Excerpt:

With the arraignment of Donald Trump on charges brought under the Espionage Act, America’s cold civil war pitting blue cities against red regions has gotten considerably hotter. But that’s inevitable when you manipulate the nation’s laws to designate the leader of a movement representing one half of the country a traitor.

...But to others, the 37-count indictment looks like a reboot of the 2020 letter signed by 51 former U.S. spies claiming Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. The package is so big it’s got to be real, when in fact it’s just Bubble Wrap all the way down.

Debating the indictment’s details—the DOJ’s legal theory, which documents do and do not belong to Trump under the Presidential Records Act, etc.—is a ritualized expression of faith that the law is still impartial and the justice system is in the hands of serious men and women, devoted law enforcement officials who even when it looked most hopeless over the last seven years never once veered from their mission and now finally got their man. But it’s just playacting, for the stark fact is this: The never-ending campaign to get Trump is evidence the country has gone mad.

Enacted in 1917 to criminalize antiwar activism, the statute is a political weapon designed to bypass the Constitution and prosecute the ruling party’s domestic opponents. The fact that Trump has been charged with crimes under the Espionage Act is evidence that the world’s oldest democracy has fallen into the hands of a corrupt and pathological ruling faction that has turned federal law enforcement into a people’s commissariat serving a cohort of performative elites who still harbor the fantasy that a former American president is a Russian spy.

The appropriate legal framework through which to view the indictment is election interference—it’s the latest leg in the Department of Justice’s ongoing effort to bar Trump from the White House that began in 2016.

For the 2020 election cycle, federal law enforcement used the same plot points for the same purpose: to shield the Democratic candidate from revelations of corruption that might thwart his chances. The FBI was especially concerned about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which it had taken into its possession in 2019. To prevent the voting public from learning of the evidence of Biden family corruption sourced to the laptop, the bureau set up a censorship task force and labeled reports about it “Russian disinformation”...

So the Trump indictment is a cover-up for Biden as well as an early effort to tilt the 2024 vote away from Trump. But it’s part of a second storyline, too, and though it intersects in places with the DOJ thread, it represents something significantly more dangerous than one political faction turning the spy services against the other faction. After all, that’s a standard feature of all third-world security regimes, but few caudillos risk setting the stage for domestic conflict.

Charging Trump under the Espionage Act plays on a theme first developed by Barack Obama when he ordered CIA Director John Brennan to produce an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) concerning Russian interference in the 2016 election. Published just before Obama’s term ended, the January 2017 report concluded, without evidence, that Putin had sought to help Trump win the election. Sourced to the brazen fabrication known as the Steele dossier, the ICA anchored the collusion narrative and served as the foundation for Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation of Trump and his aides.

Obama’s strategy worked: The Russian collusion narrative crippled Trump’s presidency. More importantly, he used the authority of the executive branch to declare Trump’s presidency, and by extension the political movement that supported it, illegitimate.

Thus the Espionage Act charges are crucial to advancing the traitor narrative. Obama tipped you off more than six years ago that Trump wasn’t really American and here are the charges to prove it: He betrayed U.S. secrets because he’s working on behalf of a foreign power.

That narrative is due to be reinforced when the special counsel charges Trump, as seems nearly certain, with offenses related to January 6. After all, the point of referring to the raucous and sometimes violent three-hour-long demonstration at the Capitol as an insurrection more dangerous to our domestic peace than 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and the Civil War wasn’t just to drive news coverage. And charging January 6 defendants with seditious conspiracy wasn’t just to enhance their prison sentences. No, the purpose was to bulk out the narrative that Trump and the voters who favor him are in a fundamental way not American.