Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed his indictment over the $130,000 alleged hush payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels proves a double standard in the justice system.
And he's right, wrote former GOP operative Tim Miller for The Bulwark on Thursday — but not in the way Trump thinks.
As it turns out, several years ago, a private investigator was prosecuted for simply trying to look up the former president's tax returns, and treated far worse than anything the legal system has thrown at Trump so far, Miller said.
Jordan Hamlett's problems began a few weeks before the 2016 election when, on a whim, he tried to use Trump's Social Security number — which had been leaked publicly by the hacker collective Anonymous — to access an Internal Revenue Service's online lookup tool to see if it would spit out Trump's tax returns.
Hamlett said he didn't intend to release the information publicly. He even tried to message the IRS, alerting them to the fact that this process wasn't secure and someone could do what he did for malicious purposes, to which they never responded. And, anyway, the widget failed to return any tax information, so he gave up.
"All that changed a few weeks later when an undercover agent who had been pretending to hire Hamlett for P.I. work to track an imaginary cheating spouse asked him to come to a Baton Rouge hotel for a purported meeting about the job," wrote Miller.
"When Hamlett arrived at the hotel, he was greeted not by a prospective client but a phalanx of FBI officers who questioned him about his alleged plot to receive Trump’s tax returns. At the time, the bureau wasn’t aware if he had been successful and 'feared a public release of Trump’s tax returns could influence the election.'"
Miller added: "During his humiliating hotel lobby interrogation, Hamlett found out that there was another group of agents at his home. They had booted down the door, overturned many of his belongings, and confiscated his computer equipment in a vain attempt to identify additional criminal behavior."
He was charged with false representation of a Social Security number and ultimately served 15 months in prison.
“They flat-out said they want to make an example out of me. Everyone was scrambling to make an example out of me,” he told Miller.
All of this is in contrast with how Trump, accused of almost three dozen counts of felony falsification of business records from a hush payment to conceal information from voters, was allowed to fly himself to New York for arraignment, has swarms of politicians and media pundits leaping to his defense, and is broadly expected to be able to continue his presidential campaign, Miller wrote.
"[Hamlett's] conclusion from the whole affair is that maybe some of those upset about justice and the law have a point, just not the one that they think they have," wrote Miller. "What Hamlett learned the hard way is that Trump used to have it right when he talked about the criminal justice system. Back when he recognized he was the beneficiary, not the victim of our societal mores. The truth is, when you’re not a star, they don’t let you do it. Even if your intentions are good."
