I think everyone understands that the just and fair administration of rules does not simply depend on the rules themselves and on some forensic analysis of what those rules require. It depends also on the general way in which those rules are applied, in universal and non-partisan terms, across society. Take just one of myriad possible examples.  Imagine (though this is actually the case in much of Canada and the US) a jurisdiction with no speed cameras and so to be booked for going too fast a police officer has to catch a speeding driver with a radar gun. Additionally in this jurisdiction there is a long-established practice that the police do not issue speeding tickets unless drivers are going 10 miles per hour (or more) over the limit. For instance, no one is booked doing 45 in a 40 zone, you have to be doing 50. And imagine, too, that drivers know this convention very well. Now suppose some conservative government is elected and tells the police chief to start issuing tickets at any speed over the limit, but only to cars with bumper stickers favouring left-wing parties or causes. All other cars will be treated according to the established convention of not being ticketed till you are ten miles over the limit. Would that be a fair and equal application of the law? Of course not. And having someone minutely dissect the rule and show that these drivers favouring left-wing parties had breached the rules – that they had brought this on themselves, as it were – would be to miss the forest for the trees, neither here nor there and more in the line of propping up injustice. Likewise, were the public broadcaster to focus solely on the rule and these left-wing drivers’ infringements and not put these infringements into the context of how other drivers are treated, well, many citizens would see it for a hack and biased media organisation. Right? A tolerable justice system depends not just on whether person X breached rule Y but also on whether others in society would receive the same treatment for that sort of breach. Indeed, in today’s administrative state, with myriad and proliferating rules, it is almost certain we all break rules all the time. Throw in a partisan prosecutor keen to get you for some reason or other and my bet is that we’d all find ourselves on the wrong side of some rule or other. ‘Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime’, to quote that well-known Soviet thug.

No surprises to any sentient readers, then, this brings us to the Trump indictment in Florida. Here is just a tiny portion of context. In 240 years of the country’s history no President has ever been criminally charged and certainly not by an incumbent when he’s the leading candidate for the other party at the next election. The Hillary Clinton campaign orchestrated the Russia collusion allegations from 2015 (that involved the FBI lying to the FISA courts). These claims led to an impeachment; they ate up huge political capital for then president Trump and took time away from his agenda; they were completely and totally debunked; not a single Democrat has been punished for them nor has the legacy press (which swallowed it in total) apologised. We know that then secretary of state Hillary Clinton breached very serious criminal laws when she had her illegal email servers destroyed by a ‘BleachBit’ program and then smashed to smithereens with hammers. After being subpoenaed. Containing uber-sensitive material. No criminal charges. Or consider that the FBI has been sitting on the Hunter Biden laptop for over two years. They have known from virtually the start that this was a real laptop – and we have not long ago learned that the Biden campaign orchestrated the 51 high-level former intelligence officers who just before the last election penned the letter saying this laptop ‘had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation’. They were lying.  And President Biden is seriously implicated by the laptop’s contents for being corrupt and taking millions to do a foreign agent’s bidding. Hunter gets a misdemeanour plea deal where anyone else would be charged with far more serious crimes. Or consider the IRS whistleblowers who claim the DoJ is doing the Dems’ dirty work. No consequences for Dems. Or recall the former president Obama CIA man who was giving secrets to his Chinese mistress, a spy as it happened. He was let off with a misdemeanour charge. Or recall that Joe Biden had more classified documents, in more places, less securely stored, than Trump ever did. And remember that Trump is being indicted in Florida on 100 per cent process charges – no obvious victims, no charges had the archivists not complained (which we can guess they wouldn’t have had it been a Dem – the fact Biden had documents himself was leaked). And remember the laughable New York City shenanigans by a Soros-funded DA. Or compare the way Trump’s Mar-A-Lago was raided by the FBI without Trump’s lawyers allowed to be there to the friendly little mediation with Biden’s lawyers over his classified documents. The overall context is clear: the Democrats have weaponised the Department of Justice to get Trump while yet to bring a single serious charge against any important Democrat at all, period. So when RINO Republicans say ‘Trump brought this on himself by not giving the classified documents back’ they make fools of themselves. If that’s your first thought given the overall context of these charges then you are simply not a serious person. It would be analogous to insisting the driver broke the speed limit and deserves the big fine irrespective of how all other drivers are treated. That blatant injustice is why Trump has soared in the polls and in fund-raising since these charges. Because most Republicans can see the big picture, and that this is Third-World stuff.

Putting all the unequal context aside, the Florida charges against Trump are weak; they would never have been brought at any other time in the US’s history against anyone else. Trump’s defences include: the Espionage Act is being improperly piggy-backed on the Presidential Records Act; the intent component is nowhere near being met; the ‘personal records’ v. ‘presidential records’ line is vague with the presumption to Trump; the bureaucracy’s stamping something as ‘classified’ does not carry with it automatic Espionage Act status (because overclassification is rife); all the information obtained from one of Trump’s lawyers, by breaching lawyer-client privilege, was only used by asserting the ‘crime-fraud’ exception and the DoJ based this wholly on a process crime, obstruction, sort of like what happened to Conrad Black. Basically, by calling and asking his lawyer for advice Trump was supposedly trying to enlist the lawyer in criminal obstruction and so we can use the lawyer’s evidence. Wtf? Without that evidence the whole indictment falls. And again, it’s a fight over who gets documents that everyone concedes any President could have declassified any time he wanted where the charge is wholly a process one (unlike Hillary’s or Hunter’s or Joe’s). For a full critique go and read former US assistant attorney Will Scharf. With all that in play Biden’s administration has indicted a former President, his leading rival, for the first time in two-and-a-half centuries; it’s threatened to put him in jail for a few hundred years, while seemingly quashing any investigations into top Democrats. Non-critics of this cannot be serious.