With the indictment of former President Donald Trump, the U.S. has entered the “era of police-state politics,” as The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland put it Friday morning. The prosecution and expected arrest of a former president — and likely presidential challenger — is a serious thing, made all the more outrageous by the nakedly political nature of New York D.A. Alvin Bragg’s mission. Bragg appears to be ginning up a criminal probe out of a possible campaign finance issue that federal prosecutors had already declined to pursue.
While the alliance of media and Democrat operatives who have been on a mission to bring Trump down since before the 2016 election rejoice over the unprecedented move, it’s worth revisiting the myriad times that their ilk decried Trump’s 2016 campaign pledge to have his attorney general “get a special prosecutor to look into” Hillary Clinton’s malfeasance, and subsequent chants of “Lock her up!” at campaign rallies.
Here are just 20 examples.
“Not a healthy sign in a democracy when the case against your opponent is that she should be imprisoned,” worried Ryan Lizza, then of The New Yorker, in 2016.
In a tweet about the “lock her up” chant, then-Politico writer Julia Ioffe asked, “Since when do Americans advocate jailing political opponents?”
“In a democracy, you can’t threaten to jail your opponents,” said former President Barack Obama in 2016. “We have fought against those kinds of things.”
“Trump threatened to jail Clinton if elected. These countries might
