Holman W. Jenkins Jr.
WSJ, May 31, 2024
“In my book, the verdict already is final: One of the worst decisions by any president in history is Joe Biden’s decision to seek a second term.”
Thursday’s conviction was more than a gift to the Biden campaign. It was a self-gift.
Joe Biden told Michigan voters in 2020, “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else.” It quickly turned out, on being elected, that he saw his first term as a bridge to a second.
For a laugh, read the New York Times’s supposedly searching account of the Justice Department’s decision to pursue Mr. Trump for Jan. 6 crimes. After failing to find the expected financial or other ties between the Trump circle and Jan. 6 rioters, “the department’s leadership had no alternative but to steer the investigation into choppy, uncharted waters: They shifted focus to election fraud.”
Notice the words “had no alternative.” Actually the department had an alternative, which any agency has when an investigation doesn’t pan out: End the investigation. But as the Times fails to point out, the department was soon laboring under an implicit direct order, delivered on the front page of the Times itself, via a contrived leak from Mr. Biden disparaging his attorney general for failing to develop a case against Mr. Trump.
Also getting the message was Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who had just been slurred in the liberal media for dropping his own office’s flimsy pursuit of Mr. Trump, which he promptly thereupon revived. It eventually delivered Thursday’s highly dubious outcome.
Next up are Hunter Biden’s trials on gun and tax charges, which may have millions of voters thinking of the political system: They’re all bums, now which one is my bum?
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