Wednesday, September 7, 2022

Time of Change

   September in America brings a return to education, as young people return to school and Congress returns to work after a brief vacation.
   Journalism, however, never gets time off from its duty of monitoring and researching the behavior of government and political leaders who try to manipulate policy to increase personal control.
   In that sense, journalism has a constant duty to keep readers aware of the dangers America faces from power hungry politicians. Meanwhile, leaves are ready to change, but dedicated followers of Donald Trump are not.
   Yet.
   
   The political climate is about to change, however, and the first signs are in the legal system. Local grand juries and congressional committees are increasing their pressure on Trumpians and their charges are being answered with increasing volatility.
   But shouting them down doesn't make them go away. This only makes for increasing news coverage. (Note: Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.)
   The season started with a report gathered by the Washington Post that among the documents seized in the search of the Trump resort at Mar-a-Lago was an analysis of nuclear weapons held by another country.
   This report got major coverage by news networks -- except Fox, which focused instead on President Joe Biden's handling of student loan forgiveness.
   Response from the Trump team criticized the news media for leaking a confidential top secret report. This ignored the reality that the report should not have been in the possession of the ex-president in the first place, much less on the premises of his vacation home.
   All things considered, it's time for more education in America, to lead voters out of the propaganda that claims Trump should still be in the White House, and therefore he has the right to keep classified top secret material as if he were still America's leader in chief.
  Problem: A Trump appointed judge has called for a "special master" to review documents taken from Trump's home by government law enforcement, and to decide which, if any, of those documents can be used in legal proceedings against him.
   But many law agents have already seen the documents. If the judge's ruling holds and the reviewer says the agents should not have seen them, that would mean a new set of investigators would have to be selected to review the remaining documents.
   All this despite Trump's initial claim that he didn't have any documents, then his insistence that he had already given back all of them, followed by his claim that investigators had no right to them in the first place, even though we was present at one of the visits and welcomed the FBI agents.
   Confusing? Yes. Time consuming? Yes. Law breaking? Yes. Largely an effort to delay the investigation? Probably.
   All this happening while talk of criminal charges increases.
   Already, a Trump supporter who assaulted Capitol police during the January 6 incident has been removed from his local government office because he violated the Constitutional ban on insurrectionists holding office.
   The same Constitutional ban applies to those who support insurrectionists. This raises the question of how a judge would rule if Trump tries again to gain a government office, given his support of January 6 insurrectionists.
   And what of other supporters campaigning for government positions in the next election day, just two months away?

Oh what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive.
-- Sir Walter Scott

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