Phil Williams Commentary: Does anyone think Trump's legal issues aren't coordinated?

Former President Donald Trump was just indicted for a third time in the current election season. I’ve seen Third World power struggles firsthand, and nothing beats this mess.

In the opening months of 2002, the war in Afghanistan was still fresh. Smoke was still rising from some of the most recent bombing runs in the Tora Bora mountains. The Taliban and al-Qaida were on the run. Life in and around Afghanistan was taking on an eerie wait-and-see posture.

My team was inserted into the northern province of Kunduz right after the invasion, and for most of the next year we lived among the Afghan people. We often dressed as Afghans, lived in an Afghan house with our own private guard force, ate their food. It was a very surreal year.

In June 2002, the powers that be decided that there needed to be a transitional government of Afghan leaders to run the country until the first free elections could be held in 2004. The way forward was to conduct a “Loya Jirga.”

Translated from Pashtu, Loya Jirga means “Grand Council” and is a tradition in Afghanistan. It is democracy with a southwest Asian tribal flair. A huge tent was set up in Kunduz. Hundreds of men in traditional Afghan garb representing tribes, councils and communities crowded inside. There was yelling, swearing, posturing, and speeches. There was clamor from the young and deference to the graybeards. Nothing like this had happened for years because of the Taliban, and before that the Soviet Union.

People were trying hard to figure out what self-determination meant. They had been beaten down for so long that just gathering to talk about an election made many of them nervous. It was amazing to watch.

Loya Jirgas occurred in every province. Even the smallest mud-brick dirt-patch communities sent their representatives to the 34 provincial capitals, and they yelled, and cussed, and postured, and gave their speeches. Hazaras, Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks — they all came. For the first time in memory, women were allowed a limited role.

Trouble arose when certain Afghan warlords demanded entry to the Loya Jirga tents and tried to threaten and intimidate the participants.

Eventually the congregation of angry, noisy, Afghan men in Kunduz selected their delegates, who then selected their leader. Those men then represented Kunduz Province in the Great Loya Jirga in Kabul. The former king of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah, who had been in exile since before the Soviet invasion, returned to formally open the ceremonies.

But there was still shouting, cursing and posturing. Weapons were drawn on several occasions. There were walkouts and resignations, nominations and more resignations. It was organized chaos.

From an outsider’s perspective, I had trouble believing they would ever reach a resolution. But it is amazing what people can do when they are given a choice. and eventually Hamid Karzai was elected interim president.

The first free election in Afghanistan was a raucous mess. But nobody went to jail, nobody was shot and nobody tried to send their opponent to jail on trumped up charges.

Twenty-one years later, I am watching the current U.S. election season, and I feel like the post-Taliban Afghans did a better job at electing a government. The modern world has not seen anything like the mess we have going on right now with Trump being indicted again and again.

We expect raucous speech in our elections. We expect over-the-top advertisements and feisty debates. We actually expect ubiquitous sleights of half-truths designed to knock your an opponent's favorable polling numbers down.

What we don’t expect is a coordinated abuse of the justice system designed solely to derail a political opponent’s campaign. Trump has been indicted on the classified documents issue, by New York City DA Alvin Bragg for alleged campaign finance violations and most recently on claims related to events on Jan. 6, 2021, and election irregularities. He's also faced decades-old sexual harassment allegations and now faces additional charges in Georgia for allegedly attempting to insert himself into that state’s 2020 election ballot counting.

Does anyone really believe the timing of these various suits and indictments is not coordinated? Is there anyone who really believes that it took almost three years for the Department of Justice to decide if Trump said something inciteful on Jan. 6? Or that he made claims about elections that some people took issue with?

The bottom line is that where there is this much smoke, it is not a question of whether there is a fire. When you have this much smoke, you have someone fanning the flames. What we are watching is not an attempt at multiple prosecutions, it is a single persecution.

Meanwhile, President Joseph Biden has been on vacation again at his beach house, conveniently out of pocket and not available for questioning. It's an example of people sitting in their castles and sending their minions out to do their bidding.

If tribal leaders in a war zone can come together in a tent and yell and cuss and posture and actually elect their leaders, all while a war is still going on around them and the Taliban’s brutality is still fresh on their minds, then surely we can get a U.S. election completed without looking like a bunch of Afghan warlords trying to intimidate their way into the tent.

But hey, those Afghan warlords have got nuthin’ on this.

Phil Williams is a former state senator from District 10 (which includes Etowah County), retired Army colonel and combat veteran, and a practicing attorney. He previously served with the leadership of the Alabama Policy Institute in Birmingham. He currently hosts the conservative news/talk show Rightside Radio on multiple channels throughout north Alabama. The opinions expressed are his own.    

This article originally appeared on The Gadsden Times: Phil Williams looks at Trump's legal issues