The news that President Joe Biden’s Justice Department might soon indict and arrest former President Donald Trump over the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol should terrify all Americans, regardless of their political beliefs.
Put bluntly, if Biden’s DOJ arrests Trump, the president’s main political rival heading into the 2024 election, it will trigger a political and electoral crisis unlike any America has ever faced. It’s not too much to say that such a move would not only imperil the upcoming presidential election but the republic itself. Jailing political rivals is what happens in tinpot dictatorships like Nicaragua, where President Daniel Ortega’s political rivals often find themselves arrested and imprisoned on charges of treason.
Now it appears it could happen here. On Tuesday, Trump said he had received a letter informing him he is a target of the federal criminal investigation of Jan. 6 being led by Special Counsel Jack Smith. In a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, Trump explained he was given the letter on Sunday and that Smith gave him just four days to report to the grand jury, “which almost always means an Arrest and Indictment,” Trump wrote.
This is the second target letter Trump has received from Smith. The first one came in June, in connection with the unprecedented FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home last year over classified documents. Days later, Trump was charged with dozens of criminal counts relating to seven different federal laws governing the handling of classified material. (Recall that classified documents,
