If the Justice Department Is Going to Prosecute Political ‘Frauds’...

The Justice Department’s effort to define former President Donald Trump’s false claims about election results as criminal fraud relies on a brand-new legal standard that could easily be applied to Joe Biden —and also to another of his presidential predecessors.

The Journal’s brilliant Kimberley Strassel writes about the Biden Justice Department’s special counsel Jack Smith and his indictment of Mr. Trump for engaging in “a conspiracy to defraud the United States.” Ms. Strassel writes:

A politician can lie to the public, Mr. Smith concedes. Yet if that politician is advised by others that his comments are untruthful and nonetheless uses them to justify acts that undermine government “function,” he is guilty of a conspiracy to defraud the country...

And why limit the theory to election claims? In 2014 the justices held unanimously that President Barack Obama had violated the Constitution by decreeing that the Senate was in recess so that he could install several appointees without confirmation. It was an outrageous move, one that Mr. Obama’s legal counselors certainly warned was a loser, yet the White House vocally insisted the president had total “constitutional authority” to do it. Under Mr. Smith’s standard, that was a lie that Mr. Obama used to defraud the public by jerry-rigging the function of a labor board with illegal appointments.

What’s the betting someone told President Biden he didn’t have the power to erase $430 billion in student loan debt. Oh, wait! That’s right. He told himself. “I don’t think I have the authority to do it by signing with a pen,” he said in 2021. The House speaker advised him it was illegal: “People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not,” Nancy Pelosi said. Yet Mr. Biden later adopted the lie that he did, and took action to defraud taxpayers by obstructing the federal function of loan processing—until the Supreme Court made him stop.

What about the signature consumer and taxpayer abuse perpetrated by Messrs. Obama and Biden? In October of 2013 Lisa Myers and Hannah Rappleye reported for NBC News:

President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.

Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience “sticker shock.”

This column’s most celebrated alumnus, James Taranto, noted at the time how the false marketing of the Affordable Care Act in important ways was worse than a consumer fraud carried out by a private firm:

The ObamaCare fraud was conducted irrespective of the volition of the “customers.” Obama and his compatriots were able to carry out their scam merely by twisting arms in Congress’s back rooms.

Mr. Taranto also shared comments from reader Kathleen Crowley:

My health-care policy was cancelled, and the Obama administration’s explanation that policies are being cancelled because they were “substandard” and issued by “bad apple” insurers is absolutely not true.

I had a very comprehensive policy, with a large and solid national health insurer, and the reasons my policy was not “ACA compliant” is because I now have to pay for maternity coverage, general pediatric coverage and pediatric dental coverage, as prescribed by ObamaCare. I’m 55 years old, have no children and don’t plan to have children...

ObamaCare is forcing people to purchase a product that they don’t want and can’t ever use. I do not need maternity or pediatric services but have to purchase them. The new policy that would have been “comparable” to my current policy is more expensive with higher deductibles.

Several days later in that fall of 2013, Chuck Todd of NBC News reported:

President Obama said Thursday that he is “sorry” that some Americans are losing their current health insurance plans as a result of the Affordable Care Act, despite his promise that no one would have to give up a health plan they liked.

“I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me,” he told NBC News...

Today Mr. Obama’s defenders might say that he should remain in the clear despite the Biden Justice Department’s new standard because Mr. Obama was merely abusing millions of individual insurance customers, not undermining government function. But the Obama falsehoods had other consequences beyond removing choices and raising costs for particular patients.

CNN’s Jake Tapper reported in 2014:

As Congress voted on the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, in 2010, one of the bill’s architects, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, told a college audience that those pushing the legislation pitched it as a bill that would control spiraling health care costs even though most of the bill was focused on something else and there was no guarantee the bill would actually bend the cost curve.

In recent days, the past comments of Gruber – who in this 2010 speech notes that he “helped write the federal bill” and “was a paid consultant to the Obama administration to help develop the technical details as well” – have been given renewed attention. In previously posted but recently noticed speeches, Gruber discusses how those pushing the bill took part in an “exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter,” taking advantage of voters’ “stupidity” to create a law that would ultimately be good for them.

Of course, Mr. Obama employed hugely consequential falsehoods because so many Americans wisely doubted that expanding government-run insurance coverage would ultimately be good for them—either as patients or as taxpayers. Their skepticism has been vindicated as the era after the implementation of ObamaCare yielded disappointing results in terms of life expectancy even before the disasters resulting from the Covid political panic. As for government function, ObamaCare failed to contain costs as promised but instead has simply taken its place alongside the other entitlement programs currently driving the United States toward financial ruin. If unsustainable debt doesn’t undermine the functioning of the federal government, what does?

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James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival” and also the co-author of “Borrowed Time: Two Centuries of Booms, Busts and Bailouts at Citi.”

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(Teresa Vozzo helps compile Best of the Web.)

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