16 Times Democrats Tried To Prosecute Their Opponents
The media is having a fainting spell over Trump's quip that Hillary would go to jail
for her emails, but they forget Democrats are the ones who throw the book
at their opponents all the time.
During Sunday night’s presidential debate, Donald Trump quipped that if he were elected president, Hillary Clinton would be in jail for illegally using an unsanctioned private email server — which was housed in a bathroom and less secure than a Gmail account — to disseminate classified information during her tenure as secretary of State.
The media had a fainting spell over Trump’s comment, and are insisting he’s behaving like a dictator and threatening to jail a political opponent. Here’s a few of the numerous overwrought headlines that have emerged.
Vox: “Donald Trump’s threat to imprison Hillary Clinton is a threat to democracy”
The New Yorker: “Trump Shows His Inner Dictator”
CNN: “Trump threatens to jail Clinton if he wins election”
ThinkProgress:”Trump campaign can’t decide whether Trump was joking about putting Hillary in jail”
They seem to be forgetting that throwing the book at one’s political opponents is what Democrats do all the time. Here’s 16 times Democrats tried to prosecute their opponents for political gain, not justice.
1. David Daleiden
After publishing undercover footage of Planned Parenthood harvesting organs from the bodies of aborted babies and discussing agreements to sell those baby organs, Daleiden became public enemy number one for Democrats. A Texas district attorney tried to charge Daleiden and his investigative partner for organ trafficking, a misdemeanor, and tampering with a government record, a felony.
From the beginning, the case against Daleiden showed obvious conflicts of interest. As The Federalist reported, “the district attorney who indicted Daleiden has received more than $25,000 in campaign contributions from the defense attorney for abortionist Douglas Karpen, who has been described as the Kermit Gosnell of Texas.” California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who had Daleiden’s home raided after the videos emerged, had financial ties with Planned Parenthood.
The charges were eventually dropped, after it was discovered the prosecutor “illegally shared evidence against Daleiden with Planned Parenthood, even though the Texas Attorney General’s office explicitly prohibited it.”
2. Little Sisters of the Poor
The Obama administration tried to fine this Catholic organization, which cares for impoverished elderly individuals, for refusing to provide birth control to their employees. The Little Sisters didn’t want to be compelled to hand out contraceptives, as it violates their religious beliefs, but Obama’s Health and Human Services took them to court to try to force them to pay $70 million in fines per year, which would have likely bankrupted the organization.
3. Gov. Rick Snyder
Leftists called for Michigan’s Republican governor to be jailed after emails revealed his office was worried about water conditions in Flint a year before he took action on the local affair.
When is Rick Snyder going to go to jail?https://twitter.com/greenhousenyt/status/703592507762831361 …
Ironically, Richter retweeted this statement, which called Trump’s remark a “straight dictator move.”
Donald Trump just promised to jail his political opponent should he become president. Which you know, is a straight dictator move.
4. Wisconsin’s John Doe Probe
A Democratic district attorney used the state’s legal system to intimidate Republicans in a witchhunt against Republican Gov. Scott Walker that targeted grassroots supporters. He told police to raid the homes of conservative activists and political operatives in the early morning hours, and then bullied them into staying quiet.
5. Gov. Rick Perry
In 2013, Rosemary Lehmberg, a Texas district attorney for Travis County and a Democrat, was arrested for drunk driving. A video of her booking, in which she’s visibly under the influence and slurring her words, went viral.Former Gov. Rick Perry tried to remove her from office by threatening to “veto funding for a statewide public corruption unit that she headed unless she resigned.” Democrats tried to get him prosecuted in retaliation. Special prosecutor Michael McCrum, who led the witchhunt against Perry, was nominated by Obama in 2009 to be a U.S. attorney. He was also encouraged to go after Perry by a leftist group, Progress Texas. The felony indictments against Perry were eventually overturned, but only after two years working through courts.
5. Gov. Bob McDonnell
Last year, the former Republican governor of Virginia was found guilty of wire fraud, extortion, and other felony charges after accepting large sums of money from a campaign donor he later named as a cabinet member. A federal judge, James R. Spencer, sentenced McDonnell to two years in prison for a crime that ordinarily would’ve earned community service.
As Townhall reported, Spencer seemed to have a personal vendetta against McDonnell: “It came out in December that McDonnell had opposed the appointment of Spencer’s wife 18 years ago to the Virginia State Supreme Court during a partisan battle in the state legislature.”
7. ‘Climate Change Deniers’
Leftist TV actor Bill Nye “the science guy” said in April that those who are skeptical of so-called “climate change” should probably go to jail. Nye isn’t the only liberal who wanted to lock up those skeptical of climate change. Robert Kennedy said he “wish[ed] there were a law you could punish them with.”
California Attorney General Kamala Harris, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, and U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch have all expressed similar sentiments.
8. Gov. Mitt Romney
In 2012, a pro-Obama super PAC, Priorities USA Action, released a TV ad basically calling the former Massachusetts governor a murderer and intimating that he gave a woman cancer.
In the ad, a man identified as Joe Soptic claimed that his wife got cancer after Bain Capital, where Romney worked until 1999, closed a steel plant Soptic worked in 2001. The timeline of these events and the supposed connection to Romney got even murkier when it was later discovered that Soptic’s wife wasn’t diagnosed until 2006.
9. Advocates for Sex-Protected Bathrooms
The Obama administration threatened to defund schools that didn’t want to allow transgender students to share bathrooms, locker rooms, and overnight sleeping quarters with children of the opposite biological sex. The edict was aimed at crushingdissent from Republican lawmakers who have pushed back against new regulations to force schools, private businesses, and churches into following the trans agenda with little public discussion or allowance for multiple ways to accommodate all parties.
10. Cake Bakers
A Denver-area cake baker, Jack Phillips, became an enemy of the state after he refused to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.
Phillips and his attorneys have argued that the baker simply declined to make a cake that violates his Christian beliefs, and that he would similarly reject ‘cakes with offensive written messages and cakes celebrating events or ideas that violate his beliefs, including cakes celebrating Halloween, anti-American or anti-family themes, atheism, racism, or indecency.’
Nonetheless, the Colorado Civil Rights Commission has mandated that he must bake cakes for all weddings, even those he objects to for religious reasons, and that he must “re-educate” his staff and keep records for two years to prove he’s complying with state law. In an effort to avoid further legal punishment, Philips no longer bakes wedding cakes.
11. Conservative Nonprofits
After Catherine Engelbrecht filed an application to get tax-exempt status approved for her voter integrity group True The Vote, she and her husband were raked over the coals by the IRS, investigated by the FBI, and later investigated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
As it turns out, the IRS has had established a “Be On the Lookout” protocol among federal agencies to go after conservative groups filing for tax-exempt status. Engelbrecht wasn’t the only conservative whose organization’s tax-exempt status was substantially delayed, nor was she the only person whom federal authorities investigated for no reason other than being conservative. The IRS also targeted more than 450 other similar groups purely for political reasons.
12. Dinesh D’Souza
The Obama administration had the filmmaker arrested after he encouraged others to donate to a New York senatorial candidate and later reimbursed them. Because D’Souza has been a longtime critic of Obama — he directed a 2012 documentary that slammed Obama’s worldview and policy decisions — his arrest seemed like a blatantly partisan smackdown from a presidential administration that likes to crush dissent and intimidate its critics.
13. The Filmmaker Hillary Blamed For Benghazi
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the filmmaker Hillary Clinton falsely accused of producing an inflammatory video she falsely told Americans had spurred the terrorist attack in Benghazi where four Americans died, was sentenced to a year in prison for publishing the short film on the Internet in violation of his parole.
The cause of the attack had nothing to do with the video. It was a group of Islamic terrorists who targeted Americans that as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had put in a vulnerable position. She ignored their more than 600 requests for additional security and ignored the fact that other countries were withdrawing their diplomatic presence in the region due to heightened danger. The film was a convenient scapegoat for Hillary, and she needlessly made Nakoula a pariah in the public eye. He now lives in poverty.
14. Pro-Lifers
Daleiden isn’t the only pro-life advocate liberals have twisted the law to pillory. For 28 years a pro-abortion group, the National Organization for Women, went after pro-life activists who had volunteered to lend support and counseling to women seeking an abortion. The attorney representing NOW accused the group of violating the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. As Life Site reports, the RICO act is “a statute intended to prosecute members of the Mafia.”
More defendants were added, until NOW compiled a list of more than 100 ‘co-conspirators,’ accusing sidewalk counselors of using violence or threats of violence to stop women from having abortions. They even deposed convicted murderer Paul Hill in an attempt to paint a picture of a vast conspiracy of pro-life vigilantism.‘The abortion plaintiffs had been claiming that the heroic leaders whom we defended were leaders of a vast nationwide conspiracy comprising as many as a million members, thereby putting a black cloud over pro-life efforts to advocate against abortion as if these efforts to save human lives were some horrific enterprise bent on ‘extortion’ and ‘racketeering,’’ Tom Brejcha, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Society, said.
15. Karl Rove
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was annoyed at House Republicans for their probe into Attorney General Eric Holder’s Operation Fast and Furious — a series of botched sting operations that resulted in the deaths of American border patrol agents and countless Mexican people. So she bragged to reporters that she could’ve thrown Karl Rove in jail, but didn’t because she’s nice.
‘I could have arrested Karl Rove on any given day,’ Pelosi said to laughter, during a sit-down with reporters. ‘I’m not kidding. There’s a prison here in the Capitol … If we had spotted him in the Capitol, we could have arrested him.’ …Asked on what grounds she could have arrested Rove, Pelosi replied, ‘Oh, any number. But there were some specific ones for his being in contempt of Congress. But we didn’t.’‘This is just strictly political,’ she said. ‘It’s just the irresponsibility of the Republicans. We want jobs. Why are they spending this time doing this?’
16. Sen. Tom Cotton
After Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) penned an open letter criticizing the Iran nuclear deal, Democrats accused him of violating an obscure, 200-year old law called The Logan Act. The funny thing is, no one has even been found guilty of violating the act in the history of the United States. So why start with Cotton? Probably because he was critical of their pet project, which is a pretty raw deal for America and the rest of the world.
The message here, as with the rest of this list: Don’t cross Democrats, or they’ll make your life a living hell whether you’ve broken any laws or not.
Bre Payton is a staff writer at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter.
No comments:
Post a Comment