Near the end of his important new book, The Disappearing of the President: Trump, Truth Social, and the Fight for the Republic, Lee Smith makes an important — and chilling — distinction. What has been happening in the last few years with the attacks on former President Donald Trump has not been a two-tiered system of justice, where some people get punished and others get off, as many conservatives have been arguing. Instead, it is a system of lawlessness. In fact, it’s barely a system at all.
“In the current system,” Smith writes, “law is an instrument the regime uses to punish political opponents, while everything is legit for the ruling party. That is, the current system is lawless.”
The origin of this lawlessness was the Russiagate hoax, which is the main focus of Disappearing the President.
It’s still amazing that the Russiagate hoax even happened. As Smith describes it, on Jan. 5, 2017, then-President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, national security adviser Susan Rice, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and FBI head James Comey met in the Oval Office and plotted the destruction of then-President-elect Trump. The Democrats had decided to spread the phony story that Trump was a Russian agent. It was ludicrous and ridiculous, and it crippled Trump’s presidency.
The details in Disappearing of the President are still incredible: the Clinton campaign, eager to change the subject from Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s questionable behavior using a private computer server to conduct official government business, compiled a phony dossier claiming that Trump was “colluding” with the Russians. They got phone FISA warrants thanks to plotters in the intelligence community and sketchy judges — not to mention some underhanded tweaking to the system by Obama.
As Andrew McCarthy, a journalist and lawyer, noted at the time, “Russia had not actually interfered in the election; it interfered in the campaign by publicizing stolen mails and peddling propaganda, most of which was too ridiculous to influence anyone….But let’s not quibble over a good story, which [on Jan. 5, 2017] was then being composed.”
The FBI and intelligence agency warrants to spy on the Trump campaign were laughable. Still, Biden supporter and FBI Director Comey “briefed” Trump on the fake Russia nonsense, then leaked the meeting to the media, which spent three years trying to destroy the innocent and newly-elected president of the United States. The intelligence agencies set up Trump staffers such as General Michael Flynn, and liberal savior Robert Mueller wasted three years and millions of dollars to conclude that there had been no collusion. Yet the damage had been done.
What makes The Disappearing of the President so valuable is that Smith is an honest and thorough journalist. He doesn’t get distracted by weird conspiracy theories. He cites reliable sources and conducts interviews. There’s no need to talk about the government controlling the weather or COVID-19 vaccine conspiracies when the truth of what the government actually does is much more terrible. People who are ambivalent about Trump or who have sometimes been put off by his abrasive personality will, even if not voting for Trump, find themselves disturbed by what Smith has compiled here.
Again, he is describing not the usual political warfare, but lawlessness. Nobody who took part in the Russiagate hoax has been punished. They never will be.
The “Shadow Network” described by Smith includes people in the intelligence community, such as the CIA’s John Brennan and disgraced FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, politicians, social media giants such as Mark Zuckerberg, as well as propagandists in the media, have never relented. Smith writes: “After Trump left office, the Biden administration mounted a massive lawfare operation – four cases total, with two federal, one in Fulton County, Georgia, and another in Manhattan – to impoverish him and distract him from the 2024 re-election efforts, with the ultimate goal of imprisoning him for life. After the legal attacks fell apart, the government exposed him, through incompetence and malice, to an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally.”
The attempts at censorship, at “disappearing” Trump, continue to go on, with tech giants, politicians, and the media telling people what they can and cannot say. Again, you don’t have to be a fan of Trump (I’ve always been ambivalent about him) to be shocked.
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From the book: “As the most censored man in the history of a constitutional republic that enshrines freedom of expression, Trump became the de-facto leader of America’s free speech movement. The former president [is] now the free world’s leading dissident.”
That also makes him a target. But that is the whole point of the Left’s lawless crusade against Trump. If they can’t get to him, then maybe someone else will.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.