THE FIFTH AMENDMENT, THE PAPER CHASE AND THE ULTIMATE THREAT TO U.S. DEMOCRACY

by Vijaya Chandrasoma

The Fifth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America is divided into five clauses, protecting the legal rights of the individual in civil and criminal cases. These are: the right to a grand jury; double jeopardy; self-incrimination; due process; and compensation when private property is used for public use.

The self-incrimination clause protects persons accused of committing a crime from being forced to testify against themselves. According to the US judicial system, a person is presumed innocent, and it is the responsibility of the state to prove guilt. Evidence gained from coerced confessions or from the testimony of the accused in a court of law, when their actual words may be used against them, are protected when they “take the Fifth”.

While taking the Fifth is not considered to be an admission of guilt in the legal sense, Donald Trump, former president of the United States, has often derided the Fifth Amendment in the past as the “refuge of mobsters”. At a rally in Iowa in 2016, he said: “The Mob takes the Fifth. If you are innocent, why should you take the Fifth? Only the guilty takes the Fifth.” He has, on numerous rallies during his presidency, railed about the implied guilt of those who take the Fifth.

Last week, Donald Trump, during his testimony in a case of tax fraud brought against him by Letitia James, the State Attorney of New York, invoked his Fifth Amendments rights on a world record count of 440 questions! Maybe Trump was right, after all, when he said that the Fifth Amendment is a “refuge of mobsters” and crooks.

Trump currently has so many charges against him in Georgia (Election Fraud), Washington D. C. (Seditious Conspiracy, Insurrection, Interfering with an Official Procedure and Defrauding the United States), the aforementioned New York trial (Tax and Insurance Fraud, Money Laundering). Add to these the Select Committee investigating into his role on inciting the events leading to the January 6 Insurrection, one’s head starts spinning.

Last week, the spinning increased violently with the news that a search warrant for his resort home at Mar a Lago, Southern Florida, had been issued by Attorney General Merrick Garland, on information that 11 more boxes containing classified documents had been stolen when Trump vacated the White House in January 2021. These documents were being held in an unsecured basement at the resort.

Six months after Trump was forced out of the White House, rumours were rife that Trump had stolen many boxes containing documents, and taken them to Mar a Lago. These documents belonged to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington D.C. When the FBI questioned Trump about the removal of these documents six month later, his lawyers gave up 15 boxes containing White House documents. The Department of Justice gave Trump a free pass on the federal crime of illegal possession of government property, as it was thought that he had surrendered all the stolen documents on request.

Last week, acting on information that there were more documents unlawfully retained at the resort, the FBI, armed with a legally approved search warrant signed by a federal judge, raided the former president’s home. They served the search warrant to the former president three days before. Trump was at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey at the time, but his lawyers were present at all times during the search.

In a statement after the raid, Trump sobbed that his beloved home at Mar a Lago was “under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents. They even broke into my safe.” Reminds me of my European History teacher at Royal. Describing the violence during the French Revolution, he famously said, “Even the windows were broken.”

Trump, ever the victim, never the criminal, wailed that this unlawful raid was yet another witch hunt by the Democrats. He maintained that all the documents confiscated by the FBI were deemed declassified by him with his invisible presidential wand; that even if they were not so declassified, they were surreptitiously planted by the FBI. And, in any event, the documents belonged to him. They did not, they belonged to the National Archives.

His supporters immediately sprang to his defence, echoing his contradictory screams of victimization, that Trump is the target of a shadowy conspiracy, painting the FBI as jackbooted thugs – like the German Gestapo – operating on the orders of a tyrannical federal government.

Florida governor Ron de Santis, the leading non-Trump favourite for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 called it “another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the regime’s political opponents”. Florida Senator Rick Scott, whose telephone was seized by the FBI the day after the Mar a Lago search, indicating that he was suspected of complicity in the storage of stolen documents, described the FBI action as “third world country stuff.” The maniacs of the QAnon (a radical right wing cult), led by Congresswomen Tailor Green and Boebert are demanding the defunding of the FBI, while declaring a call to arms, with threats of an “armed rebellion” and “a civil war.”

Fears of violence have grown after the Mar a Lago search. A man armed with an AR 15 style rifle and a nail gun attacked the FBI office in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was killed by the police after shooting a nail gun at people. No one else was wounded. Another man drove his car into a barricade near the Capitol in Washington DC and killed himself.

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have warned the public of an increase in violent threats posted in social media against federal officials and facilities, including a plan to place a so called “dirty bomb” in front of the FBI headquarters in Washington DC.

Attorney General Garland has received death threats after the search, as has Judge Bruce Reinhart, who is also facing a political firestorm for authorizing the search warrant. In despicable and vengeful desperation, Trump is threatening to release Closed Circuit TV footage at Mar a Lago during the search, which will identify, target and endanger the safety of FBI agents who were just doing their jobs.

After the attack on the FBI office in Ohio, Trump had a message conveyed to Attorney General Garland to the effect that “The country is on fire. What can I do to reduce the heat?” A veiled threat by the arsonist offering to help the firefighters!

Even if these seized documents were mainly collections of Aesop’s Fables and Grimms Fairy Tales, the removal of any documents, classified or not, from the White House by the outgoing president is in itself a federal crime. Not even Aesop or Grimm would have had the imagination to describe the criminality of the haul of documents seized by the FBI from Mar a Lago.

These documents show potential violations of three federal statutes, including the Espionage Act. They included five sets of documents marked “Top Secret SCI” (Sensitive Compartmented Information), granted access only to a handful of senior government executives on a “need-to-know” Top Secret Clearance by the Intelligence Community. These documents are considered germane to the nation’s nuclear arsenal and ongoing CIA investigations, which are deemed to have the potential to threaten the security of the nation.

Beyond belief is that these boxes of Top Secret documents had been lying, unsecured, in a basement of a golf club/resort, accessible to anyone visiting the resort, for over a year.

This will be an added case against Trump, which will be prosecuted along with the multitude of the other cases listed above. Trump is running low on his choice of defence lawyers, not only because of the volume of cases against him, but because few in the legal community wish to represent him as he famously stiffs his lawyers, refusing to pay their bills. Also, his regular lawyers like Rudy Guiliani, Lindsay Graham and Sydney Powers are too busy fighting their own indictments of election fraud and sedition.

The question that immediately arises is not that Trump is guilty of stealing Top Secret documents, but why he did it. And why they were being stored in an insecure basement of his home/resort? There is only one answer which is in perfect sync with the criminality of the former president. These documents are worth billions to our adversaries. Trump, who is beholden to no one but himself, certainly not to his country, who has never forsaken the opportunity to make a quick buck, would have sold them to the highest bidder. North Korean President Kim Jong Un, with whom Trump once claimed to be in love, his erstwhile puppet master Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabian Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS), come to mind as likely customers.

After the Mar a Lago raid, Fox News, as is their wont, rushed to the defence of Mein Fuhrer. Yet again, they try to defend the indefensible, to cover up and Foxsplain away the many instances of Trump’s crimes of extortion, obstruction of justice and sedition. In their eyes, Trump can do no wrong. And they persuade their many old, mainly white audience that Trumpism is the future of the country, against the evidence of their own ears and eyes. They lie, they obfuscate, they misinterpret the news to anger their already racist audience.

It was not always so. During the couple of decades I lived in the USA at the turn of the century, members of the Republican Party, including Fox News, espoused the classical conservative viewpoint. The Republican Party of yore was the Party of Lincoln, of law and order, small government, low taxation on the super wealthy and corporations, minimum anti-pollution ecological regulations, in short, espousing the Ayn Rand philosophy of “Full speed ahead and the devil take the hindmost”. Christianity was never poured down our throats. Live and let live was the order of the day. These opinions were right wing, but not virulently or violently racist and completely devoid of fact.

Although I am of a more progressive bent, I could live with these traditionally conservative policies. America had kind of lost its way and its thriving middle class of the 1970s with Reagan’s “trickle down” supply side economics in the ‘80s. But I was confident that, especially after the progress made by the Obama administration, the nation would finally auto-correct and catch up with the social democratic policies of the rest of the developed world.

I was spectacularly wrong.

Trump came along, and brought to the surface all the fascist prejudices of white supremacy seething during the administration of a black man. And Trump gave them the licence, even great pride to make public and violently act out these radical racist feelings without fear of government retaliation.

Unfortunately, after the Trump base of the radical right and Evangelicals crawled out of the woodwork, traditional conservatives continued to get their daily dose of misinformation from Fox News. They have been radicalized and corrupted by the fact-free propaganda machine of Trumpism. They consume as gospel the daily tariff of lies and criminal propaganda catered by Trump, through Fox News.

Fox News is the modern American counterpart of Goebbels’ German propaganda machine of the 1930s. They still pretend to believe and trumpet the big lie about 2020 election fraud. They continue to make ridiculous excuses for Trump’s criminal acts, bordering on treason. With this latest crime of stealing Top Secret documents, which amounts to espionage and treason, Trump faces his greatest test yet of his ability to survive scandal and escape imprisonment.

Should he succeed, and either he or one of his acolytes take control of Congress in the midterms in November and the White House in 2024, the United States of America would have abandoned the Great Experiment of Democracy born in 1789. Trump’s White Supremacist America would transform the world’s oldest democracy to the largest, most violently corrupt, nuclear-armed Banana Republic the world has even seen.

Hitler is long dead, but his dreams of an ethnically pure, white nation are being kept alive in the United States of America by Trump and his white supremacist Republican cult.