Photo Credit: Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Gage Skidmore
He'll have his work cut out for him, but perhaps he alone can do it.As last week’s debate made clear, Kamala Harris’s media enablers have given Harris the green light to lie in the most flagrant ways about the most significant of issues. Even if Donald Trump were adept at giving concise answers, which he is not, he would have had no chance to expose Harris’s mendacity.
In the long run, the most damaging of issues deal with the weaponization of justice. As vice presidential candidate, Sen. J. D. Vance is perfectly positioned to address this phenomenon. He is precise in his language; quick on his feet, and, with a “J.D.” (hmmm!) from Yale, inarguably well credentialed to take on the task at hand: heading up an American Truth and Reconciliation Commission (ATRC).
Based on the model South Africa used with some success to end the Apartheid era bloodlessly, the ATRC would offer amnesty to those willing to tell the truth about the corruption of justice in the past decade. Unlike Trump, Vance has not been a victim of this corruption. He could manage the affair dispassionately and legitimize the conciliatory nature of the ARTC and, by extension, the Trump presidency.
As an executive function, the ATRC would forward amnesty declarations to President Trump, who would have the constitutional power to grant them. To be effective, the commission would limit its scope to those issues that have most directly threatened to undermine our constitutional republic these last several years.
President Trump should hold a press conference immediately to introduce the ARTC. Vance would take it from there. He would explain the impossibility of securing legal justice in the District of Columbia, a district in which 95 percent of the potential jurors voted against Trump, a district in which no Republican can expect to be acquitted and no Democrat convicted. The ARTC might not deliver the hard justice many miscreants deserve, but it could deliver truth and, with truth, something like closure.
At the press conference, Vance would concisely lay out the four major areas of inquiry with inarguable and well documented facts. To most Americans, and a shameful number of Republicans, these facts will come as news. Vance could challenge the media to fact-check him as he speaks.
Moving chronologically, Vance would open with Russiagate. Too few Americans, including the media, know that the scandal’s foundational document, the Steele dossier, was a dirty trick operation funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Based on that document and other disinformation gathered with some help from the “Five Eyes,” an anglosphere intelligence alliance, the FBI launched a spurious investigation that would destroy lives and cost the Republicans the House in 2018 before ending in the smoking ruins of the Mueller investigation.
Next stop: Huntergate. In the closing weeks of the 2020 election, the FBI leaned on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms to suppress a story that its brass knew to be true — namely, that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop were real and damning. As if on cue, current secretary of state and then–Biden adviser Antony Blinken found 50 members of the Intelligence Community and had them sign a document declaring the laptop a Russian hack and dump job. As planned, Biden used this bogus intel at the final debate to counter Trump’s legitimate claims about the laptop. Conservative estimates put at 4 percent the number of votes Biden would have lost had the truth not been suppressed — more than enough to cost him his “victory.”
During the debate, Kamala Harris did not shy from repeating the lies about January 6 that, in her case, are both personal and damning. No, Trump did not “instigate” the riot, “some officers” were not killed, and she was not at the Capitol at any time during the riot. J6 is a large, unwieldy subject, but a useful point of entry would be Harris’s caginess about her actions that day.
At the press conference, Vance would do well to zero in on the inarguable fact that Harris has repeatedly deceived the public about her presence at the DNC at the very moment the pipe bomb was discovered and the riot launched — by people who did not attend Trump’s speech. Her deceit did corrupt the cases of hundreds of unjustly punished J6ers and may be a cover for a genuine “inside job.”
Politico unwittingly describes the criminal charges leveled against Trump as though it were something other than the open conspiracy known as lawfare: “For the first 234 years of the nation’s history, no American president or former president had ever been indicted. That changed in 2023. Over a five-month span, former President Donald Trump was charged in four criminal cases.” This five-month span just happened to coincide with Trump’s entry into the 2024 presidential race. Add to these criminal cases the civil case filed by a New York State attorney general who ran on a campaign to “get Trump” for something, anything, and you have a perfect working example of judicial “weaponization.” Not content with destroying Trump, the conspirators have gone after Trump’s lawyers and supporters as well.
There are other scandals that need to be addressed — the near assassination of the former president, the Afghanistan debacle, the COVID lies, the abetting of the illegal alien invasion, the social media suppression, the dementia cover-up, the 2020 election shenanigans, and more, but these are for another day.
Once the ARTC is announced, Vance would do well to focus on the four issues cited above in every speech, every media appearance, and especially in his debate with Tim Walz. America is perilously close to becoming a banana republic, and Americans need to know it.
Jack Cashill is a Kansas City–based writer and producer with a Ph.D. from Purdue in American studies. His newest book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, is available in all formats.
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Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
