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Law Talk: A Comment on March 27 Episode
“Stunned” is the best word to describe my reaction to Richard Epstein’s stated opinion that all should be forgiven with those Federal employees who abused their power in the FISA/Russian collusion drama for fear of the downside to such a pursuit of justice.
This scandal has roiled our country and had significant financial and emotional costs for the targets involved — not to mention the negative impact on foreign policy over the past two years, of which I am painfully aware, living abroad. But what the heck, let’s mention it. Can you imagine the damage done to our negotiating position with enemies and allies alike who were told by lovelies like former Secretary of State John Kerry just to wait it out, the pesky Trump would be gone soon? Try.
No, sir. In order to make sure that this doesn’t happen again — for at least a decade or so — there must be a cost paid by those complicit in this chicanery. If we cannot control the corrupt actions of Federal employees in responsible positions, there will be a concerted effort by citizens like me to shut it down. By “it,” I mean the FISA courts, and its ilk.
Further, in order to restore a little faith in our justice and IC community, there must be an atonement through the criminal courts for the egregious illegalities. Epstein’s litany of instances of collusion present in the Clinton investigation where no such charges were brought plus the difference in the treatment of those surrounding Clinton who were given immunity, versus those in the ‘Trumposphere’ who had the hounds of legal hell set upon them makes the case for me. As it stands now, I will hold them (IC/Justice) in contempt if there is no redress.
Judge Rosemary Collier has kindly given us a, shall we say, “roadmap” in her scathing opinion on the Obama Justice Department’s use of four contractors to illegally access the NSA database in the unmasking/leaking of info on targeted US citizens to the jackals in the press. These were all violations of the Espionage Act. Pick up the damn baton.
Published in Politics
IF we cannot prosecute them without destroying the Republic, then the Republic is already dead.
Knowingly exposing vital national secrets to foreign hostiles (Russia, China, Iran, …) and endangering American interests and assets (by which I mean people) makes one, in a practical sense, indistinguishable from an enemy spy. Also known as a “traitor,” which, in some people’s mind is a hanging offense.
In contradistinction to Prof Epstein’s question, my question is, “How is the rule of law restored in a country where one party spies on the opposition campaign, subverts justice by aggressively hounding minor malefactors (Manafort, Stone, D’Souza…) and innocents (Flynn, Papadopolous,…) and journalists (Rosen, Attkisson,…) and ordinary citizens exercising their democratic prerogatives (IRS scandal) unless the law is equally applied, no matter how politically disruptive?” I really want to know.
So true. If the actions of a single individual like Lois Lerner can weaponize the IRS without repercussions, the actions of several people to overthrow a duly elected President are dangerous and should be considered nothing short of treason. They should all serve a minimum of 20 years in prison if found guilty.
To roll over and give them the Smollett treatment would be tell the American people “You can get away with it depending on who you know.”
How do you get a jury which will contain in some measure people selected from a pool with a worrying if not omnipresent ends justify the means crusader culture?
The judges themselves are also corrupted by this same culture.
Courts are no longer credible, because the underlying fundamentals are no longer credible. Hence end of the republic.
The abyss is here.
This whole episode has been a solvent on the glue of civilization.
Western: “In contradistinction to Prof Epstein’s question, my question is, “How is the rule of law restored in a country where one party spies on the opposition campaign, subverts justice by aggressively hounding minor malefactors (Manafort, Stone, D’Souza…) and innocents (Flynn, Papadopolous,…) and journalists (Rosen, Attkisson,…) and ordinary citizens exercising their democratic prerogatives (IRS scandal) unless the law is equally applied, no matter how politically disruptive?” I really want to know.”
Very well said.
Okay, let’s say that we give the disgusting perps a pass. Does that then now become a justifiable legal position in the law, sorta like “to big and influential and protected by the media to prosecute”? How is it then used in the future? Who determines it’s use? How would it be used fairly and justly? Or how would you guarantee it’s fair use? Does it become commonplace or is it in actuality already commonplace? Or is it just another compromise in our system of justice to promote our already two tiered system of justice?
from: THE USE AND ABUSE OF POLITICAL ACCOUNTABILITY- The lethal dangers of leaving unpunished the principle of equality before the law. BY BRUCE THORTON AT FRONT PAGE MAG.
“Beyond the partisan divide, we are witnessing the uses and abuses of one of the fundamental building-blocks of political freedom––the assertion of the citizenry’s right to call out and punish those politicians and public servants who exceed the legal limits placed on a political power that is “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
“Like free speech, term limits, and regularly elected or appointed offices, accountability reinforces the central premise of political freedom: that power is not the personal possession of individual men or women, but belongs to the community of citizens as a whole. Accountability checks and deters the innate human tendency to abuse power, and thus to weaken political freedom with tyranny: “That arbitrary power,” as Aristotle defined it, “of an individual which is responsible to no one, and governs all alike, whether equals or betters, with a view to its own advantage, not to that of its subjects, and therefore against their will. No freeman willingly endures such a government.”
“we are witnessing the uses and abuses of one of the fundamental building-blocks of political freedom” – and one which Henry and Richard want to blithely throw away undermining the very foundations of our Rule of Law without a second thought in the interest getting along I guess with our Progressive Betters because well just because. In this rush by these so-called ‘reasonable” moderates to fall all over themselves to give the Big Perps a pass, there is more than a whiff of willing submission to our new overlords and a whiff of knowing cowardice to face the consequences of standing up to tyranny for after all the Progressives are on the right side of History and will win in the end- right?
So, if a Trump minion lies to a FISA court and obtains a National Security Letter to determine what Bernie’s deal is, Richard is okie-doke with that? Because I’m not.
My shorter version is, we’re already in a banana republic. The question is, how do we restore the republic?
I don’t claim to have the answer, but I think 1) not admitting the problem is a surefire way to never solve it and 2) solving it is very likely to induce discomfort. Even children know punishment for crimes is only fair.
Unfortunately, we’re not dealing with children, and progressives have habitually, ruthlessly projected their own malfeasance onto small-r republicans. If we enforce the laws equally, we will be accused of targeting political enemies and driving the country to become a banana republic. For this and other reasons (leftists in control of the commanding heights of the culture), I fear restoration is not possible.
Sorry to be a downer.
You’re right with everything you say, but to not even try is to give up.
Although that might be the way to force the issue about the previous administration. Do what they did. If the Dems raise a stink, that forces the question…
I was a practicing (actual, in the courtroom, not just on billboards and TV studios) trial lawyer (I still use the term with pride despite what some have done to destroy that image) for most of my life, so if I seem a bit heated in my comments, I hope I may be forgiven for making a few comments about some of the miscreants we are discussing here. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I consider Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, James Clapper, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, James Comey, Andrew McCabe,Peter Sztrok, to be some of the most dishonest, sleazy, unethical people in American history, and for anyone to suggest, even if it is done “in jest”, that any of them — especially the Queen of Sleaze herself, Clinton, to “get a pass” because they are among the glitterati who have deemed themselves our “betters”, to use Dr. Sowell’s term, is quite simply incomprehensible to me. Hillary Clinton committed, among many other offenses,one of the most criminal acts in the book-she knowingly participated in the destruction of evidence she knew to be under subpoena or, at the very least, under an order to preserve such evidence. She, on her own ipse dixit, decided to destroy 30,000 emails. She transmitted on an insecure server at the very least several messages which were marked for security purposes. If her name were not Clinton, and she had done any one of the litany of offenses outlined in the grotesque performance of James Comey on July 5, 2016, she would have been under Federal indictment that afternoon.
All of this sends a message, quite loud and clear, to all the “nobody people” I wrote about recently that they simply do not count and it also sends another kind of message entirely to “ethically challenged” “public” servants like Kim Foxx that they are free to blatantly give their friends (see, e.g., Jussie Smollett and his Obama-connected “fixer”) the same kind of “pass”.
The Rule of Law is under attack; dual systems of Justice will be its death knell.
Sincerely, Jim
This, more than anything, shocked me. I’m a lawyer and have been through two Federal criminal investigations (one involving Bob Mueller), and know full well that if I’d ever walked into DOJ and said, “here are the documents I think relevant and I’ve destroyed the ones I didn’t think relevant”, an indictment would be quickly forthcoming.
I had just finished the above comment when I read Victor Davis Hanson’s piece of this morning entitled Clinton Projection Syndrome which contained some of the very same things I had expressed about Clinton, who I saw referred to fairly recently as Felonia von Pantsuit, and I pass this article along as it is not often that one’s ideas are so quickly reinforced by a scholar of the eminence of Prof. Hanson. Here are some of his comments:
“Given the Steele travesty and other past scandals, it is inexplicable that Clinton has not been indicted.”
“In truth, Clinton was at the heart of the entire Russian collusion hoax. Even after the election, she kept fueling it to blame Russia-Trump conspiracies for her stunning defeat in 2016. Unable to acknowledge her own culpability as a weak and uninspiring candidate, Clinton formally joined the post-election “resistance” and began whining about collusion. That excuse seemed preferable to explaining why she blew a huge lead and lost despite favorable media coverage and superior funding.
“For much of her professional life, Hillary Clinton had acted above and beyond the law on the assumption that as the wife of a governor, as first lady of the United States, as a senator from New York, as secretary of state and as a two-time candidate for the presidency, she could ignore the law without worry over the consequences.”
Amen!
I heard HRC suggested the “Chinese should release Trump’s tax returns” which reveals what a dope this broad is even when she tries to make a snarky analogy.
-All the taxing bodies to which Trump and the Trump Org are responsible to file have Trump’s tax returns.
Whereas, HRC deleted her own e-mails which were under subpoena with Congress, and presumably at least should have been under subpoena with the FBI, when the FBI was working on that “matter”(MidTerm Exam). A “matter” which somehow miraculously disappeared not unlike HRC’s e-mails.
-It has never even been alleged Trump has ever been hacked where some nefarious actor could even possess Trumps anything much less Trump’s tax returns.
Whereas, through HRC’s selfish arrogant idiocy of doing the business of Secretary of State on a private unsecured server has left open the high probability classified materials were hacked by hostile foreign adversaries. Not to mention these same adversaries may very well possess whatever this devious knumbskull HRC was concealing when when she destroyed her 30k e-mails.
So far, it has proven to be true.
Sad but true. It cannot continue to be so, or we have no more Justice system worth the name.
I will permit myself, however, the faintest glimmer of hope, as I have seen, in Attorney General William Barr, the closest thing we have had to an actual Attorney, in the sense formerly thought of as a real lawyer, General, who, in my most humble opinion, may be our true, last, best hope of bringing these street thugs to Justice.
@melissaosullivan, I was most interested in your comment about the Senior Judge on the FISA Court and her opinion and I have two questions– (a) may I have the cite to the opinion you mention and (b) where, in your opinion, is the outrage of this Court, which seems to be a Federal Court unlike any I have ever dealt with in a career at the Bar which involved a great deal of civil litigation in the Federal system, over the open, obvious, blatant, in-your-face contempt of their court by all the luminaries who signed the four warrants for surveillance? I have been mentally writing a post on that subject and would be most interested in your views.
By the way, thank you for this most interesting and thought provoking post.
Sincerely, Jim
If that’s the case, I hope he has good security.
The text of the opinion can be found here. The section dealing with improper NSA searches of the database and improper access by four unidentified FBI contractors starts at page 80. However, unlike the summary of the decision in the OP, I did not find the decision itself to contain any information addressing whether information regarding the Obama’s administration’s political opponents was improperly accessed and distributed, nor did I read the text as the Court being “outraged”, though it clearly disapproved of the behavior and the faulty procedures. The decision also is not concerned with the Carter Page FISA warrants.
Folks, I hear what you are saying: no one should be above the law. Agree wholeheartedly.
However, Henry is right. Perfect justice would be just too expensive. The Dems & MSM have recently turned virtually every action by the current administration into a three-alarm crisis. Prosecute Hillary or Obama and they would create a firestorm of Hamburg/Dresden/Tokyo intensity. .
It seems to me a way to minimize the damage is to name Obama and Clinton as unindicted co-conspirators, while prosecuting all the others to the fullest extent of the law. If even very senior people – and a lot of pretty big fish were involved in this scandal – are sent to jail, it would deter others in such positions from going along with something similar in the future. (Ok, maybe just a decade or so, but still very beneficial).
Ah. I get what you’re saying. “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”
Kahless himself said, “destroying an Empire to win a war is no victory.”
“And ending a battle to save an Empire is no defeat.”
Just throwing that in there. Although I think Hillary and Barack, among others, deserve to be strung up by their toenails. Or something.
I agree about Obama.
HRC is in fact guilty of violating felony statutes and the Feds chose not to indict her in the infamous Comey non-indictment, indictment following the scandalous Mid Term Exam
exonerationinvestigation of HRC.It would simply be a matter of reopening her case then having her negotiate a guilty plea … she would not necessarily need to go to prison …. David Petraeus never went to prison (ie: 2 years probation and $100k fine).
Mr. Beare,
I’m not trying to be cute, but I would like to frame a question to you in a deliberately unusual way. (I’m trying to seem as perceptive as you were in your post without revealing how late in the game I was struck by the qui bono question. Thanks if you will humour me.)
In the (often) fictional world in which I concoct stories such as this one, if I (as the novelist) were to reveal “Dems and MSM” actors who were under the weight of a grand-extortion scheme predicated on illegally obtained (classified) e-mails, therefore, the “expensive justice” you mention is actually Dems and MSMs just trying to clear their overhead…would you find that an exciting, and unexpected twist in my fiction novel, or would you have already figured that out early on.
If this let bygones be bygones attitude included, an admission of guilt by HRC, the reimbursement of legal fees for all those caught up in the Special Counsel probe, as well as pardons/commutations for all the poor bastards stupid enough to have worked for Trump only to become the recipient of the most brutal financial proctological exam ever performed on a human subject …. then maybe we can negotiate.
Watching the (D)/MSM complex flit from one liar liar, worst human being ever, prison prison narrative from one day to the next … I get the sense the (D)’s are in no mood to negotiate.
Mr. Carter,
What you propose would make a very interesting story. And a plausible one, too. I have been wondering for some time why so many otherwise intelligent people have been so agitated about our president for so long. I can’t believe it is a vast conspiracy: there are too many of them. Being blackmailed might explain it. Hell, you might even be onto something for real.
The biggest problem I have with some kind of negotiated settlement especially with Hillary, that includes no jail time, is that regular people who do a lot less, might get a significant amount of jail time.
Right point, wrong dilemma.
Investigating and–if warranted–prosecuting individuals that violated laws on the security of TS//SAP information, selling influence, using the surveillance apparatus of the state on American citizens, making accusations of Treasonous/criminal deeds for political gain is absolutely necessary. And I left out a lot of the probable crimes so as not to make this comment longer than a receipt from CVS.
We’re not asking for “perfect justice,” here. We’re asking for achieving the minimum standard for justice.
Mishandling classified information no joke. You don’t get a mulligan if you don’t take care of it. They made me sign a copy of the Espionage Act every year and initial each page. If I had ever done what Hillary did with her emails, I’d still be in the joint.
@percival: and that’s what made clear that the whole thing was a deliberate scam. Comey’s comments on his 05 July press conference were blatant lies. I’m not a lawyer, but I guaran-damn-tee you I know the legal ins and outs of storing, sending, carrying, transmitting and protecting classified information.
What is it Mr. Comey: are you incredibly incompetent, a liar or just a coward?
Or is it a hat trick?
Fellas, I never said Clinton and maybe Obama shouldn’t go to jail.
My point is that these people have been the darlings of the Democratic party and 90% of the main stream media for a decade. Prosecuting either would be cast as a Stalinist act of political revenge by the Dems and many or most in the MSM, and literally tens of millions of our fellow citizens would believe that to be the case. Congress would cease to function (not that it is all that functional now); the ranks of violent “antifa” would swell, etc.
Do you doubt that the Dems and the MSM would mostly stoke the hysteria rather than trying to tamp it down? Do you think this would be good for the country?
In my judgment, it is far, far better to let a couple of weasels escape justice than to try this experiment and find out.
@arthurbeare, I’m not saying you’re wrong. But Democrats will be on a war footing regardless. Better to let them know that this does not set a precedent (you think if the weasels walk it won’t be seen as a green light to commit these crimes in the out-years?) and that we are willing to gird our loins and duke it out for the sake of the rule of law.
Too, this may well be the best time to have this fight. The press has so soiled its credibility that the effects of hysteria-stoking will be minimized.