Last week I started this series on Weapons of Government Control with a look at use of accounting practices and the manipulation of election cycles. Please take the time to have a look at these posts (linked below). This week, I am going to start to get to the dirtier stuff, beginning with the weaponization of the justice system.
Part 1 (https://steemit.com/truth/@cwparkes/weapons-of-government-control-accounting)
Part 2 (https://steemit.com/freedom/@cwparkes/weapons-of-government-control-part-2-election-cycles)
We all learned in our various civics courses and even (in my case) through law school how important an independent judiciary is for a democracy. Many countries have some variation of the separations of powers/three branches of government principles that are internationally known to be staples of the federal system of government in the United States. I'll use the example of the US because most people will be familiar with the content and because, frankly, the misuse of the justice system in that country right now is as bad as it has ever been.
Let's take a look.
Rosie O'Donnell, a liberal comedian (is she funny?) and known hater of Donald Trump, got a bit of a wake up call recently when she was caught making illegal campaign contributions by finding ways around contribution limits in the form of using multiple names and addresses. I say she got a wake up call because I am assuming the attention alone will scare her from ever doing something like that again. Perhaps the other thing that has her worried is the precedent set in with the felony conviction of Dinesh D'Souza in 2014 for his illegal contributions to a New York politician. Fox News has even put out a piece asking whether Rosie will get the same treatment? (http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2018/05/07/will-rosie-odonnell-be-held-to-same-standard-as-dinesh-dsouza-after-reportedly-exceeding-donation-limit.html) I'll save you the suspense. She won't. Because of her liberal leanings and celebrity status, she will never likely face any consequences for her actions. Even if she did, such legal action would be branded as political revenge by her adversary in the White House, which would cause him more grief than it would her. I hope I'm wrong but I doubt it.
Michael Flynn - briefly the National Security Adviser to Donald Trump - on the other hand was forced to plead guilty to willfully and knowingly false statements to the FBI and now waits in limbo for sentencing. The "crime" that Flynn allegedly committed had an element of "technicality" to it. Did he even actually lie? Apparently not, according to some information coming out ofthe House Intel Committee (http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/386323-house-intel-report-comey-mccabe-testified-that-the-two-agents-who). What he was being tried for in the Court of Public Opinion was supposed collusion with Russia. The public was ordered to be aghast that Flynn spoke to Russian diplomats prior to the Trump inauguration (by the media...we'll get to them in another post). Not that speaking with foreign diplomats is a crime but the sentiment was that Flynn had done wrong and therefore deserved to be punished. So when he got jammed up by the FBI in a surprise interview, no one really seemed that outraged. It was only in the months following that people actually started asking questions. Now delays are persisting with his sentencing and questions are being asked about the validity of the charge for which he made his guilty plea. As the yarn continues to unravel, there appears to exist a possibility that those who prosecuted (persecuted?) Gen. Flynn actually might be guilty of much more serious crimes. We could talk all day here about how Flynn and others are being targeted for political reasons. And maybe we should but this post would get exceedingly long.
So what's going on here? Well, the simple and convenient answer regarding the likes of Rosie O would be to accept that there is a degree of prosecutorial discretion in law enforcement and justice systems. The likelihood that Rosie gets aggressively prosecuted and sent to jail are remote, regardless of whether the law would allow for it. This line of thinking is essentially the moral equivalent of the idea that we do not prosecute all speeding tickets or instances of public intoxication. We can all accept that there is a certain degree of discretion that goes into making sure that every petty or frivolous infraction of the law is not prosecuted to the fullest extent. We all agree that we do not want to see remakes of the pursuit of Jean Valjean.
The above makes sense until we start to see that the discretion seems to include choosing winners and losers. If not Rosie, then why D'Souza? If it is so vital to the national interest of the United States t o prosecute Gen. Flynn, then why not have a closer look at Hillary Clinton or James Comey for that matter. Those individuals might get a closer look eventually but if it were left to the current, politicized Department of Justice, FBI and the Congress, it would be unlikely that they would ever need to lose a wink of sleep over their alleged wrongdoings.
Thankfully, some members of the judiciary will help defend the legitimacy of the system (https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/04/politics/paul-manafort-hearing/index.html). Hopefully, they will be able to restore order to this branch of the government as a catalyst for restoring ethics, authenticity and respect to the overall institution of government. Otherwise, make no mistake, while the everyday functioning of a justice system may seem above board and fair, there will always be the possibility that it is politically weaponized and used to achieve agendas in ways that would make the average freedom loving citizen extremely uncomfortable.
CW