‘Get Trump’ effort fizzles

OPINION:

The extraordinary efforts to jail and bankrupt former President Donald Trump aren’t having the expected impact. An NBC News poll released over the weekend shows President Biden’s popularity sliding. In a fair fight, Mr. Biden is clobbered by his likely rival with only the prospect of imprisoning Mr. Trump offering hope to the Big Guy’s chances, and barely so.

Against this political backdrop, the Manhattan jury’s recent $83 million verdict against Mr. Trump makes more sense. E. Jean Carroll set the stage in 2019 when she wrote a book asserting publicly for the first time that Mr. Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s. Mr. Trump has denied the claim.

It’s a classic he-said, she-said. At trial, Ms. Carroll had only her word to back the accusation — no security camera footage, no physical evidence and no witnesses. Jurors weighed the facts under the loose legal standard of whether the allegation was more likely true than not to conclude there was no rape. Even so, they awarded Ms. Carroll $2 million in case some kind of sexual misconduct potentially happened.

Mr. Trump has maintained his innocence, saying the charges were part of a “hoax” meant to sell her book. For this, he was hauled back in to court for a trial weighing whether these denials constituted defamation.

It would seem fair to deny a rape charge with a jury verdict in hand saying there was no rape, but such is not the case when you’re up against the Democratic machine. New York passed the Adult Survivors Act to override the statute of limitations so that lawsuits like the one against Mr. Trump could be filed.

U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan had to stand language on its head to achieve his preferred outcome. He wrote, “The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”

The judge’s ruling recalls then-President Bill Clinton’s famous equivocation, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” Appropriately enough, Judge Kaplan owes his present job to Mr. Clinton.

So it comes as no surprise that billionaire Reid Hoffman is bankrolling Ms. Carroll’s case. This is the left-wing activist who spent over $600,000 assisting Fusion GPS, the Democratic law firm that fabricated the Steele dossier, which in turn invented a lurid tale about Mr. Trump cavorting with ladies of the evening in a Russian hotel room.

The dossier spread these lies as if they were true, but the best efforts of thoroughly anti-Trump FBI agents couldn’t find a single true sentence in the dossier. At this point, there’s no way of knowing decades after the fact whether Ms. Carroll is telling the truth, but her willing collaboration with a dishonest political machine undermines her complaint.

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh faced similar evidence-free accusations against his character in his confirmation hearing, and one of his accusers eventually confessed that she lied in the hopes of stopping the right-of-center judge from taking a spot on the high court.

The machine’s efforts failed then. Let’s hope they fail again.