After three years probing former President Donald Trump’s alleged financial skullduggery, two leading Manhattan prosecutors, Carey Dunne and Mark Pomerantz, quit Feb. 23, convinced there would be no prosecution of Trump. The grand jury they were running, empaneled as part of the Democrats’ ongoing efforts to stigmatize and indict Trump and drive him out of politics, had stalled.
Despite getting a U.S. Supreme Court ruling making Trump’s tax returns available, and a gang of 25 lawyers and their aides pouring over millions of other records, the only indictment they had come up with is a charge of tax fraud against Allen Weisselberg, chief executive of the Trump Organization.
The U.S. capitalist rulers face a serious political crisis, finding no way to seat a government that can provide stable rule for their dog-eat-dog system. Their two ruling parties are fixated more on assaulting each other than on any serious effort to find bipartisan steps to ease the crisis of capitalist production and trade and the eroding position of U.S. imperialism worldwide. And this crisis is fracturing the Democratic and Republican parties at the same time.
Other criminal and civil probes against Trump continue apace in New York, Georgia and Washington, D.C.
Evidence is mounting that the 2016 presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton was responsible for the fake charge that Trump was a tool of Moscow. Democrats drove relentlessly to use those charges against him. The U.S. government’s special counsel, John Durham, issued an indictment of Rodney Joffe Feb. 11. Durham’s probe was set up under the former administration to investigate the Democrats’ Trump-Russian-collusion hoax. Even though they now control the White House and the House, Democrats’ efforts to get the probe shut down have failed.
Just days before the 2016 election Clinton said, “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.”
But Durham’s indictment shows that prior to Clinton’s announcement, Joffe used his job as a government contractor to spy on internet records and concoct “evidence” of secret communications between Trump and the Russian Alfa bank. He then ferried this onto the Democratic Party campaign’s opposition-research group, ending up in Clinton’s claims.
Joffe was interviewed in 2018 by the New Yorker under the pseudonym “Max,” claiming he had uncovered a threat to national security that had to be made “known before the election.” None of Joffe’s allegations turned out to be true. Clinton responded to Joffe’s indictment Feb. 16, claiming any allegations her campaign spied on Trump were “fake.”
For years the ruling class has used the FBI to spy on militant workers, Black rights fighters and working-class parties. These operations were exposed in the Socialist Workers Party’s successful political fight and lawsuit against the FBI filed in 1973 and won in 1986. Washington’s domestic political police agency was forced to admit its operation against the SWP included hundreds of “black bag” burglaries and wiretaps of party offices, the sending of 1,000 informers into the party between 1945 and 1966, and a series of attempts to disrupt the party’s political work.
Never-ending Jan. 6 probe
In their drive to prevent the former president from running in 2024, Democrats hope the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol will recommend the Justice Department charge Trump. Despite prosecuting 725 individuals for their alleged part in the break-in, the Justice Department has been unable to uncover any plot for “insurrection” or a coup. Neither has the House Committee, which has subpoenaed 50 individuals as well as myriads of phone and bank records, and interviewed 475 witnesses.
All kinds of norms that have governed capitalist politics for decades are being jettisoned in these sharpening disputes. On Feb. 18 a federal judge stripped Trump of immunity from prosecution in civil lawsuits — a protection granted to presidents since at least 1867. Democrats’ attempts to remove Trump from office through impeachment were twice overturned by the Senate.
The political crisis facing the boss class and its parties today stems from the unraveling of the world order put together by Washington when it emerged at the top of the imperialist world order at the end of the slaughter in World War II. Moreover, the illusion the U.S. rulers won the Cold War when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991 is coming apart, as is their belief they would have decades of unrivaled domination.
Their crisis is rooted in their fear that workers increasingly see through the fraud that the Democrats or Republicans have anything to offer, and are looking for ways to defend ourselves from years of declining living and working conditions, endless wars, attacks on our political rights, and other abuses spawned by capitalist exploitation and oppression.
Exemplifying the rulers’ fear of working people, the Pentagon authorized the mobilization of the National Guard at the Capitol during President Joseph Biden’s State of the Union address March 1 to guard it from a convoy of truckers heading toward the Capitol to protest government vaccination mandates and other measures that have made their livelihoods increasingly precarious. The New York Times Feb. 26 alleged these truckers have “connections to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.”