(LifeSiteNews) –– Weaponizing the legal process is not simply about stopping Donald Trump – it aims at the permanent capture of U.S. power by the Deep State. 

According to U.S. lawyer Robert Barnes, the latest legal measures deployed against former President Donald Trump are aimed at supplanting the powers of the presidency – permanently. 

His analysis, which aligns with that of political prisoner Julian Assange, is that the use of state secrets is a means of undermining presidential authority forever. 

If the precedent of making so-called state secrets more significant than the person of the president is established, this means that any president at any time will be vulnerable to prosecution under the 1917 Espionage Act. 

Trump is of course the first president to be charged under the Act, for the possession of documents which he as president had the unique constitutional power to declassify. 

The case would therefore remove this presidential privilege, leading to a situation where future presidents would seek protection from prosecution by choosing to remain unaware of anything the permanent government considered sensitive. 

It is, therefore, a means of keeping democracy out of the business of politics. 

Legal precedent

Barnes points out that the Act has been used in political cases beforehand. Eugene Debs, the famous socialist, was indicted under the Act in 1919 for his activities in opposing the United States’ dubious entry into the First World War. 

Debs, opposed to the propagandizing of Americans into the very kind of “foreign entanglements” and European wars against which the founding fathers warned, was branded a traitor for his opposition to a state-controlled disinformation campaign whose legacy shapes the western world today. In fact, the Espionage Act is being used to indict Julian Assange, whose crime is to have revealed some of the lies and sins of the secret state in the promotion of perpetual war. 

Secrets and the state

Barnes repeats the central argument which saw Julian Assange dedicate himself to the exposure of government misdeeds – that state level crime is protected by secrets, and revealing those secrets is the only way to stop it. 

…Exposing those Secrets became part of [Assange’s] life mission – but his bigger political philosophical point was that if you want to take out deep states around the world take out secrets.

Why does this matter? 

Assange, whose life has been ruined for his exposure of the shocking misdeeds of governments, strongly believed that “[i]f wars can be started with lies, they can be stopped by truth.”  

He was scandalized by the Iraq war of 2003, which was sold by the same propaganda methods developed a century ago by Woodrow Wilson’s Committee for Public Information.  

He not only revealed many of the scandalous practices of the Deep State, but also exposed them as media-glamourized mediocrities. 

Most power structures are deeply incompetent, staffed by people who don’t really believe in their institutions and that most power is the projection of the perception of power.

And the more secretively it works, the more incompetent it is, because secrecy breeds incompetence, while openness breeds competence, because one can see and can compare actions and see which one is more competent.

To keep up these appearances, institutional heads or political heads such as presidents spend most of the time trying to walk in front of the train and pretending that it is following them, but the direction is set by the tracks and by the engine of the train.

Understanding that means that small and committed organizations can outmaneuver these institutional dinosaurs, like the State Department, the NSA or the CIA.

If extradited to the USA he faces 175 years in prison due to his indictment under the 1917 Espionage Act. The reason for this is simple. Assange spoke truth to the powerless. 

The power of the truth

Barnes says that the danger posed by Assange to the Deep State is simple to explain and is genuine. 

[To] remove their capacity to keep secrets is to remove their ability to sustain secrets. Do that and the core of their power collapses.

Instead, the legal process here is designed to prevent anyone – even the president of the United States – from ever revealing anything ever again. It is a move to consolidate power against the threat of accountability.  

“This case is the Deep State versus democracy, not the U.S. vs Donald Trump,” says Barnes, explaining how if this indictment succeeds in convicting Trump, it will destroy democracy in America.

Such an outcome, Barnes adds, “…flips the Constitutional order and creates a legal, administrative, bureaucratic State who can use the power of secrets to elevate themselves over… the elected representatives of the people – and in that process completely contort distort and destroy the entire constitutional framework.”

It makes the “elected embodiment of the people” a hostage to those with the worst secrets to keep, insists Barnes.

Far from a conspiracy behind closed doors, the process is openly understood as battle for the control of America. As was mentioned in the video interview with Barnes, the British Daily Telegraph published a brief article on June 2, titled The Deep State is Gearing up to Fight a Second Trump Presidency. 

One secret is certainly open – this is a fight for the soul of America.   

Strategy backfires

Barnes claims that the whole process is resulting in the re-evaluation of Donald Trump amongst voters any candidate needs to win the presidency. 

“In prior elections of campaigns of people who got targeted like this, the communities that have a history of being wrongfully harassed by the legal system tend to rally to someone who’s under attack in the legal system,” says Barnes. 

He notes:

…that’s disproportionately African-American and Latino voters in the United States of a younger generation especially…

So Trump is surging amongst the very group they needed to keep him from gaining votes with because they’re weaponizing the system in such an open overt way they’ve made the billionaire Trump look like the little guy Underdog and that’s why they’re in deep trouble politically.

Barnes thinks there is unlikely to be a verdict before election day, suggesting that the verdict may be delivered on the day of the election itself – for maximum impact.  

This, he notes, is a risky strategy, given that Trump cannot be prevented from running in the election by these charges, and even if imprisoned has a right to be on the ballot. Of course, should he win the election, he can pardon himself before the unlikely event of any federal judge choosing to prosecute a newly-elected president. 

Overreach?

Barnes expands his analysis with a comparison to the war in Ukraine, which he claims is characterized by the same overreach as the ambitious legal project to stop Trump, and make the presidency the permanent captive of the Deep State. 

If election day is verdict Day the Deep state is going to lose badly, because they overreached and overstepped.

There’s  an analogy between the Ukrainian military operation and deep State attacks on Trump: they keep overreaching, they keep overstepping – and it keeps backfiring.

The scaled-back objectives of the now abandoned Ukrainian offensive speak for themselves. U.S. war aims in Ukraine have shrunk from regime change in Russia, to the retaking of Crimea and the Donbass, to the temporary capture of a few villages in the defensive “grey zone.”

In like fashion, the contact with reality is destroying the plans of the Deep State war faction – as their attempts to isolate and destroy Trump are seeing him attract wider and more convinced support from the American people. 

Overall, Barnes considers this indictment a doomed attempt to subvert the American Republic to the will of a shady elite distinguished by a record of spectacular failure. 

Barnes maintains that it has to be Trump in 2024. Due to the corruption of the Democratic Party, he believes it is unlikely that Robert F. Kennedy will secure the nomination.  

As was noted later in the video, if Trump is defeated and jailed, we can forget about people like Kennedy, as if he or anyone like him were to secure the presidency, the Deep State would no longer be in control at all. 

It is a parlous state to be in, but Barnes appears convinced that the miscalculations of an arrogant and incompetent permanent bureaucracy all but guarantee the failure of this, their latest and boldest gambit to sweep the table. 

In the next presidential election, the winner takes all.