ADAMS: Trump Verdict: Two Tiered Justice Now the Norm
The verdict in New York v. Donald Trump didn’t come as a surprise. Shock was a typical response unless you could work inside the Eric Holder Justice Department.
Normalizing a two-tiered justice system has been a priority of the left for more than a decade.
As an attorney inside the Voting Section in the notorious Civil Rights Division run by Tom Perez, I witnessed justice for thee but not for me as early as 2009. Early in the Barack Obama administration, we were told explicitly to stop enforcing federal laws that required voter roll maintenance of the dead and ineligible. Progressives didn’t like that part of the law, and they said so.
The laws the left doesn’t like are erased by bureaucratic hostility. Let’s call that democracy dying in darkness by a bureaucrat’s fiat.
Then I saw my voting rights case against the racialist New Black Panther Party for stalking a polling place dismissed, in part, as the DOJ Inspector General found, because of a pervasive unwillingness to prosecute those sorts of lawbreakers with laws designed originally to help racial minorities.
This was 2009, and unequal justice was just getting started. What seemed like a fluke, 15 years later, is a governing philosophy.
So Trump was in the dock as the guilty verdicts from the Manhattan jurors were read. Unequal justice now includes forum selection. Beware the New York or District of Columbia jury if you are a conservative.
What we are facing is more than good old-fashioned bias and prejudice. It is significantly more dangerous.
We are in a country where people no longer see reality similarly. The Democrats lusted for Trump’s conviction because they were filled with hatred and saw him as an existential threat to “democracy.”
The bureaucrats rigging the system, the professors annihilating rational thought in the classroom, the Justice Department lawyers deciding which case to bring and not bring, they simply do not think they are doing anything wrong. This is how they see the world.
That is hard for many to swallow, especially for anyone who hasn’t worked inside the federal leviathan. They think they are doing the right thing. The Justice Department, for example, has so many procedures and so much institutional inertia that it all self-justifies whatever action, or lack of action, is chosen.
They are the smartest, most educated lawyers, highly skilled in finding high-cotton excuses and justification in the lawbooks for whatever carnage they inflict on the rule of law. Thick and thorough memos with letterhead support every Justice Department decision you find objectionable.
I am frequently asked when will so-and-so be held accountable. It depends.
The answer is never if you are lovebirds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page or contemptuous-of-Congress Eric Holder. If you are Steve Bannon or Peter Navarro for doing the same thing, welcome to Federal Detention Center, Miami.
Everyone should have seen this coming. The evidence they said in 2009 didn’t support prosecuting the New Black Panthers, even if it did a few months earlier. Holder’s Justice Department started this mess. It started small but has metastasized.
Some in Congress saw this coming a decade or more ago, but members like Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, were a small caucus minority then, and House leadership was more interested in avoiding government shutdowns.
To the rank-and-file prosecutors now in power, Trump should be prosecuted but not President Biden for similar handling of classified documents. Trump paying to keep girlfriends quiet is different, they think, to what Bill Clinton did to keep his girlfriends quiet.
Those too young to understand, Google Paula Jones Settlement.
Get used to it; there isn’t accountability in this two-tiered justice system. Oh, and the prosecutor in the New York case is none other than Holder Civil Rights Division alumnus Matthew Colangelo, a long-familiar name.
Peggy Noonan missed the mark when she wrote “we can’t go on indefinitely like this.” When polarized camps have different political and cultural realities, there isn’t a reverse gear, Peggy.
Witness the reaction on the right to the hardly surprising jury verdict. Calls for states to arrest Biden came from voices not long ago and wouldn’t get close to that. Nullification is back in vogue; just ignore the feds, they cry.
How did that work last time?
The left doesn’t understand this powder keg they have built. They don’t understand that millions of mainstream Americans who vote Republican feel under siege.
Trump is the champion of what they believe in, and they think their champion is being railroaded by this two-tiered justice system. They fear they are next. They have endured years of the left attacking their values, their religion, their flag, their police and their Constitution.
Too jubilant, the left doesn’t understand them, and it is about to worsen.
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