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Licensed to Lie, Sidney Powell
It’s surreal to be writing this review on the day after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. This book focuses on the long slide of our “justice” department into a “conviction machine” by a woman who started her career as a starry-eyed believer in the integrity of the DOJ.
As I observed the events of yesterday, I could not believe that a competent Secret Service would not detect a person on a roof with a rifle within 150 yards of a former president/current leading presidential candidate, especially when people in the crowd were pointing and yelling “there is a guy with a gun up there” before the shots fired.
The current director of the SS is Kimberly Cheatle, former director of security for Pepsi. An expert in protecting soda pop, and excellent an excellent DEI example. As I watched the smallish women agents scurry around the larger Trump, and read about what the current agency, I was unsurprised to find that its primary source of pride (PRIDE?) was that it is “diverse.” One of the agents had a lot of difficulty holstering her weapon, something an average pistol shooter would have no issue with.
Size matters. If you are smaller than the person you are protecting, you can’t effectively shield them with your body. You will find that the average size of an NFL offensive lineman significantly exceeds the size of the QB — one reason that QBs need to be fairly tall so they can throw over their own line.
So that is the surreal part.
The book is excellent and written in a way to hold your attention. If you like lawyer stuff on TV or in the movies, you will likely love it.
The key insight of the book for me is that in the 1963 case Brady vs Maryland, SCOTUS made it clear that it is a constitutional requirement of government prosecutors to turn over any exculpatory evidence to the defense (evidence that may prove innocence or justify actions of the accused).
Why? Because the mission of the Justice Department is JUSTICE, not winning convictions. An inscription of the walls of the DOJ states that: “The United States wins its point whenever justice is done for its citizens in the courts.”
The first case discussed is the corruption case of Ted Stevens, former senator from Alaska, who was charged with “making false statements on disclosure forms” relative to a remodeling project on his house. He paid $165k for the project, but the DOJ threatened the contractor with prosecution for crimes if he did not testify that the value of the remodeling work was $250k. Stevens lost his Senate race, the Democrats got 61-seat control of the senate to help newly elected Barack Obama.
In this case, however, an honest FBI agent came forward at great risk and informed the defense that the DOJ had hidden very relevant Brady information — the real value of the remodeling work was $80k. The case was appealed, and Stevens was exonerated. It took a courageous FBI agent and the honest Judge Brendan Sullivan to finally achieve justice. I personally only remember Stevens being convicted and fitting with my bias against corrupt politicians, I never noticed his innocence on appeal.
As we ought to all be aware, as stated by Judge Sullivan: “Any citizen can be convicted if prosecutors are hell-bent on ignoring the Constitution and willing to present false evidence.” As we saw with Trump, it is even “better” if the case can be tried in front of a hostile jury!
What happened to the corrupt prosecutors? They moved to prominent law firms, other positions in the DOJ, or cushy high-level positions as legal scholars at law schools.
Another case covered is the case of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm and Enron relating to destruction of documents, which turned out to have a direct effect on protestors charged in the J6 protest. The prosecution used an obscure statute that they stretched to cover “attempting to interfere with a government proceeding.” SCOTUS ruled the following:
“To prove a violation of Section 1512(c)(2), the Government must establish that the defendant impaired the availability or integrity for use in an official proceeding of records, documents, objects, or as we earlier explained, other things used in the proceeding, or attempted to do so.”
SCOTUS kicked the J6 cases back to lower courts, which, depending on the level of corruption in the system, will likely vacate the sentences. Much more detail here.
BTW, the DOJ had played the same trick by withholding Brady’s (exculpatory) evidence in the Andersen case. The conviction was overturned by SCOTUS but, of course, Andersen was out of business by then. The case boiled down to Andersen following its own document retention policy, and complying with DOJ demands to produce documents once subpoenaed. However, the DOJ managed to obscure Andersen’s legal retention policy and obtained a conviction on “obstruction of justice.”
The bulk of the book is about a very long-running case tangentially related to the Enron debacle. It boiled down to whether an Enron executive GUARANTEED a fixed rate of return to Merrill Lynch vs just “best efforts” to obtain $12 million profit on a loan relative to barges with generators on them for Nigeria.
In this case, there was no honest judge or whistle-blower. Although having committed no crime, 3 people served prison time and were under legal peril for a decade just so some federal prosecutors could save face, shuffle around to various prestigious jobs, etc. One of the innocent people remains a “convicted felon”, something that has been established today as being often a merit badge, or maybe a “bullseye” to bear.
I close with a quote from page 401 of the book:
“Our system of justice is crying for a culture change. We must return to a system in which prosecutors seek justice more than headlines and in which judges are willing to judge. Our founding fathers created three separate but equal branches of government. They intended the federal courts to serve as a check and a balance on the executive branch, which runs the prosecution, and the legislative branch which makes the laws. Judges are the only immediate and most meaningful ones who can spare a defendant the stress and anxiety of bogus charges or concocted facts. When judges hold prosecutors to the highest standards and provide a fair trial, they do justice.”
Sadly, our once great nation is now so corrupt that finding such judges and supporting the good ones rather than trying to have them removed (see Clarence Thomas) seems impossible.
Only by an act of God was Trump spared yesterday. Perhaps God still has some grace to shed on this corrupt nation, and we can at least be decent again.
Published in Law
The whole system supports the elite and acts to punish the rest of us
We can hope and pray, sir.
I still keep coming back to what the red-haired guy interviewed by the BBC asked while the shooter was on the roof, to the effect: Why is Trump still on the stage?
Because their command and control was lousy.
Fantastic book. Time to dust off and re read.
If I remember correctly, we have Obamacare thanks to Senator Stevens losing his senate race, which he lost due to prosecutorial misconduct.
He spared Trump, so what did God have against the guy who died? He wasn’t worth sparing, apparently.
It’s been probably 10 years since I’ve read the book and recommended it here. The very cautionary tale of the Ted Stevens’ prosecution makes it, at a minimum, well worth the read. But I’m not going to sugarcoat the fact that Powell’s absurd conduct in the wake of the last election makes me question her judgment.
Based on some quick internet research, I don’t think that this is quite correct. You read the book, so you may know better.
I am a litigation lawyer, and while I do not practice criminal law, I am quite familiar with disputes over the value of home improvements. The claim that “Brady information” would show that “the real value of the remodeling work was $80k” seems unlikely to me, because this is typically a matter of opinion.
I found this story from the National Registry of Exonerations, which provides more detail. According to this report, the key fact that the prosecution withheld in the Stevens case was the fact that a key prosecution witness said, in an interview, that the improvements were worth about $80,000, though he later testified that the improvements were worth $250,000.
The way forward will cost all of us something. Every Trump supporter who attended the rally was doing something heroic for our nation. Corey Comperatore and his family paid a huge price. I have to ask, what am I willing to do?
I object to the claim that there was once some sort of golden age when judges and prosecutors were not corrupt.
Sorry, but you have to remember that for the Department of (in)Justice the “(in)” is silent. As it has to be to achieve their goals.
Our scope of understanding the path of history and the role people will or do have in it is infinitely inferior to Gods. If you read history about people like Churchill, Washington, US Grant, and many others, many die around them many times, yet they live. Certainly, an atheist must deny anything like destiny, since their faith is that we live in a random universe with no purpose.
All lives are precious, however not all lives have the same effect on history, and we have no knowledge of that.
Isiah 55 8-9
“For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord.
9 “For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways,
And My thoughts than your thoughts.
If man is the measure of all things, power is justice.
I’m not legally smart enough to understand the difference between “Brady” and other exculpatory evidence. The article you linked says:
“It was later discovered that the prosecution failed to disclose an interview with Allen, and the prosecution knowingly allowed Allen to contradict what he had said in the interview and lie under oath at the trial. In the interview, Allen said the fair market value of the improvements on Steven’s property was about $80,000—sharply different from the $250,000 that he asserted on the witness stand.”
The book indicates that the prosecution threatened Bill Allen with prosecution of sex crimes with a minor to get him to testify to the larger value, and all that was included in the prosecution’s records. That may not be “Brady”, but it sounds bad to me.
I forgot to credit you with recommending this book. THANKS!
When China and Russia have a lower conviction rate than you have a problem.
Somehow, not prosecuting innocent people doesn’t strike me as a huge problem.
The notable exceptions rightfully erode faith in the whole system and destroy civic integrity.
Your trust in statistics from China and Russia is odd. I tend to not trust statistics from our Administrative State, I have much less faith in theirs.
Are you saying, less people are convicted in total, or are you saying that less people charged are convicted?
I’m not sure either country is inclined to keep accurate records of charges, disappearances, executions, incarcerations, etc.
What would their motivation be? It isn’t like the leadership is going to lose an election because they have a “bad” conviction rate.
Seems better directed to Tory, not me.
Good point … still have struggles with who I am responding to sometimes. Sorry.