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No One, Other Than Trump Supporters, Is Going to Jail: Change My Mind
Sorry, but that is likely true, to the deep peril of our constitutional republic. I appreciate Attorney General Barr’s willingness to step up, knowing he would be trashed, yet I doubt he has the sort of strength and clarity of purpose to enforce equal justice. Susan Quinn was right on point about the detestable Andrew Weissmann, who should have been disbarred long ago. So what is to be done?
As another writer here on Ricochet observed earlier this year in “Barr Sets the Bar:”
At least 10 years now, maybe 20, we’ve needed an ethical, tough son-of-a-gun with the mental acuity of a SCOTUS justice in the AG chair. Boys and girls, I think we’ve got one, one who will do the right thing at the right time for the right reason. An AG who can balance what the law requires with what the country needs to know, no more and no less…all of which makes him an AG I can believe. Here’s hoping we can keep him long enough to finish the much-needed clean-up on Aisle 9.
I’m thinking everyone will be disappointed. AG Barr painted a scenario several times in the interview of self-deluded members of government sincerely believing they were justified but being horribly wrong. So, unless you get to criminal statutes without an intent component, all you get is an oh-so-stern finger-wagging and maybe referral for bar committee discipline. Fat chance the relevant lawyers would not politically rule for their fellow #resistance members.
Perhaps even Barr does not get that anything short of predawn raids and at least equal legal coercion, with the aid of sympathetic judges, is actually license for the next assault on our constitutional republic. Yet, he has clearly identified the threat of a “Praetorian Guard.” He made that point repeatedly in the CBS interview.
Norman Podhoretz has made the stakes of the 2020 election clear, speaking from his long decades of bitter experience with our political class. From an electoral politics perspective, holding off on the institutional house-cleaning for a few more months makes the issue fresh for the 2020 election. However, the institutional players are strongly motivated to avoid any real accountability, any real blame attaching to their beloved organizations. So, President Trump should immediately give two clear, simple points of guidance to Attorney General Barr.
First, the president should write that the American people deserve the full story, and have got less than half of it, before the 2020 election season. That is, the Democrats deserve to know all the cards that could possibly come out on their own party and partisans in the institutions. Accordingly, the Department of Justice, with 100% cooperation from all agencies, must deliver completed investigations and recommendations for prosecution or other disciplinary action no later than 1 January 2020.
To accomplish this, all vacation days, all weekends, must be canceled. No conferences, no workshops, not trips for “professional development,” not until the work is done. All personnel with any competence in the relevant areas of law must be pulled in from around the country. Work must be carried out 24/7 in shifts. There are no days off in the face of a terrorist threat, and now there must be no days off in the face of this clear and present danger to our election system. No more running out clocks, as every delay is time away from FBI and DOJ members’ families.
Second, the president should write that William Barr will, in the end, sit in front of a camera with graphics and walk through the decisions to investigate or not, to prosecute or not, to raid or not, for the whole mess. He will expressly address how he, as the one man responsible in the end for ensuring his agency truly applies justice equally, has equaled out the decisions made since 2016. Either he orders the same treatment for the Democrats team or he compensates the targets of Mueller, or Andrew Weissman.
Either he bankrupts Democrats with legal fees, after catching them in perjury traps, or he unilaterally offers to have the government make President Trump’s supporters like General Flynn whole. Either he rolls heavy teams, with body armor and automatic weapons in dawn raids, or he fires FBI and DOJ personnel who “just followed orders” and publicly apologizes to Paul Manifort and his wife. Equal justice must be visible and seen as such by the American public.
All of this should be in a clearly written presidential directive, a real legal document that compels action, not a series of tweets and verbal rants. If this seems a bit much, consider the Norman Podhoretz interview. He, not a “Trump pom-pom boy,” plainly called the 2020 election a culminating, decisive battle in what he called a [cultural/political] war. His current assessment aligns with the Flight 93 election thesis. If this seems a bit extreme and too risky, consider Michael Barone’s assessment in “Sometimes Parties Have to Change to Thrive or Even to Survive:”
Increasingly, the split now is between what the British analyst David Goodhart calls the Anywheres and the Somewheres. The Anywheres are the high-education metropolitan elites…and their less affluent neighbors, plus racial minorities. Somewheres tend to be less educated and located in the heartland countryside, where their families have been for generations.
…It may be that, by nominating and now almost unanimously supporting Trump despite his break from party ideology on immigration and trade, Republicans have enabled their party to transition beyond the old 1990-2010 alignments and adapt to the emerging division between Anywheres and Somewheres.
President Trump is a symptom, a consequence, not in himself a cause, of changing politics both here and abroad. If he is possibly to win reelection, or not, he needs to follow his brand of keeping his political promises. He got in to deal with dysfunctional, gridlocked government. He has time and again done things that politicians promised or mouthed support for over the decades. Now he has a chance to actually clean up powerful agencies that were last cleaned up after Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War (see the Church Committee reports). Once again, President Trump might go well by doing good.
Published in General
By definition, juries are laymen (or lay persons) and not professional. That’s the point of having them.
I agree that in general they take their role very seriously.
I think of instead of on the Mall, the march is on Congress. Surround it. We are who they are supposed to be accountable to, not themselves.
I agree. The only time making a false statement should be a crime is if you are under oath.
I don’t understand the thinking here.
Let’s say a girl has been kidnapped, and they go and talk to the parents of some guy that was last known to have been around her. Assume for the sake of argument that this guy is in fact the guy who kidnapped her. Anyway, the detective is at this guys parents house. “Do you know where your son is?” They say no, they haven’t seen him in weeks. They really know he has a cabin up Old Mountain Road, and they saw him just yesterday. Weeks later they do find the cabin and they find her remains.
Shouldn’t mom and dad go to jail for lying to the police? For obstructing justice? Had they been honest, they might have saved her life.
What am I missing here?
Obstruction is a crime. Not being a lawyer, I can’t opine on the standards of proof.
Making false statements appears to be a separate crime. I wonder why.
I have no respect for anyone who succumbs to such threats. I know many men who were killed or maimed defending this country. Losing your job doesn’t even come close in importance.
The FBI are allowed to lie in the exact same conversation that they would prosecute someone else for not telling the truth. It seems only fair.
But what’s a whole lot smarter is to never talk to the FBI.
Good advice.
True, but if they subpoena you as a material witness, you either talk to them or you’re in contempt. I guy I work with (when he’s on orders) is a reservist SF guy who is a special agent. Great guy, I have profound respect for him and his integrity. When I mentioned that these days, why would anyone ever talk to the FBI, he laughed and said, “try that. Let me know how it works out for you.”
I think you can have that it’s a crime to lie to the FBI–if the FBI is free of corruption. Big if, these days.
Can they subpoena you to an interview, or just to a hearing?
Hence the need for a presidential directive along the lines I suggest.
If it’s legal for the cops to lie to us [“Your partner is in the next room confessing to everything”], it ought to be legal for us to lie to the cops.
So we are primarily concerned with (correct me if I am wrong here) folks close to Trump saying “I never met with that guy.” Now, leaving aside that the collusion investigation was BS from the start, isn’t that still obstruction?
I mean, nobody went to jail for telling a cop that the donut shop was around the corner when it wasn’t, right?
Fair point, but you didn’t address my point. You agree or disagree that the parents in my hypothetical should go to jail?
Jed Babbin weighs in at the American Spectator, “The Comey-Brennan Conspiracy to Violate Trump’s Civil Rights: It could get them an additional five years.”
Scott Johnson of Power Line underlines the seriousness and context:
John Hinderaker of Power Line concurs, citing a Washington Examiner story on a Rep. Andy Biggs interview on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures:
That’s not obstruction of justice, it’s aiding and abetting. The crime is still in progress (I think that’s a part of your scenario.)
Lying to an officer saying, “He went that away” while the officer is in hot pursuit is a much different situation.
Obstruction of justice scenarios I have in mind are where the commission of the crime is complete, and they are trying to find out who did it. More importantly, they “know” who did it and are trying to threaten witnesses with obstruction of justice prosecution if they don’t get the result they’re looking for.
We’ve far exceeded my layman’s knowledge of criminal law. Especially when it comes to the intersection of a. false statements, b. obstruction, c. c. conspiracy and d. lying to the FBI.
Not that that’s ever stopped a Ricochet thread!
Ok, just to push a little harder: say we found the girl and now are looking for the suspected kidnapper, or at least looking for evidence. The police ask “Didn’t he stop by here the day before? What did you talk about?” Mom and dad say “He never stopped here, we don’t know what you are talking about.” That’s a lie, and really lets say he said “I’ve got a girl tied up in my cabin and I don’t know what I’m going to do.” or something.
You still ok with that lie not being criminal? I’m asking because I simply don’t understand the logic. To me, lying to the police when they are asking direct questions about an investigation doesn’t seem right.
I think the comment that it should be okay to lie to the police was flippant. At least it was on my part. Of course if you throw the investigators off the track on purpose, you’re aiding and abetting and probably should be prosecuted.
But the FBI has gone too far in using that tactic to persecute people.
Ok, if it was flippant, then fine. But if serious, I’d still like to understand the logic, beyond just “Well the FBI sucks!” If you catch my drift. The FBI shouldn’t be used as a tool to persecute one’s political enemies, for sure. But it also oughtn’t be ok to lie to an FBI agent during the course of an investigation.
There is no constitutional justification for having an FBI, certainly not at the scale we have today. I’d be very seriously happy if it was disbanded completely. Problem solved.
“Former Congressman Steve Stockman, an immigration patriot and a stalwart of the conservative movement, is serving a ten-year sentence for fundraising crimes…
The extensive investigation was spearheaded by the same people Stockman exposed for weaponizing the IRS against conservative organizations. In contrast, Democratic officials accused of crimes receive kid gloves treatment—even with the supposedly ‘authoritarian’ Trump in the White House. The Trump Administration’s Department of Justice is being slammed for supposedly being ‘far-Right,’ but it’s not even upholding equal justice against Leftist Deep State bureaucrats. Stockman has been a thorn in the side of the Republican Establishment… He’s strong on immigration (NumbersUSA career grade B) and even bravely challenged current GOP Senator John Cornyn (current NumbersUSA grade F-). He was also something of a proto-Trump in his ability to bait the Left and get them to expose their true beliefs. However, Stockman took on something far more dangerous than the GOP Establishment when he called for ex-IRS official Lois Lerner to be arrested in 2014. (Republican George W. Bush appointee) Lerner was the head of the division of the IRS that oversees tax-exempt organizations and had admitted that the government was applying extra scrutiny to conservative groups claiming tax exempt status. She refused to testify before Congress and was held in contempt by the House. However, no charges were filed against her.” — James Kirkpatrick, unz.com, August 27, 2019
Mentioned in a recent Derb Radio podcast.
Oh, here’s that transcript:
“Stockman’s release date is December 26, 2026, when he’ll be 70 years old. So his life is pretty much over. That’s assuming he makes it to 2026; He seems to be incarcerated in a medical facility. …translation: not enough of a **** to the cheap-labor donor lobbies — to get any support from the Republican Party. …wrist-slaps delivered to Establishment darlings like Hillary Clinton, Al Sharpton, and Ilhan Omar, who have displayed an approach to the people’s laws about campaign-finance, taxes, and immigration far more careless… When there’s a street rumble involving Antifa, arrests are made, charges are brought, and convictions are handed down … but hardly ever against the Antifa goons. Are we already a Third World nation? …we have given up on equality under the law.
Obama’s aunt went on scoffing at our laws until she died in 2014 in very comfortable circumstances, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer. Why not? She was the President’s aunt! Does anyone but me remember that Obama has a scofflaw uncle, too? He’s also an illegal alien, ordered deported in 1989. Still here? Oh yeah. In a country of laws, not of men, our chief federal executive would have made a point—a proud point!—of having his uncle and aunt deported, as the courts had ordered. Unfortunately we don’t live in that country. We live in a country where having connections to the powerful and holding approved opinions gets you off the hook.”
Still aiding and abetting. The kidnapper is still at large and may be dangerous. They are still in pursuit.
They aren’t trying to prove something in preparation for a trial. They are trying to catch someone.
Obstruction of justice doesn’t involve aiding someone to escape from the law. Usually the subject is either already in jail, out on bail, or the authorities don’t even have probable cause for an arrest.
Let’s not forget, with regular cops that sort of lying is incredibly common. Mom saying she hasn’t seen her son? Happens every day. It would make sense to have it work one way or the other. If you can make a case that that sort of lying should be illegal, then it should always be illegal. If not, then not. The FBI is not special.
If you’re referring to my comment, it wasn’t being flippant. I think I have clarified where lying to the police (or federal law enforcement) could still be prosecuted. But using it for obstruction of justice doesn’t hack it for me.
Remember, even in that situation, I’m not letting witnesses off for lying if they are in front of a judge. Just with law enforcement alone.
No criminal is at large at this point. See my last post.
A very good friend of mine was asked to be on his staff when he was last elected. He declined, and later intimated to me that he didn’t trust anyone working for him not to get caught up in a fundraising scandal. He made a wise choice, I believe.
I met Stockman (through my friend). He’s, um, quirky. He also slept through most of the ceremony we were at, and I’m not sure it wasn’t because he was drunk. I wouldn’t peg my hopes for the country on him.
He should have become a Democrat at the last minute like becoming a death bed-converting Christian to escape all punishment…
Quirky?
Quirky ain’t a crime. Most of the elected Republicans in Washington seem to be either too frightened, stupid, or lazy to do anything.
Yeah, I think he might have been a bit of a weird guy. I can’t remember everybody’s story.
He was originally elected by defeating Jack Brooks, the most senior representative ever to lose a general election.
To be sure, it isn’t. But in his case it doesn’t make him an inspiring leader.
I think we can all agree that lying is wrong. But we don’t make it against the law in all cases. Actually, we don’t make it against the law in most cases.
It’s clear that the police use long exaustive interrogations as a tool to get people to say things that are untrue after hours of questioning (which doesn’t necessarily make it a lie) and then turn around and say that the person being interrogated lied. That person does have the option of having a lawyer present, but in too many cases, he has to put a second mortgage his house to pay for that legal representation.
The primary job of cops is to catch criminals. It’s up to the lawyers to prosecute them.
We should keep that in mind before allowing them extra powers to prosecute us with technicalities.