The Democrats finally got their ounce of Donald Trump’s flesh in a Manhattan courtroom last week but like Shakespeare’s Antonio in “The Merchant of Venice,” the bloodlust may be their own undoing. 

The guilty verdict should be reversed by the New York appellate or federal courts and likely will be at some point — but perhaps only after the clear election interference objective of the Democrats has been met. 

Never before have state prosecutors charged a defendant with federal election reporting violations (state courts don’t have jurisdiction) and never have non-disclosure agreements been found by a jury in any criminal trial to be a reportable federal campaign expenditure.  

In a game of legal hide the ball, Trump was denied the time-honored constitutional right to notice of the charges against him and to a unanimous jury verdict on those charges. 

Instead, the jury was allowed to cherry-pick non-unanimously from a menu of “additional charges” — unproven federal campaign, tax and other bookkeeping charges — that Alvin Bragg needed in order to manufacture a felony out of an expired misdemeanor bookkeeping violation.   

When independent counsel Ken Starr pursued President Clinton criminally for covering up an affair, Democrats cried foul, arguing that prosecutors were using the law highly selectively to go after a political opponent — the classic definition of lawfare.

How things have situationally changed in a few short years. 

What has changed most is the industry of lawfare.

Democrats were dumbfounded by Trump’s 2016 nomination and subsequent election. 

President Obama’s Department of Justice commenced controversial counterintelligence investigations of Trump campaign officials and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign paid for a bogus “Steele Dossier” claiming Trump to be a Russian mole. 

Tellingly, Bragg never even considered prosecuting Clinton for misreporting this ill-begotten hit job as a “legal expense” even though the parallels to the Trump case are eerily similar. 

In Clinton’s case, the FEC appropriately fined the Clinton campaign a modest sum — which is what, at most, should have happened in Trump’s NDA case. 

But the original sin of the Steele Dossier birthed the new era of lawfare for the Democrats. 

As the allegations of Trump’s Russia collusion grew during Trump’s presidency, liberal cable networks found a new salve for their previously slumbering ratings, mainstream print grew new subscribers and previously obscure left wing legal Cassandras got book deals and television contracts.

Never mind the absence of any actual evidence of a Trump criminal conspiracy.   

For the Democratic party, the fantasy of Trump’s criminal relationship with the Russians became near obsession during his presidency. 

Democrat leaders like Adam Schiff promised hard evidence of the criminality, and liberal television hosts breathlessly parroted supposed confirmatory nuggets in their breathless dawn to dusk coverage.

A Columbia Journalism Review investigation later exposed how this culture of opinion journalism had replaced the more serious institution of independent journalism moored by facts, independent investigation and skepticism.   

When special counsel Robert Mueller exculpated Trump on the Russian collusion but found four possible instances of obstruction of justice, the left, without apology, just moved on.

The new charges may have been enough to keep the show going, but the cynicism was unmasked by the fact that the Biden DOJ and all the liberal pundits seem to forget about it once Biden was in office and in position to do something about it.  

This is not a defense of Trump’s conduct.

I was very critical publicly of Trump’s failure to demand that Jan. 6th rioters stand down, his far-fetched theories under the 12th Amendment to overturn certified 2020 election results and his classified documents’ misdeeds. 

And there should be appropriate consequences for each.

But the bigger issue is the somnolent groupthink on the left that endorsed the new legal authoritarianism blinded by bloodlust in the pursuit of lawfare.  

The Jan. 6 riots occurred over three years ago.

Are we really to believe there are no politics behind the DOJ decision (and that of Georgia’s ethically controversial Fani Willis) to delay prosecution until just months before the 2024 election? 

Is it really okay with Democrats when partisan prosecutors like Alvin Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James — deeply conflicted by their political ambitions — use the immense power of prosecutors to go after political opponents with unprecedented applications of the law?

Like Shakespeare’s Antonio, Democrats will be unlikely to cabin their ounce of flesh.

They will have less ground to stand on if, for example, a Trump DOJ comes after a former President Biden for his mishandling of classified documents, or Democratic candidates for inevitable campaign reporting disclosure errors.   

Hunter Biden’s prosecution for allegedly lying on federal gun applications — a case that would normally never have been brought — may just be the first instance of the boomerang. 

And as the lawfare floodgates open, the irony may be that in the Manhattan case the Democrats unleashed a profound threat to our democracy of their own.   

Julian Epstein is the former Democratic Chief Counsel to the House Judiciary Committee.