Source – vtforeignpolicy.com

“…Whoever the Democratic nominee is, he or she will be carrying the can for a catastrophic administration: inflation, crime, borders, the green terror, Afghanistan and, in some respects, Ukraine. This can’t be disguised any longer behind an avalanche of defamation and false prosecution of Donald Trump. For the last eight years, all the Democrats have had is their promotion of anti-Trump hysteria; it is finally fizzling as the kimono is opened on the corruption of the Bidens”

MEET THE ALL-DECADE TEAM: Former leaders have been jailed or charged all over the world

Whose Your Favorite Indicted and Convicted Former Leader?

Former President Trump declared after being indicted in New York that “THE USA IS NOW A THIRD WORLD NATION,” a statement echoed by his sons and many of his supporters.

The big picture: In reality, leaders who left office in 2000 have been jailed or prosecuted in at least 78 countries — including in democracies like France, Israel, and South Korea.

Since 1980, around half of the world’s countries have had at least one such case, and that’s not counting impeachments or coups.

Driving the news: Investigations into former leaders have been in the news around the world lately.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ongoing corruption trial has fueled some outrage over his judicial overhaul plan, while Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva returned to the presidency in January after his corruption conviction was thrown out.
Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s home was surrounded this month in a botched attempt to arrest him, while former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak remains in jail after a judge this week threw out a challenge to his corruption conviction in the multibillion-dollar 1MDB scheme.
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Argentina’s current vice president, and former president, was convicted of fraud but remains in office and out of prison because her position carries immunity and because she’s launched what’s expected to be a lengthy appeal.

Several ex-leaders from wealthy democracies have also found themselves on trial in the past two decades.

Like Trump, Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy had his home searched after leaving office. He was convicted in two separate cases in 2021 and sentenced to prison (he’s appealing).

In South Korea, former President Park Geun-hye was sentenced to 24 years for corruption. She was pardoned by her successor in December 2021 after serving five.
In Taiwan, former President Chen Shui-bian was convicted of bribery in 2009.

Lula isn’t the only former leader for whom a trial or even conviction was not career-ending.

Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been in and out of court for three decades and was temporarily barred from seeking office due to a tax fraud conviction, but remains a player in Italian politics at 86.

For obvious reasons, the countries that are least likely to be filled in on our map are monarchies or dictatorships where leaders are long-serving and untouchable.

In some countries, leaders may be inclined to cling to power due to the risk of prison if they don’t. That’s one explanation for the trend of African leaders seeking third terms.

But the region where most countries have jailed or prosecuted former leaders over the last two decades is Latin America. In Peru, every president but one who served between 1985 and 2018 has been arrested or charged.

Former Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is under investigation for alleged corruption but has not been charged.

In the vast majority of cases all over the world, the charges former leaders have faced relate to corruption.

Worth noting:

Because we were looking at cases where leaders were jailed or prosecuted after leaving office, we didn’t include impeachments and didn’t automatically include coups — though cases, where leaders were detained following coups, are in the “complicated” category.
We did include cases where ex-leaders were prosecuted in absentia or faced charges that were later dropped. We didn’t include cases where leaders left office before 2000 but were charged more recently (Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, for example). We didn’t include cases where the charges came solely from international courts (thus, no Vladimir Putin).
In the vast majority of these cases, the ex-leader was prosecuted or jailed for their activities in office, rather than before or after.
We were only considering leaders who held the most powerful political office in each country, though that required judgment calls in a few cases.

SOURCE Axios

Related….

Conrad Black: Democratic witch-hunt won’t deny Trump’s triumph in 2024

He has become a much more presentable candidate and he is facing a withered and palsied Democratic opposition

Former U.S. president Donald Trump

The trajectory of the campaign for next year’s presidential election in the United States has been clear for some months: Donald Trump has led all the way, has grown slightly but steadily stronger and stands much more strongly in the polls and in his prospects generally than he did at any time in the 2020 or 2016 election campaigns.

In the run-up to the previous election, only in a brief golden window between the rejection of the first impeachment of Trump and the onset of the COVID pandemic and the irresistible demand for a national shutdown was he ever leading the polls. It is now impossible to find a plausible scenario in which he is denied renomination by the Republican party.

This in itself would make him an enhanced historic figure as only the fifth person to come first or second in three consecutive presidential elections: Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland and Franklin D. Roosevelt were the others. William Jennings Bryan and Richard Nixon were nominees three times but not consecutively, and Henry Clay and Martin Van Buren sought the office three times but not consecutively and only twice as one of the two principal contenders.

One after another, the life vests of the anti-Trump movement have been torn off the increasingly frightened Trump-despisers wearing them: the arrival in the campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was breathlessly awaited and must now be considered an almost inexplicable failure.

I was one of those who wrote, here and elsewhere, that it seemed obvious that given the party alignment and the fact that he was only in his mid-40s, the best course for DeSantis was to make a deal with Trump that the governor would support him this year and, whatever the outcome, Trump would support DeSantis in 2028. If the present trend continues, it will not be easy for the Florida governor to reassemble himself as a strong candidate for the White House after what appears to be a serious debacle this year.

The ultimate Democrat weapon to achieve their re-election was telegraphed long in advance to be politicized indictments of the former president; confident statements were constantly leaked for months that the Trump phenomenon would be blown to smithereens at last when the dreadful ogre was finally brought face-to-face with righteous justice.

The four indictments have been handed up, and Trump has risen slightly in the polls. The most encouraging development in the Biden era is this clear evidence that the majority of Americans now have some awareness of how severely their criminal justice system has putrefied.

The prosecutors have practically unlimited powers to extort and suborn evidence, to grant immunity from perjury proceedings to witnesses giving false inculpatory testimony and in the federal system to rack up totalitarian levels of success in convictions, 95 per cent of them without the tedious bourgeois formality of a trial, so great is the ability of prosecutors to manipulate the plea-bargain system.

The only one of the four indictments of Trump to which any serious legal authority attaches the slightest credence is the documents case. I don’t believe any of these indictments will ever come to trial as motions and appeals of motion decisions should push them all past the election, at which point the purpose for them evaporates.

The New York, Jan. 6 and Georgia cases are such utter nonsense — and as far as I can deduce fail to really allege a crime — that higher courts will strike them. As for the documents case, I have no standing to try the case here, but I don’t think there is any chance that Trump violated the Espionage Act.

This was a records case, which has to overcome a president’s ability to declassify, and I think the chances of a Florida jury deciding unanimously that the former president committed a crime over these issues is approximately zero. Yet this was the heart and soul of the Democratic party campaign for re-election: the abuse of the criminal justice system to try to smear and derail the former president and current leader of the opposition with glaringly spurious criminal charges known by their authors to be absurd and almost unfounded.

As the trials are set back, the cases themselves will cease to be highly publicized and the issue becomes whether the aversion to Trump is greater than the combination of the public revulsion at the abuse of the justice system and the corruption of the intelligence agencies and the FBI, as well as public dissatisfaction with the failure in almost every policy field of the current administration.

I don’t believe President Joe Biden is re-electable, and it is not believable to me that the same party bosses who rescued him from the dustbin of history after he’d flunked out of the primaries in 2020 will not, as gently as they can, guide him into retirement. They will have to do this in time to allow for the primaries to ensure that the vice president is not the presidential nominee.

Gavin Newsom, building on his record as governor of California, and turbocharger for the Jerry Brown-Newsom destruction of the Golden State, is not going to be a formidable vote-getter across the country. Whoever the Democratic nominee is, he or she will be carrying the can for a catastrophic administration: inflation, crime, borders, the green terror, Afghanistan and, in some respects, Ukraine.

This can’t be disguised any longer behind an avalanche of defamation and false prosecution of Donald Trump. For the last eight years, all the Democrats have had is their promotion of anti-Trump hysteria; it is finally fizzling as the kimono is opened on the corruption of the Bidens.

The Biden administration is like a heavily damaged Allied bomber returning from the skies of Germany in 1944, pieces falling off its fuselage and the unflappable pilot informing his copilot that since the landing gear won’t come down, it could “get a little rough.” There are now signs of disintegration in the airtight stonewall of national political media hostility to Trump.

Jake Tapper, an indefatigable amplifier of any conceivable criticism against Trump these last eight years, to his credit, and without apparently turning blue as he did so, acknowledged on CNN last week that on Ukraine, in 2019 and 2020, “Trump was right and Biden was wrong.”

Megyn Kelly, no Trump supporter, must have spoken for most Americans when she described Rachel Maddow’s love-in with Hillary Clinton on the day of the Georgia indictment as “disgusting.” So it was: Maddow, who thought she was exposing Trump as a tax cheat when she disclosed the many millions of dollars he had paid in tax in one year from his improperly leaked tax return.

Maddow also whitewashed the greatest destroyer of subpoenaed evidence in American history, Clinton, who attributed her defeat in 2016 to acts of treason by Trump with the Russians, and to being “shivved twice by Jim Comey,” the FBI director who did everything humanly possible to salvage her candidacy, while corrupting and disgracing the FBI.

It is true that, according to polls, a majority of Americans are now disinclined to vote for Trump, but that does not allow for whatever might be their views of the alternative at the next election, and it does not take into account that the present Trump is a new Trump. He is a much-wronged and courageously persevering candidate. Unlike the first version of candidate and President Trump, he now rarely issues cringe-worthy posts or wildly implausible accusations. He has become a much more presentable candidate and he is facing a withered and palsied Democratic opposition.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/democratic-witch-hunt-wont-deny-trumps-triumph-in-2024