Biggest Hogwash Of The Week: Justice Department Independence From Politics

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  • Late Friday afternoon (September 26) the U.S. Justice Department filed an indictment against former FBI Director James Comey in the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. The indictment is extremely brief — barely one page of text — and focuses only on a single statement made by Comey in sworn Congressional testimony given on September 30, 2020, which statement is alleged in the indictment to be false.

  • Note that essentially every other commentator on this subject is in the same position that I am in of not being able to make a full analysis of the merits of the indictment. That has not prevented the usual suspects from criticizing President Trump for pushing for the indictment. To some degree, I agree with these criticisms, or at least I am sympathetic to them, to the extent that they criticize the President for seeking to use the justice system to get back at his political enemies.

  • But then, seemingly in each case, the critics go farther, and assert that with this indictment President Trump has done something totally new and different, and has entirely broken or transformed (or maybe “trampled on”) the former longstanding and proper norms of the Justice Department of never, ever abusing the justice system to attack political opponents. These assertions are not potentially appropriate criticism, but rather are complete hogwash.

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The Case Of Bolsonaro: What They Had In Mind For Trump

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  • Donald Trump is now President of the United States for a second term, having survived an unprecedented campaign of lawfare that has included no fewer than four criminal prosecutions, two state and two federal, brought during the four years that he was out of office. All were brought by highly partisan Democratic Party prosecutors.

  • The four prosecutions of Trump are all now essentially dead.

  • However, much of the process of killing off these prosecutions has occurred either since Trump’s re-election, or only because of the fortuity of Trump getting enough appointments to the Supreme Court during his first four years in office to have an effective majority on that Court.

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The End Of The Eric Adams Prosecution : Holier-Than-Thou Federal Prosecutors

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  • Since my post a few days ago about the demise of the Eric Adams prosecution, controversy has continued to swirl around the matter.

  • On the side supporting the action of the Trump/Bondi Justice Department, several new voices have emerged to join what were previously the lonely cries of a handful of people like myself and Josh Blackman. These new voices include James Copland and Rafael Mangual (of the Manhattan Institute), writing in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on February 18; and Alan Dershowitz in a column in the New York Post on February 19.

  • On the other side of the argument, an ex-colleague of mine sends me a copy of an “open letter” dated February 17, and signed by a gigantic list of well over 1000 former federal prosecutors. This letter essentially adopts the arguments set forth in the resignation letter of ex-SDNY US Attorney Danielle Sassoon, including echoing some of her language.

  • A fair description is that these guys adopt a holier-than-thou attitude, claiming to be wholly pure and above politics and devoted only to the “facts and law.”

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Bizarre End To The Trump Criminal Prosecution

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  • By now you may have almost forgotten that, back on May 30, Donald Trump was convicted by a New York jury on 34 supposedly felony counts of “falsifying business records.”

  • In the time since, the judge in the case, Juan Merchan, has occupied himself with denying various post-trial motions and with postponing the sentencing several times. Yesterday, Acting Justice Merchan issued an Order which, besides denying several of the outstanding motions, also scheduled sentencing for next Friday, January 10 — thus just over a week in advance of President-elect Trump’s second inauguration.

  • This Order is one of the most bizarre documents I have ever seen to issue from a court.

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Anti-Money Laundering Enforcement: What Happened To Due Process Of Law?

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Anti-Money Laundering Enforcement And De-Banking

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  • In a government full of nasty, obnoxious and extra-legal regulatory initiatives to harass the people, the effort to regulate “money laundering” out of existence has to rank at the top.

  • The basic idea is for the government to require all banks to become involuntary deputies of law enforcement to spy on their customers behind their backs, so that the bureaucrats can gain access to detailed information on what every single person is doing all the time. And thus will all criminality be stomped out!

  • In the real world, what anti-money laundering (AML) regulation means is that the government gains vast information on the innocent citizenry. This information in almost all cases has nothing to do with criminality and instead finds its principal use in hobbling and harassing the political opponents of the régime.

  • Meanwhile, the real crooks have plenty of ways (cash, Bitcoin, ten other forms of crypto, gold, MoneyGram, etc., etc.) to continue business as usual.

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