Prosecuting Democrats, too

The Justice Department under Biden is investigating and prosecuting crime. 

Crimes by both Republicans and Democrats.

Guest Post author Jeffrey Laurenti is struck by the audacity of complaints by Republicans. They are claiming that Biden's Justice Department is weaponized against Republicans -- and implying it ignores crimes by Democrats.

Laurenti is from New Jersey, the home state of U.S. Senator Robert Menendez. Menendez, a Democrat, is the one with the hard-to-explain-away gold bars. Meanwhile, Laurenti notes that Hunter Biden is being prosecuted in federal court in Delaware for a rarely-prosecuted crime involving a false statement on a gun purchase. And In Texas, Democratic U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar is being prosecuted for bribery. Laurenti complains that Republicans are ignoring facts that are right before their eyes. "Such audacity," he writes.

Laurenti is a college classmate, a political scientist, and a former senior analyst with a boutique foreign policy think tank. He has been active in Democratic politics. He served as a New Jersey elector in the 2012 election, and cast his vote for Barack Obama.

Here is Laurenti with his wife Yuki at her 45th college reunion.

Guest Post by Jeffrey Laurenti

Our Weaponized Justice System

It takes a special skill, which I in no way have, to hold two diametrically opposed positions at the very same time. It takes a special audacity to argue those same diametrically opposed  positions publicly, without fear of embarrassment in the face of logical impossibility.

Such skill, and indeed such audacity, were both very much in evidence in the past week’s Republican offensive to paint the American justice system as “corrupt” based on a New York jury’s verdict against Donald Trump. It’s obvious, they insist, that President Joe Biden and his partisan hacks at the U.S. Department of Justice were the instigators of a case in state court in Manhattan.

Perhaps those partisan hacks in the Justice Department have misread the memo from the front office. 

Around the corner from the now-famous drab courtroom where defendant Donald Trump declined to testify in his own defense, a powerful U.S. senator -- chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and incidentally of the same political party as the current chief magistrate of the Republic -- is also on trial for breaching the law. 

Do those who allege the criminal justice system is deeply corrupted view the senator's legal travails, gold bars and all, as further evidence of the system's bias?

 Two hours south, in Wilmington, Delaware,another federal case is unfolding this very week, the trial of the current president's own son on gun law violations -- prosecuted, incidentally, by the very Justice Department headed by the same president's appointees. 

Is this further evidence of the deep corruption and political bias of the justice system? (Amusingly, media headlines blare, "President's son on trial in case that Republicans plan to use as a political weapon.")

Those same partisan hacks in that corrupted Justice Department last month unveiled another criminal indictment, in far-off Texas, of an entrenched congressman who happens to be of the president’s own party and who holds a seat that is critical to that party’s hopes of wresting back majority control in the U.S. House of Representatives in this fall’s elections. 

Are we seeing yet another instance of politically weaponized use of the law to persecute the president’s opponents? (The only public reaction by Republican leaders has been to put that congressman’s seat on their list of top targets for pickup in November.)

A top advisor to the former president has put the issue bluntly: “Is every Republican D.A. [district attorney] starting every investigation they need to right now?” Yet it seems that the Justice Department has already been doing that. So what’s the point?  

The point, it turns out, is that the courts throughout the country should become an ongoing political battleground. The same advisor articulates the urgency of the moment, as seen through the former president’s lens: “Every facet of Republican Party politics and power has to be used right now to go toe-to-toe with Marxism and beat these Communists.” Huh?

 

Another advisor, himself about to begin a short prison term for contempt of Congress, seeks to mobilize legal minions in the glorious campaign against “Marxism” by holding out the hope of political glory: “There are dozens of ambitious backbencher state attorneys general and district attorneys who need to ‘seize the day’ and own this moment in history.”

  

I cannot say whether the charges and the evidence that were brought against the former president were based in reality; they persuaded twelve fellow citizens who were listening to every word. (Curiously, if I may repeat myself, the one voice they did not hear from the witness stand was that of the normally voluble defendant himself.) Presumably the appellate courts of the State of New York will review the trial record for possible errors.

 

But is the conservative cause in American politics so dependent on a single towering personality that its leading voices should call for plunging the country into a scorched-earth legal civil war? Cannot the one-time Party of Lincoln present a gold watch to the former president, donate to his legal defense fund, and find another candidate, unburdened by legal troubles, to carry on the conservative program? 

 

You tell me Republican voters had that opportunity, and preferred to stick with the charismatic orator they came to know and adore eight years ago. Like the voters of Washington, D.C., three decades ago, who restored to power a mayor convicted in what his defenders said was a sham, the Grand Old Party sticks by its man.

 

Indeed, perhaps this slice of America looks forward to prosecuting a civil war to eradicate from public life the threat that Marxism or Communism or woke-ism or liberalism or environmentalism poses to their serenity, their traditional values, their way of life. Perhaps it takes an inspiring leader who breaks and makes the rules, rather than slavishly abides by them, to set a troubled society right. 

 

Germans came up with a word for that. Führerprinzip.

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.]