Instead, Only Trumpers and Regime media joined arm in arm to force Republican primary voters to walk the plank for a guy who according to what I read in the indictments by Special Counsel Jack Smith, ordered his attorneys to lie to the grand jury. I’m a Republican, so Lord knows I can and have had to defend a lot of goofy stuff over the years. But allegedly commissioning false testimony to the grand jury to cover up what you otherwise claim to be above board record retention? Sorry, but to quote the Late Meat Loaf, I can do anything for love, but I won’t do that.

I said on my Friday Week In Review podcast with Ed Morrissey that you can have and should have two thoughts – the former President is being selectively targeted for prosecution, and that the system of justice in this country is corrupt. There are multiple tiers of justice – one for Republicans, and the DOJ as a protection racket for Democrats. The entire 7th floor of the Justice Department needs clear cutting.

And you can hold a thought that’s not mutually exclusive to the first. You can also look at the evidence in the latest Trump legal problems and say he’s got himself a world of trouble, especially on obstruction grounds, and he only has to look in the mirror to find the primary source of that trouble.

Let’s look at some of the analysis that’s out there from legal minds on how much legal jeopardy the former President is in. Here’s Former Attorney General Bill Barr:

Here’s George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley:

Here’s former assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York:

No, the evidence comes from Trump’s lawyers. The people who were trying to minimize his criminal exposure and push back against his destructive tendencies. The people who were trying to help him.

One of these lawyers, Evan Corcoran, kept trying to help Trump even after he knew he’d been had. For his trouble in representing a former president, Corcoran was subpoenaed and forced by a federal judge and an appellate court to testify. He fought them all the way, struggling to preserve Trump’s attorney-client privilege even though, apparently unbeknownst to Corcoran at the time, Trump had blithely negated the privilege by using Corcoran to provide false information, under oath, in response to a subpoena.

It’s the Trump pattern: Good people try to help wrestle his demons, he gets his kicks out of making unsavory acts of loyalty the price of prestigious jobs, they finally realize the price is too high — usually too late for their own good — and he trashes them as they make their quietus. Rinse and repeat.

Corcoran was not trying to hurt Trump, even though Trump had thought nothing of putting the lawyer’s livelihood at risk. Corcoran provided the lurid testimony reflected in the indictment — including Trump’s suggestions that he falsely tell the FBI and grand jury that he did not have documents marked classified, and that he “pluck” out of a package of documents responsive to the subpoena “anything really bad in there” — because the law required him to, not because he wanted to.

And former U.S. Attorney and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie had this conversation with Jake Tapper on CNN after reading the indictments:

Now to be certain, there’s a lot about this that is on the hinky side, and the fact that the government seems to be casting a little more scrutiny Donald Trump’s way than they ever would towards Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden. We’ll get that in a bit. But the bottom line is the obstruction stuff doesn’t look very promising for Team Trump. It just doesn’t. And even if you can come up with a technicality-based defense out of it, it’s not something conservatives of any stripe should rush to defend, just because it’s against a Republican. If it’s illegal conduct, it should be illegal conduct for everyone – Trump, Hillary, Biden, anyone.

As for the defense argument Trump can make, from my understanding, it goes something like this. Here’s former Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz:

So the idea is that the DOJ is supposed to have guidelines of prosecution which oblige like cases to be handled in the same fashion. If it can be shown to a juror or two in a convincing way that the DOJ did not follow their own guidelines, then any obstruction that’s born out of that broken guideline is the equivalent of fruit from a poisoned tree. All it would take is for the prosecution team to miss weeding out a MAGA juror and their case could go up in smoke.

As a non-lawyer, this seems to me the argument made lots of times by people pulled over for speeding. “There were tons more cars going faster than I was. Why didn’t you pull them over?” It may be true that you were targeted for whatever reason. You also were speeding, if the radar says you were doing 90 in a 65. Everyone else was, too, never gets you out of the ticket. I know. I tried it myself when I was selectively targeted as a teenage male driver. I wasn’t the President, though, and Trump wasn’t speeding. He was allegedly playing hide and seek with a federal grand jury and ordering his attorneys to abet him in doing that.

To me, whether the President is eventually put on trial, if it even gets that far, and whether or not he’s convicted, and regardless of what actions might be taken in appellate courts or beyond, I keep coming back to two points that are poking at frontal lobe. Trump’s own attorneys were bound by law to tell the grand jury what Trump actually wanted them to do, which is to commit a felony. And even if the prosecution’s case falls apart, pretending Trump didn’t do something illegal is a little bit like pretending O.J. didn’t murder Nicole and Ron Goldman. O.J. may not have been convicted of it, but everyone knows he did it and got away with it. Defending O.J.’s innocence in the court of public opinion is a fool’s errand.

The other thing I keep focusing on is the political fallout of all of this. And I want to close by going to the back end of Donald Trump’s Innocent Man video he put out on Truth Social when he was informed that the indictment was imminent.

It would be wonderful if we could devote our full time to Making America Great Again, and that’s exactly what we did. But now, our country is in decline.

He admits that not even Donald Trump can do both. He can’t fix the many ills from which the country suffers at the hands of the Biden regime and defend himself from the Swamp. So he’s going to defend himself first and foremost. It’s a respectable thing to do. I would expect anyone under federal indictment to spend their time trying to beat the rap. But as the former President just said, you can’t run full-time to represent Republicans’ interests and defend yourself. And I’m sorry, that’s not good enough for a candidate for high office to do. There are too many problems facing the country for a distracted candidate to be given the nomination out of blind loyalty. It should not be demanded, and it should not be given. It should be earned by campaigning hard. It’ll be interesting to see how focused Trump can and will be on the campaign trail in the weeks and months ahead as the legal fights envelop him.