.  Why do I keep having visions of Ruby and Oswald?

Also, the DA knows the President isn’t a flight risk or a risk to anyone’s safety.  He’s DONALD TRUMP, perhaps the most recognizable person in the world.

I joked yesterday about Democrats rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of Trump being arrested and perp-walked.  But today, we’ve all seen them actually behaving this way.  (We didn’t watch “The View” but heard about it.)  It’s so hard to do comic exaggeration these days.

But step away from the Trump Derangement Bubble, and Americans are wise to this.  Not just Americans, either; even the President of Mexico sees it for what it is --- a scam to keep Trump from running again --- and he said the whole world will know what it is, “because we are not sucking our thumbs, that it is so he will not appear on the electoral ballot.  And if I say that, it’s because it seems [the] application of a crime, because they don’t want him to become a candidate.”

The case itself is ridiculous.  As Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said yesterday, “The Department of Justice didn’t take this case.  The federal district of New York didn’t take this case.  Cy Vance, the former district attorney, didn’t take this case.  And even Alvin Bragg when he got the job didn’t take the case.”  He only took the case now, Jordan said, because Trump has announced a run in ‘24 “and is winning in every single poll.”

REASON #2:  It’s really starting to look as though President Trump is the only one with the wherewithal to dismantle the ‘deep state,’ and this is how the deep state fights back.  On Tuesday, Trump unveiled his plan to “dismantle the deep state” in a new policy agenda video.  It cannot happen too soon.

The video he posted on Rumble --- “Agenda47:  Trump’s Plan to Dismantle the Deep State and Return Power to the American People --- offers a list of ten items that he says will be at the top of his agenda once he’s back in office.  Here’s a summary:

1.  He’ll reinstate his 2020 executive order restoring the President’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats, and he will “wield that power very aggressively.”

2.  He’ll “clean out all the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them.”  He says he’ll completely overhaul the departments and agencies that have been weaponized.  He’s had it with faceless bureaucrats targeting conservatives, Christians, and other political enemies.

RELATED STORY:  Perhaps you saw that the U.S. Attorney in DC is planning to bring over 1,000 additional January 6 protesters into court.  It just never ends.  Republicans need to be up in arms about this, so take note of the ones who don’t appear to be, such as Lindsay Graham.  And did you know that even some investigative journalists who were there that day and later wrote stories that contradicted the DOJ’s preferred “narrative” are among the ones targeted?  Tucker Carlson featured one, Steve Baker, on his Tuesday show, and also this U.S. Special Forces veteran, Mike Glover, who says his disaster response organization, American Contingency, was falsely targeted by the FBI as “a militant violent domestic terrorist organization.”  He says they even targeted his Korean-born mother. 

“If we’ve talking about subversion, sabotage...government entities going after its citizens, these are the first precursors to ‘Operation Prepare the Environment,” he said.  “We call it ‘shaping the environment.’  And I don’t like seeing it.”  He’s seeing the routine targeting of veterans who are now entrepreneurs and on social media.

https://www.foxnews.com/video/6323046028112

This, I’m sure, is the kind of thing Trump is talking about and wants to end.  Moving on...

3.  Trump says he’ll totally reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts, “which are so corrupt that they seemingly do not care when they are lied to in warrant applications.”  Judges do nothing about it when they see applications that they know must be wrong.  No one knows better than Trump, after a FISA court went right along with the ridiculous and unverified “dossier” --- four times.

4.  He’ll “expose the hoaxes and abuses of power that have been tearing our country apart.”  He intends to establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission “to declassify and publish all documents on ‘deep state’ spying, censorship and corruption.”  (“And there are plenty of them.”)

5.  He’ll launch a crackdown on government leakers who collude with fake news “to deliberately weave false narratives and to subvert our government and our democracy,” pressing criminal charges when possible.  That’s another one he knows all about, firsthand.

6.  He will physically separate the offices of inspectors general from the departments they oversee, to help maintain the independence of their investigations.  This is “so they do not become the protectors of the ‘deep state.’”

7.  To stop intel agencies from spying on our citizens or running disinformation campaigns against them, he’ll ask Congress to establish an independent auditing system, to continually monitor their work.  This is also to stop them from “spying on someone’s campaign, like they spied on my campaign,” he said.

8.   He’ll continue the effort launched by his first administration “to [immediately] move parts of the sprawling federal bureaucracy to new locations outside the Washington swamp,” as he moved the Bureau of Land Management to Colorado.  This could affect 100,000 government employees.  He wants to locate these bureaus “among patriots who love America.”

One bonus that occurs to us:  maybe most of those bureaucrats just won’t make the move to places where they can smell the Trump support, and Trump can cut the size of the bureaus by, oh, about 90 percent.

Trump didn’t mention the proposed plan to build a new FBI headquarters near-but-not-in Washington DC.   But he’d appreciate what Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz said:  that the FBI is “rotten to the core” and that “Gifting the FBI a new headquarters larger than the Pentagon would condone, reinforce, and enable their nefarious behavior to levels we have never seen before.”  Gaetz has introduced legislation prohibiting the funding of this.

https://floridianpress.com/2023/03/matt-gaetz-fbi-rotten-to-the-core/

Now, back to Trump’s list.

9.  He’ll work to ban federal bureaucrats from taking jobs with the companies in industries they were regulating.  He singled out Big Pharma as a particularly egregious example.

10.  He’ll push for a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on members of Congress.  When he says that this, too, is part of how he is going to “shatter the ‘deep state,’” that should tell you a lot about how far it reaches.   Trump wants to restore “government that is controlled by the people and for the people.”

https://rumble.com/v2e4bm6-agenda47-president-trumps-plan-to-dismantle-the-deep-state-and-return-power.html

So next week, if you see President Trump on TV standing before a judge for his arraignment, and being photographed and fingerprinted, after a corrupt DA has contorted the law and managed to “find” a way to indict a political enemy, please note the irony that his plan to end such abuses of power is one huge reason he’s there.  We all know it’s true.

………………

RELATED STORY:  Did you know that George Soros’ high-dollar campaign support for Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg was a family affair?  We didn’t, either.  A million dollars apparently wasn’t quite enough for such an important race, so his wife and son kicked in.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/beyond-george-soros-family-members-directly-supported-manhattan-da-alvin-braggs-campaign

THIS COMMENTARY IS SURE TO BE DEMONETIZED BY GOOGLE AND SUPPRESSED BY FACEBOOK. TO HELP KEEP MY NEWSLETTER ALIVE, SIGN UP FOR THE CENSORSHIP FREE VERSION ON SUBSTACK>>>Subscribe to The Morning Edition (substack.com)

Bombshell testimony

You’re probably wondering how a New York grand jury could still vote to indict Donald Trump after the bombshell testimony on Monday from Michael Cohen’s former legal adviser Robert Costello. He eviscerated Cohen as a convicted perjurer and pathological liar willing to say or do anything to avoid charges against himself, and who previously admitted to Costello that he arranged the hush money payments to two women without Trump’s knowledge. Cohen’s testimony to the contrary is the rickety foundation of Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s ridiculous case. So how could any grand jurors vote to approve such a divisive and unprecedented indictment based on that obvious pile of rancid fertilizer?

Well, there are two answers:

1. It’s a New York grand jury, and the target is Donald Trump.

2. This is likely the first time the grand jurors have heard a single word of evidence in Trump’s favor. Even then, Costello said he had to sneak it into his answers because Bragg was trying to keep him from revealing it. And he was shocked to learn that the grand jury hadn’t seen the hundreds of pages of evidence he’d provided to Bragg; they’d only been shown six cherry-picked documents.  

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/sudden-turn-events-could-derail-trump-indictment

At that link, Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett points out the many flaws in the case and the nakedly political motivations for it, as well as Bragg’s hiding of exculpatory evidence from the grand jury, which he calls “reprehensible” and “unconscionable.” Unfortunately, it’s hardly unusual.

There’s a reason the cliché exists that you can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. That’s because all they hear is the prosecution’s side. The defendant isn’t allowed in the room; he has no attorney there to give his side or to cross-examine witnesses or call defense witnesses; and there’s no exculpatory evidence presented unless the DA feels like presenting it (hint: they seldom do.)

In short, it’s exactly like Nancy Pelosi’s January 6^th Kangaroo Kommittee.  

So if an indictment does come down, don’t judge the grand jurors too harshly because they know not what they do, and Alvin Bragg has done his darnedest to make sure of that.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/03/22/soros-funded-da-alvin-bragg-may-have-hidden-exculpatory-evidence-in-trump-case-n1680419

If they had been allowed to hear both sides, I assume this is what they would have said to Mr. Bragg; and if this hot mess actually goes to trial, let’s hope it’s what the trial jury will say:

https://youtu.be/hiEfuzjG1Iw