Every institution has been corrupted, but they get upset if you call them corrupt.<\/p>\n
\u2018Liberty and Justice For All\u2019 \u2013 A Tattered Cliche? <\/a><\/p>\n One set of laws for Donald Trump and his supporters, and another set for the harassers.<\/em><\/p>\n Throughout history, the tyrannical abuse of governmental power has been a fearsome thing to behold. Wise men instituted laws in an effort to tame that abuse. The Constitution of the United States, for example, was framed in large part as a prophylactic against the coercive power of the state. The Framers witnessed the \u201clong train of abuses and usurpations\u201d perpetrated by the British crown and resolved to respond. The Constitution dealt with many other things, to be sure, but concern about tyrannical abuse of power by the government and its minions is patent from the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence straight through the Constitution and its Amendments. The idea was that we Americans would live in a polity governed by \u201claws, not men.\u201d That is to say, laws would be legitimately formulated, clearly defined, and administered impartially, so far as was humanly possible. How are we doing on that score?<\/p>\n Not so well.<\/p>\n The terms \u201cadministrative state\u201d and \u201cdeep state\u201d entered parlance only about seven years ago. The realities those phrases name long predate their currency, but Donald Trump was the lens through which worry about those legitimacy-devouring, essentially tyrannical phenomena crystallized. During the 2016 campaign, Trump\u2019s chief strategist Steven Bannon raised eyebrows when he said that \u201cdeconstructing the administrative state\u201d was a high priority. In the event, Trump\u2019s success on that task was only a patchwork affair, but he did make an effort.<\/p>\n Opinions differ about the state of popular sentiment when it comes to the current disposition of the United States government. I have by degrees joined the camp that has grave doubts about its legitimacy. I do not, for example, believe that the hallowed ideal of \u201cliberty and justice for all\u201d is these days much more than a tattered clich\u00e9, a pious nostrum without substance.<\/p>\n One of the great poster children for this erosion of public support\u2014and, consequently, of political legitimacy\u2014is the FBI. At a time when its operations are so patently partisan, it is hard to maintain confidence in its beneficence. Consider the news about Charles McGonigal, former head of Counterintelligence for the FBI, boss of\u00a0 FBI love bird Peter \u201cMr. Insurance Policy<\/a>\u201d Strzok, and vigorous investigator of the Trump Russia Collusion hoax. Wouldn\u2019t you know it: the chap who went after George Papadopoulos and others in Trump\u2019s circle was just fined and sentenced to four years in prison for\u2014wait for it\u2014colluding with Russia<\/a>.<\/p>\n You might argue that McGonigal\u2019s comeuppance shows that \u201cthe system works,\u201d that the FBI can effectively police itself, etc. I would counter that it is yet another reminder that the deep-state, anti-Trump forces operate primarily by what the Freudians call projection, by being guilty of what they accuse others of. There is a hilarious\u00a0video collage<\/a>\u00a0making the rounds of various pundits and politicians warning that the world, or at least our democratic republic, will come to a sudden and ignominious end if, heaven forfend, Donald Trump should be elected again in 2024. Trump will assassinate generals, you see, shoot visitors to the White House, suspend the Constitution, and kill democracy. It is an inadvertently amusing compilation but also a deeply depressing one since it underscores the sad and debilitating effects of Trump Derangement Syndrome.<\/p>\n It is here that we must distinguish between \u201cdemocracy,\u201d which is what would be upheld if Trump were allowed to run, and \u201cOur Democracy\u2122,\u201d that strange, oligarchical confect that can be maintained only by suppressing common, or garden variety democracy.<\/p>\n It is in this context, I believe that we must understand the unhinged legal campaigns unleashed against Trump in four separate jurisdictions.<\/p>\n I say \u201clegal campaigns,\u201d but really they are partisan political assaults masquerading under cover of legal procedures.<\/p>\n That is, they look like legal procedures from the outside; they employ all the paraphernalia of legal procedures. There are courts, lawyers, subpoena, judges. \u00a0But \u00a0the German Judge\u00a0Roland Freisler<\/a>\u00a0(1893-1945) employed all that machinery, too. He presided over trials. \u00a0But he always got the results he wanted.<\/p>\n Smith understands that by far his best chance of getting Trump is in Washington\u2014not, I hasten to add, because he has much of a case there but because he has an Obama-appointed anti-Trump judge Tanya Chutkan and a Democratic jury pool that can be counted on to convict Trump on anything he accused of. Andy McCarthy has published a\u00a0thoroughgoing anatomy<\/a>\u00a0of the the legal niceties of the case. He is no friend to Trump, deprecates what he calls his \u201cloathsome behavior,\u201d but does say that he thinks Trump is \u201cbeing denied due process.\u201d He further acknowledges that the effort to use\u00a0Section 1512(c)<\/a>\u00a0of the federal penal law against Trump will be a \u201ctough case\u201d that is likely to signal \u201ctrouble for Smith.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s the opposite in Florida, where the judge is a Trump-appointed jurist and the jury pool is likely to be sympathetic to Trump.\u00a0In my view<\/a>, Trump\u2019s possession of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago is\u00a0no different from Biden\u2019s possession of classified documents<\/a>\u00a0in his garage behind his Corvette. Rather, Trump\u2019s case was less egregious than Biden\u2019s. For one thing, Biden was never president. \u00a0He had many more documents, in many more, less secure places. And remember: all modern presidents seem to have possession of classified documents after they leave office, but not all former presidents are Donald Trump.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s lawyers have appealed the Washington case and, in response, Smith has asked the Supreme Court to bypass the usual appeal process and take the case on an expedited schedule. Why? Because the Washington trial was set to begin on March 4, a day before \u201cSuper Tuesday,\u201d at which Trump is likely to seal the GOP nomination. Smith hoped that an early trial would harm Trump with voters. So far, legal attacks agains Trump have had the opposite effect, increasing his standing in the polls. That is because voters understand that the legal challenges are legal in name only. At bottom, they are instances of bare-knuckle political warfare.<\/p>\n On Friday,\u00a0The Wall Street Journal<\/a>\u00a0published an editorial whose slug got to the nub of the issue. \u201cThe special counsel,\u201d it read, \u201ctries to drag the Justices into his political timetable for the Jan. 6 trial of Donald Trump.\u201d That\u2019s it exactly. Smith wants the Court to decide now, today, so he can pursue his vendetta against Trump on the time table the election calendar has set. Most observers believe that the Court will be more circumspect. The writers of that editorial caution that \u201cThe wiser decision would have been to lay out the facts of what the special counsel found and let the voters decide. They chose to prosecute, and the damage has begun to unfold.\u201d<\/p>\n I was talking to a friend about about Smith\u2019s case. He responded \u201cIt sounds like the judiciary\/prosecution is corruptly trying to interfere with an official proceeding, i.e., the election.\u201d That\u2019s pretty much what I think, too, though I don\u2019t expect Jack Smith to be charged for the tort. Remember, there is one law for Donald Trump and his supporters. They can be harassed, prosecuted, and jailed. There is another law for the nomenklatura that does the harassing, prosecuting, and jailing.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every institution has been corrupted, but they get upset if you call them corrupt. \u2018Liberty and Justice For All\u2019 \u2013 A Tattered Cliche? One set of laws for Donald Trump and his supporters, and another set for the harassers. Throughout history, the tyrannical abuse of governmental power has been a fearsome thing to behold. Wise … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,9,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-enemies-foreign-domestic","category-goobermint"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=98651"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98652,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98651\/revisions\/98652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=98651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=98651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=98651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}