Even as the nakedly political aspect of Attorney General Merrick Garland's naming of a a special counsel to investigate President Trump is obvious enough, there are some puzzling aspects.

Why, for example, is the Biden administration doing this after all of the ongoing investigations against President Trump have manifestly failed? Garland claimed that both aspects of the special counsel's investigation would focus on President Trump, one of which would be his role in the January 6 incident at the Capitol, and the other on his personal papers dispute dating from the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago last August. January 6 has been investigated ad nauseum by Trump's biggest opponents in Congress and come up empty, and just days ago, the FBI sheepishly admitted that its unprecedented SWAT-style raid on the former president's Mar-a-Lago home in search of stolen nuclear secrets hyped in the press was a nothingburger, they found nothing. (Wonder how much they paid their informant for that bum tip and who the heck put that scammer on payroll?) 

Obviously, they don't want these bids to fail, they don't want the January 6 commission to see its demise with the incoming Congress, and they desperately want their raid to be justified by a prosecutor who can find something, anything, to pin on Trump as he prepared to challenge Joe Biden for the presidency in 2024. Joe, who had to have had foreknowledge of this appointment, made it clear four days ago that the aim was not to find anything out regarding Trump, but to knock out a potential political rival, as he told a reporter at the G-7, declaring:  

Well, we just have to demonstrate that he will not take power by — if we — if he does run.  I’m making sure he, under legitimate efforts of our Constitution, does not become the next President again.

Still, the gambit is so political, so third-world, so bottom-of-the barrel, so banana republic. This is the kind of thing dictatorships in democracy's clothing do: Hugo Chavez did it. Vladimir Putin is doing it now. Biden would know this and not care. Hain't he got the power?

But it's also likely to backfire. Just as Trump had nearly done himself in with his insults to Florida's hugely popular governor, Ron DeSantis, making himself look petty and jealous and maybe not so temperamentally suited to the job of president after all, Joe Biden steps in and shows who the real temperamentally unsuited president is. Biden's move is very likely to drive voters into the arms of Trump and create a huge united front to oppose Biden's naked abuse of judicial power, which up until now, has been unknown in U.S. history. Who isn't rooting for Trump in this outrageous abuse of DoJ power, particularly when you take a good look at the guy Biden has chosen to lead the special counsel's office investigation, a DoJ creature of zero ethics named Jack Smith? More on him later.

If Biden really wants Trump out of the race, he should have let Trump destroy himself. Instead, he's strengthened Trump and even if he throws Trump in jail, which can be compared to Biden's campaign basement, he cannot stop voters from voting for him. Sound like a smart political move? All he's doing is creating sympathy for Trump and that's very obvious in the statements of people who have been at odds with Trump, such as Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence, both of whom have condemned the move, Pence calling it "very troubling." After all, if Biden can get away with this on Trump, he can pretty well come after all Republicans to get them out of the races, and for any flimsy reason whatsoever, and no sustainable charges required. As Conservative Treehouse notes, the aim is lawfare, not justice. Ron DeSantis should be loudly condemning this as well, because if he's smart, he would know who's next.

Third question: Why the strange timing? The video of it is here. Why now? Why not last week, or when the media was covering the January 6 hearings like they were going to show some walls closing in on Trump? Why now?

President Trump has loudly blasted the appointment as rigged and unjust and there's little hyperbole in what he' saying. Here's just how bad it actually is:

Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate President Trump over January 6 and Mar-a-Lago personal papers dispute, is a guy who loves himself some legal warfare to Get Republicans. He loves it so much he doesn't care about the results of his prosecutions, which are often failed, because his game is legal harassment, not upholding rule of law.

His past is amazingly despicable: He's the one who in 2010 brought Virginia's Gov. Bob McDonnell up on charges that ruined his political career. They were utterly meritless and the Supreme Court unanimously threw them out as total garbage.

In 2010, Obama Attorney General Eric Holder picked Jack Smith to run Public Integrity Section.

Smith took out VA Gov. Bob McDonnell as a potential Republican presidential candidate--on bogus corruption charges.

Supreme Court reversed, 9-0.

Now Smith is back--to take out Trump.

— рџ‡єрџ‡ё Mike Davis рџ‡єрџ‡ё (@mrddmia) November 18, 2022

Didn't bother him a bit.

Worse still, he was the one who gave IRS nonprofits chief Lois Lerner the go-ahead to destroy Tea Party nonprofits through excessive delays and intrusive questions, effectively refusing to allocate that status to the groups, with an amazing sting of lies, lost computer data, and vile emails, effectively swinging the election to President Obama in 2012. 

Sound like a fair guy, a guy with "integrity" as a strained-looking Garland insisted in his speech announcing the appointment of the special counsel?

He sounded like an unusually Stasi-like political attack dog with a grotesque habit of abusing power and advancing power abuses to new lows to become a new normal.

Well, now they've got him to turn his ethics-challenged eyes to President Trump and charge him with something, anything, to keep him from challenging Joe Biden for the presidency. To repeat what Joe said: He's "making sure" that Trump "does not become the next president again."

And in his mind, with elections just a matter of ballot-gathering now, not persuading voters, it's pretty obvious that Biden thinks he can get away with it. But the uncertainty is still there and surely his name is mud from this, even among Democrats, certainly the Bernie Sanders people who have seen his dirty tricks to knock their man out of the race in the past and figure it's just being applied to President Trump now. Why is he doing this?

The story is actually worse than it looks when you read Conservative Treehouse's take on why these strange activities are nevertheless happening.

It's not a matter of Joe Biden being stupid.

 The special counsel's office is there to centralize and federalize all of the investigations surrounding President Trump on this front. Just as an incoming Republican House is set to be seated, the special counsel will be there to tell Republicans that their efforts to get the truth out about January 6 -- things like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's role in refusing National Guard reinforcements offered by President Trump, and Capitol police opening doors for protestors to enter the Capitol, and FBI informants taking down the 'no-trespassing' signs and instigating violence, the weird incident with the unsolved pipe bomb, the coverup in the shooting death of one unarmed protestor and the beating death of another, as well as the Gulag-like imprisonment of arrested protestors who have been jailed without trial for abnormally long periods. Any effort to find out any of those facts from a GOP-led Congress will be squelched due to the ongoing investigation. 

Worse still, Smith's crew will use its authority to investigate all Republicans in Congress who are supposedly involved in the January 6 "insurrection" with the aim of arresting them. Bump off just a few and Democrats will be there to retake Congress. Their capacity to act as congress members will be compromised as their communications are surveilled, their records are pored over, and their rights are violated, by a monster secret-police juggernaut of unlimited budget that unlike the previous special counsels, doesn't care about whether its charges are true or not, or will stand up to a jury, but only that they are filed.

Thirdly, by picking off Republicans, Smith can effectively shield Joe Biden from their plans to investigate Hunter Biden's influence-peddling activities, which lead straight to the source of the influence, which is Joe Biden. How convenient for Joe. 

This is truly nasty stuff affecting all Republicans, not just President Trump. It's the doing of a banana republic dictator of huge unprecedented and unprosecuted corruption, as indicated in the Hunter Biden laptops and witness statements, who is now on the skids because he's lost the House and that puts an end to his far-left agenda as well as propensity to spend the country into bankruptcy.

Joe Biden is getting mean as he loses power, because he's convinced he's entitled to it. His electoral thievery has made him double down on his power grabs and as his legitimate power slips away in the wake of the midterms, he's now taking increasingly desperate and overreaching measures. This is how crummy fourth-world dictators are created and Biden is well on his way to becoming one.

Image: Twitter screen shot