Must Pass the TRUMP Act and End the Democrats’ Reign of Politicized Prosecution Terror

Must Pass the TRUMP Act and End the Democrats’ Reign of Politicized Prosecution Terror

BY ATHENA THORNE   

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

The politicization of various prosecutorial positions on both state and federal levels, along with the fact that there is no consequence for doing so, has reached an intolerable level. If America is blessed with a serious Republican congress after the midterm elections, the new legislators must add yet another chore to their towering to-do list: they must pass a new law that clearly spells out the crime of malicious, politicized prosecution and specifies meaningful penalties for doing it.

Leftist prosecutorial abuses are nothing new — remember Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, whom a Democrat DA in Travis County, Texas, indicted out of office on flimsy campaign finance accusations? Or how Sarah Palin was forced out of the Alaska governor’s office because she didn’t want to bankrupt her family by defending against endless nuisance lawsuits? It’s shockingly unethical to abuse the legal system as a means of defeating one’s political enemies, but lawfare is also an effective tactic and there is almost never a penalty for doing it. Thus, it has become a favorite street-fighter tactic of militant leftwing operatives.

Democrats truly elevated the tactic to historic, systemic levels beginning when Donald Trump rode down the golden escalator to announce his candidacy for president in 2015. The next thing we knew, the White House, the DOJ, and the FBI were spying on an opposition candidate. This, in the country where Watergate was The Worst Thing That Ever Happened. Yet the all-out effort to Get Trump! famously spiraled into Russiagate — and more politicized investigative and prosecutorial abuse than had previously been imaginable in the United States of America.

But worst of all, none of the people who did this suffered any consequences. In a column at Just the News, Aaron Kliegman noted some of the impunity:

Former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith was the only one convicted of a crime. In 2020, he pleaded guilty to making a false statement after he altered the language of an email about Page while preparing an application for a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to place him under federal surveillance.…

Still, despite the guilty plea, Clinesmith received no prison time and even retained his law license. Instead, he received 12 months of probation and 400 hours of community service. Since the end of last year, he’s been able to resume practicing law.

Meanwhile, many of the most high-profile players in the Russia investigation are enjoying prominent positions in media and academia while raking in dollars from speaking fees and book deals.

Former FBI Director James Comey, for example, is now a No. 1 New York Times bestselling author, prominent Twitter personality, highly paid public speaker, and big-name faculty member at multiple colleges.…

Andrew McCabe, Comey’s No. 2 at the FBI and, later, acting director of the bureau during the Russia probe, has also enjoyed post-government rewards, becoming a CNN contributor, bestselling author, and visiting professor at George Mason University.…

Former FBI agent Peter Strzok was another senior FBI official involved in the Trump-Russia probe. He’s currently an adjunct professor at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and a New York Times and Washington Post bestselling author for his book on his time running the FBI’s probe into Trump as head of the counterintelligence division.…

There’s more, but you get the gist.

Related: The Day the FBI Raided Donald Trump

With no consequences, is it any surprise Democrats are escalating their political abuses almost daily at this point?

On Friday, Steve Bannon appeared on the Charlie Kirk Show to talk about his recent arrest on specious charges and broke the news that the FBI had just raided at least 35 top Trump supporters. Becker News reported the interview:

“There were 35 senior members of MAGA Republicans, supporters of Donald Trump, that were rolled. You know, the FBI rolled in on. Right? When they didn’t need to do it.”

“Remember, all these people have lawyers,” Bannon went on. “All their lawyers are very well known. No, that jackbooted gestapo has got to show up at their door and and make a big display of this. So, there’s so much going on that so many people don’t even know, at so many levels on Trump, people in bankruptcy, trying to de platform them.”…

“Look, this is all about intimidation,” he continued. “Whether it’s, whether it’s what they did with me yesterday, what they’re doing with Alex Jones, what they’re doing with other people to de-bank them to make sure they can’t fund their operations.…”

Prominent Republican attorney Harmeet Dillon went on Tucker Carlson to analyze what was happening:

“They’re from the capitol siege section of the United States Department of Justice’s DC office,” Dhillon went on. “And they ask for broad categories of documents. They ask for all communications dating from a month before the election until a month, two months after the election. And they ask for all communications regarding dozens of people and the categories are alternate electors fundraising around irregularities around the election, and also a rally that happened before the January 6th situation at the capitol.”

“So the Save America rally that happened,” she added. “And so basically most of this activity, if not all of it is protected by the First Amendment and the United States Department of Justice is telling reporters about these search warrants and subpoenas before they’re executed. There’s no other explanation for this. And I think the reason for this is to instill fear into Donald Trump’s supporters and into those who would challenge election irregularities right before an upcoming election, Tucker.”

“So this is really outrageous abuse by the DOJ, and it is illegal for the DOJ to leak this information to the media. Tucker,” Dhillon said.

The Democrats’ abuse of authority to suppress and destroy their political opponents is unprecedented, unAmerican, and quite frankly, terrifying. A new Republican Congress must address this extremely dangerous situation immediately by passing a new law that criminalizes this behavior.

The law could be named for forty-fifth President Donald Trump because he is the most persecuted politician in our lifetimes. Trump — along with anyone who ever gave him the time of day — is relentlessly pursued by hyper-partisan attorneys general, three-letter agencies, and prosecutors who think nothing of blowing through countless taxpayer dollars in their quest to destroy Orange Man Bad. TRUMP might even be a serviceable acronym: An act To Remedy Unethical Malice and Politicization, or something similar.

The TRUMP Act must first address the criminal aspect of the abuse. Prosecutorial discretion was once an intrinsic feature of American justice, but it no longer can be.  The U.S. Constitution requires “sufficient virtue among men for self-government,” wrote James Madison; otherwise, “nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.” Sadly, we must now set hard and fast rules to prevent virtue-deficient Democrats from destroying and devouring their political foes. Lengthy prison terms and heavy fines are appropriate sentences for those convicted of abusing their power and betraying the trust the American people placed in them by handing them authority.

The Act must have a civil component as well. People who have nothing to lose have no reason to behave. Therefore, prosecutors must have some skin in the game.

We’ve all heard the expression, “The process is the punishment.” The families of the Duke Lacrosse players — young white men who belonged to an Ivy League fraternity, a perennial target of the Left — had to shell out $3 million to defend their sons against Durham County, N.C. DA Mike Nifong’s politically corrupt persecution. Or consider the plight of retired Gen. Mike Flynn, who lost his home during the course of his maltreatment by the Russia collusion hoaxers. Not to mention the untold sum of personal fortune Trump himself has spent, is still paying, and will probably pay for the rest of his life to fight this evil.

It is exceedingly unfair that partisan prosecutors can maliciously torment political enemies with the bottomless funds of the American taxpayer, terrorizing and impoverishing their targets and their families. The TRUMP Act must revoke indemnity in these cases, placing the antagonist in personal jeopardy by making him/her liable for damages incurred by his/her victim.

Nor should there be limitless taxpayer money for politicized prosecutions without there also being taxpayer money to make victims whole again. Whatever cannot be recovered from the convicted tormentor’s personal worth must be repaid to the victim by the state that harmed him or her.

Ethical considerations, precedent, and fair play used to be adequate guardrails against the politicization of the American justice system. This is clearly no longer the case, which sadly necessitates Congressional codification of a remedy for the rampant and dangerous abuse of government power against the political opposition of the party in power.

We can’t live in the America we wish we had; we must live in the America we have.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/athena-thorne/2022/09/11/a-republican-congress-must-pass-the-trump-act-and-end-the-democrats-reign-of-politicized-prosecution-terror-n1628378

"We’re doing things that help those of us in the anti-Trump world bond with one another and that help people in the Trump world bond with one another."

 "We’re doing things that help those of us in the anti-Trump world bond with one another and that help people in the Trump world bond with one another." (David Brooks quote)

by Ann Althouse

"We’re locking in the political structures that benefit Trump.... We are in the middle of a cultural/economic/partisan/identity war between more progressive people in the metro areas and more conservative people everywhere else. To lead the right in this war, Trump doesn’t have to be honest, moral or competent; he just has to be seen taking the fight to the 'elites.'... Trumpists tell themselves that America is being threatened by a radical left putsch that is out to take over the government and undermine the culture. The core challenge now is to show by word and deed that this is a gross exaggeration. Can Trump win again? Absolutely. I’m a DeSantis doubter.... And then once Trump is nominated, he has some chance of winning, because nobody is executing an effective strategy against him."

David Brooks slogs along, ahead of his crowd, which is moving even more slowly, pondering the mystery, "Why Is There Still No Strategy to Defeat Donald Trump?" (NYT).

The needed "effective strategy" against Trump is "to show by word and deed" that it's "a gross exaggeration" to think that "a radical left putsch... is out to take over the government and undermine the culture." I'm not even persuaded that Brooks believes it's all that much of an exaggeration to think there's a "radical left putsch... out to take over the government and undermine the culture." He just wants Trump defeated and hopes anti-Trumpsters execute a good strategy to take him out.

What would work on these "conservative people" who live everywhere but where everyone who needs to think up the strategy lives? Brooks doesn't know! He doesn't even know why all these millions of people love Trump. Does he think it's because they haven't yet been cajoled out of believing the "gross exaggeration"? If they haven't abandoned this belief yet, why would it happen now or in the next 2 years? 

I saw that Brooks column yesterday and passed on it, but I gave it another look this morning after Meade texted it to me, which he did because I'd posed the question, in real life here at Meadhouse, "Do you think Trump will run and win?" Meade said the column answered my question. I take it that means the answer is yes.

ADDED: The fact that Brooks talks about a "gross exaggeration" reveals that he thinks there is something true. If there weren't something true, you'd call it a lie, not an exaggeration. 

Desperate Democrats Hope Midterms Are A Referendum On Trump, Not Biden

Desperate Democrats Hope Midterms Are A Referendum On Trump, Not Biden

by Ari Kaufman | 

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democrats want referendum on trump

The Aug. 8 Mar-a-Lago Raid and President Joe Biden’s dystopian Independence Hall speech to start September began a transparent autumn effort to thrust former President Donald Trump back into the spotlight. Why you ask? Because Biden and Democrats much prefer to make the crucial midterm elections a referendum on someone not currently holding office than their party’s disastrous policies.

Any Trump-related headline, they believe, can distract not only from Democratic debacles but Republicans’ superior plans for America should the GOP reclaim power.

A recap shouldn’t be necessary, but the Reader’s Digest version includes Team Biden mishandling COVID-19 policies, letting teachers’ unions destroy vulnerable students’ futures, and continuous poor communication on masks, re-openings, and vaccines. Recently the White House botched monkeypox with vaccine shortages and misapplications.

The administration’s profligate federal spending, including two unnecessary recent bills to close the summer, exacerbated inflation, crushed the middle and lower classes, and reduced supplies of food and energy.

Interest rates are now soaring, making homeownership harder for people who want to marry and start families instead of relying on the government.

Small businesses, hampered by COVID lockdowns, still suffer under inflation and cumbersome regulations. But Biden wants to “help” them by adding nearly 90,000 new IRS agents, likely for audits.

Then there’s Biden’s shambolic student-loan “forgiveness” program that even a former top Obama White House advisor admits is atrocious public policy.

Stealing money from folks who eschewed college for work and transferring the funds to mainly upper-middle-class people who majored in puppetry and jetted to Europe is the epitome of left-wing regressive elitism. Of course, it’s also a vote-buying scheme.

Studies from Ivy League universities show that over 70% of the debt forgiven will belong to people in the top 60% of income earners. It’s literally the reverse Robin Hood.

Perhaps cruelest, Biden still refuses to visit or even discuss the southern border to witness the fiasco his inept team allowed. Under their tragic border policy, where hard-working border agents are spoken about in harsher terms than terrorist cartels, millions of illegal migrants have been tossed into the country’s interior with carte blanche.

Owned by execrable eco-lunatics, Biden’s unrelenting war on domestic energy production does zero to help America. It does fund rogue foreign nations, like China, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. It not only impacted gas prices but also caused food to skyrocket and led to shortages of vital products. It almost makes you wonder which side Team Biden is on.

Finally, Biden’s catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan — a low point in our nation’s proud history, leading to the deaths of 13 young servicemen and tens of thousands of innocent people — alone should cause a crushing midterm defeat for Democrats if any voters care about life, freedom, and liberty around the world.

Suppose people are talking about these embarrassments instead of a cultish obsession with calm weather patterns, proper Supreme Court decisions, or the Orange man not on the ballot. In that case, Democrats will receive their comeuppance for the pain they’ve caused most Americans.

Joe Biden is a failed president. He is also corrupt, petty, and tyrannical, with policies resembling Bernie Sanders, the abominable totalitarian he defeated. Despite what former President Barack Obama mused last week, we are not better off since the Biden regime came to Washington.

If November is a referendum on Biden’s odious record and treatment of everyday Americans the last 600 days — not on the guy who occupied the Oval Office prior —  Democrats will lose badly.

https://lidblog.com/democrats-want-referendum-on-trump/

The DoJ Argues that the Intelligence Community Overrides the Judiciary

The DoJ Argues that the Intelligence Community Overrides the Judiciary

By Clarice Feldman

At this point in time I have no regard for the probity or competence of the Intelligence Community and neither, apparently, does Judge Aileen Cannon, who earlier this week ordered the appointment of a Special Master to review those documents seized in the Mar-a-Lago raid, which it claims are classified. The Department of Justice appears to have been surprised that it has lost credibility and filed a motion seeking a stay on that portion of the order and a Notice of Appeal to the Eleventh Circuit indicating its intention to file an interlocutory appeal.

I don’t think the trial judge who issued a very well-considered order will grant the stay. I don’t think the Eleventh Circuit will, either. I don’t think the Eleventh Circuit will even grant an interlocutory appeal on this matter. I do think all of these pleadings reveal the weakness of the grounds for a search and seizure of materials at the home of Donald J. Trump, the overreach of the warrant, and the expansive search itself. Worse for the DoJ and FBI, I believe their actions amount to a claim that under no circumstances does the judiciary have a right to question anything the Intelligence committee does as long as it makes a claim of “national security.” Such a claim is scary and should be -- and I think will be -- denied.

Without going into all the fine points of what it means to say a trial court order is an interlocutory order, basically it means that the order is not a final one. In this case, it is merely an order covering discovery matters in a trial. As Seth Barrett Tillman tweeted, ”The government has not been forced to return any materials, and no privilege rulings have been made for which to take an appeal.” He also gives an example of such an interlocutory, unappealable action by a trial court: He notes that J. Messitte refused to decide Trump’s motion to dismiss the Emoluments Clauses case and sat on it for three years until after the election when he dismissed it as moot after Trump lost.

Why is the DoJ so desperate to prevent a Special Master, even one with security clearance, to view those documents the department asserts are classified? (The parties each have offered two candidates for the position, one of Trump’s candidates, in fact, sat on the FISA court. Is he less certain to do this job properly than the National Archivist?) There are several possible explanations for the desperation I can think of -- none of which do credit to the attorney general. The first and most common supposition is that the documents which they claim must be kept even from the eyes of the Special Master relate to the FBI and DoJ’s role in fashioning and perpetrating the phony Russian Collusion fairytale. That would be damning indeed, and frankly, I see it as the most likely explanation: It is improper to classify documents simply to prevent embarrassment to persons or agencies. And anyone who does this is subject to sanctions. Obama’s Executive Order 13526 reads in relevant part:

Sec. 1.7. Classification Prohibitions and Limitations. (a) In no case shall
information be classified, continue to be maintained as classified, or fail
to be declassified in order to:

(1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error;
(2) prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency;
(3) restrain competition; or
(4) prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security.

Despite leaking staged photos of the fruits of the search, along with claims that it involved “nuclear” information, in the latest pleading it’s revealed that the searchers seized copious amounts of news clippings, some clothing, passports, personal tax records and material clearly covered by attorney-client privilege. In other words, the agents seem to have viewed this is a general warrant to grab everything, something not permitted. The only “nuclear” thing mentioned is some document about the nuclear capacity of a foreign government -- hardly the nuclear code which had been bruited about by some media lackeys.

I think the delay rankles and disturbs DoJ as much as the likelihood that a Special Master will find the “classified” information was legally declassified by Trump and had been improperly classified in the first instance to protect those who engaged in this wrongful smear of a political candidate.

This, the second of my suppositions is related to the Hail Mary effort to stay the portion of the order which temporarily enjoins the government (pending completion of the Special Master’s review or further court order) from reviewing and using the seized materials for investigative purposes. The warrant was issued before the grand jury in D.C. even received or reviewed the 15 boxes of documents Trump turned over to the government. This suggests the department was eager to use whatever they could hose up at Mar-a-Lago before a further examination of the legality of their actions could be done -- and not coincidentally -- in time to affect the midterms.

In the meantime, the department yet again has been engaged in a leak to poison public opinion and any potential jury trial.

The feds continued to leak like crazy after the order, in a form of lashing out, getting the word out to The Washington Post that some of the documents related to a foreign government’s nuclear program (the leak didn’t say that such documents were classified). For years during Russia Collusion attacks, whenever there was a news cycle that might help Trump in the public eye, the feds leak something to grab back the news cycle; that tactic seems to be renewing itself.

Like Mark Wauck, I see these pleadings as asserting that the Intelligence community -- the very folks who promulgated and promoted the Russian Collusion story and went on to cast substantial doubt on the Hunter Biden computer contents, asserting they were likely “Russian disinformation” -- should be the sole arbiter of such matters. The problem with losing your credibility is that no sensible person will trust you again. As lawyers often tell juries, “"false in one thing, false in everything." True of government officials and agencies as it is for the rest of us. 

In sum, my hunch is that this latest effort by the Deep State is not going to go anywhere for a long time, if at all.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/09/the_doj_argues_that_the_intelligence_community_overrides_the_judiciary.html

Dems want the midterms to be a referendum on Trump, not bungling Biden — and the media are compliant

Dems want the midterms to be a referendum on Trump, not bungling Biden — and the media are compliant

By 

Glenn H. Reynolds

Democrats want to make the midterm elections a refendum on Donald Trump, not President Joe Biden's record.AP Photo/Matt Slocum, File

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Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter Alice once said that he was “the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral.” No matter what was going on, he always wound up the center of attention.

The same could be said for former President Donald Trump. No matter what’s going on, he somehow seems to wind up driving the conversation. (Several years ago, when I wrote a column for another newspaper having nothing to do with Trump — I was writing about the theory, popular in Silicon Valley, that our universe is just a computer simulation like a giant version of The Sims — the editors added a reference to Trump in the sub-headline. For traffic, I guess!)

And today’s news almost seems calculated to bring Trump to the forefront. You have the FBI’s questionable raid on Mar-a-Lago, where the same agency that covered up Hunter Biden’s laptop sent G-men to run their fingers through Melania’s underwear. You have President Joe Biden’s positively Mephistophelean red-lit speech in Philadelphia following his declaration that his opponents are “semi-fascists.” You have Democratic officeholders in New York and Georgia trying to prosecute Trump. All generating steady Trump-related headlines.

Well, if it seems calculated to bring Trump to the forefront, it’s because it is calculated to bring Trump to the forefront. The truth is, the Biden people would rather this election be a referendum on Trump than a referendum on Biden.

That’s because if it’s a referendum on Biden, the Democrats will lose, hands-down.

And the press knows this, which is why it’s cooperating.

The White House and the media are focusing on Trump and the FBI raid instead of Biden’s failures.

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

If the Democrats have to run on Biden’s record, they’re doomed. Biden fumbled COVID and continues to send mixed messages with random mask-on, mask-off appearances. Now the administration has fumbled monkeypox, with shortages and misapplications of vaccines and other public-health remedies.

Those public-health debacles pale in comparison to the Biden economic failures, though. The administration’s wild spending spree has promoted inflation, which has further been made worse by its regulatory explosion that’s reduced supplies of food, energy and fertilizer.

The press, duly carrying water, tries to pretend things are getting better: Inflation is up, but it’s slowing! Gas prices are still much higher than in the past several years, but they’ve fallen a bit off their peak! Food’s still expensive, but you probably needed to lose weight anyway, you fatty! (And besides, you should be eating bugs to help the climate.) And the media have just stopped talking about the ongoing baby-formula shortage — if they don’t mention it, it doesn’t exist!

SEE ALSO

Democrats love that Trump distracts from their failures

Interest rates are skyrocketing, which together with inflation is making homeownership harder for younger people trying to start families.

Small businesses, already hammered by pointless COVID lockdowns, are suffering under inflation and new regulations — and Biden is hiring 87,000 new IRS agents to audit them.

As Rep. Thomas Massie notes, the talk was of auditing billionaires, but the IRS recruiting video is about “taking down a landscape business owner who failed to properly report how he paid for his vehicles,” not “taking down a billionaire who uses the corporate jet for private trips.” (Hey, the IRS knows which side its bread is buttered on.) As The Post reported, 80% of new IRS revenue will come from small businesses earning less than $200,000 a year.

Then there’s Biden’s student-loan forgiveness program, which even The Atlantic calls a “legal mess,” but which also takes tax money from working-class people who never went to college to pay for the student loans of upper-class people who did. A Post column noted that 70% of the debt forgiven will belong to people in the top 60% of the income distribution.

And under Biden’s open-door border policy, millions of illegal migrants have been waved into the country.

The Ukraine war slogs on, after Biden essentially invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade in January. (His handlers tried to walk it back, but the damage was done.) And, of course, Biden’s unrelenting war on domestic energy production has magnified the impact of oil and gas shortages resulting from Putin’s war, and the sanctions, on American businesses and citizens.

President Biden took aim at “MAGA Republicans” during a primetime address.

Photo by JIM LO SCALZO/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Plus, there’s Biden’s disastrous skedaddle from Afghanistan, undoubtedly the most humiliating and unnecessary military defeat in US history — a defeat that’s depressing military recruitment as potential recruits don’t trust their potential commanders to do their jobs. This alone should cost the Democrats a crushing defeat in the midterms.

And it will, if people are talking about that and about the other failures I’ve listed.

Which is why Democrats and the press — but I repeat myself — want us to talk about Trump instead.

They should face it: Biden is a failed president. He’s incompetent, he’s corrupt, and worst of all he’s mean, constantly showing hatred for his fellow Americans merely because they oppose him politically. America is already much worse off because of him.

Talk about that between now and November.

https://nypost.com/2022/09/08/dems-want-the-midterms-to-be-a-referendum-on-trump-not-biden-and-the-media-are-compliant/