Letter 2 America for October 30, 2016

Dear America,

I was reading an article about attendees at a Trump rally in the New York Times a couple of days ago and I was struck by one interview in particular.  The interviewee said that if Hillary Clinton won the election on November 8, she would be prevented from taking office.  When asked how, specifically whether he was suggesting that a revolution would occur, he simply said, we will do what we have to do.  This is why that interview is significant.

Over the past month or so, Donald Trump has been claiming that the election is rigged...that the process is rigged, and he has suggested that it is being rigged by some phantom conspiracy led by the Clintons.  He has persistently added provocative tone to his pronouncements on the subject to the point that he now says that Hillary Clinton should not be permitted to occupy the Oval Office.  He has been saying that she should be imprisoned for awhile.  All this would be empty hyperbole if it weren't for the fact that Trump knows the sentiments--and I emphasize that they are sentiments rather than thoughts because facts and the consideration thereof seem to have nothing to do with them--of his ardent supporters, and he knows the effect that his sensationalistic screeds have on them, yet he continues to utter them.  Trump knows that they are threatening rebellion if he loses, yet he persists in stoking the embers that he ignited among them to the point that they are now incendiary, if not explosive, and he has used the claim that Hillary Clinton is a criminal worthy of prosecution by the federal government, condemning James Comey, the FBI and the Department of Justice for declining to do so.  And now, Comey has succumbed to the pressure being applied by Trump and his millions of acolytes by sending a letter to Republican congressional leaders to say that the FBI has found something in a parallel investigation, and though they still don't know what they found, it may be related to Hillary Clinton's email server.  The fact that Comey was being advised not to do it seems not to have mattered to him, begging the question of why.  Maybe there's where the conspiracy lies, but I digress.

My point is that when Comey was asked during his interrogation by the House Oversight Committee chairman, Jason Chaffetz, why Comey wasn't prosecuting Clinton under an obscure statute related to state secrets, Comey answered that in the 99 year history of the statute, it had been invoked only once, and that was in a case of espionage...spying...intentionally giving state secrets to other nations.  This is not that, he opined at the time, and he has never said anything to the contrary.  So, there is no statute under which to prosecute Hillary Clinton no matter how careless she may have been with her emails.  But there is another statute of which Donald Trump might want to take note: 18 USC 2385.  It reads in part as follows:

     "Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government; or

Now there's a statute worth prosecuting someone for violating.  And Donald Trump has violated it, and continues to do so every day.  As for James Comey, maybe someone should be checking his bank records.

Your friend,

Mike