This was the week that President Trump really started to drain the swamp. It came when he yanked the nomination of Jessie Liu to a Treasury Department post. The decision was all Trump’s and occurred after Trump learned details about what was going on when she was United States Attorney for the District of Columbia.
Though Trump was most aggravated with Liu not clamping down on the outrageous sentencing recommendations of her staff in the Roger Stone case, there was a long list of other concerns that made it clear to the president the extent of ideological weaponization across the Justice Department.
Let’s start with Roger Stone for now.
Liu’s so-called “career prosecutors” devised a sentencing recommendation of nine years in prison for behavior that became commonplace anytime former Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before Congress under oath.
Lest we forget, Holder was found in criminal contempt of Congress in a bipartisan 255-67 vote. Back then, most House Democrats didn’t find contempt of Congress to be an impeachable offense. Don’t forget, House Democrats marched off the floor during the Holder contempt vote.
This nicely illustrates the central theme that has animated Trump’s impeachment, Justice Department investigations of Trump, Liu’s yank, and the entire political saga of the last three years.
Jessie Liu. (U.S. Justice Department photo).
Justice is no longer blind. Investigations, charges, and even prison terms depend on the ideological views of the targets.
If you are a friend of the president, the Justice Department “career lawyers” will do all they can to find a venue in the District of Columbia where they know a rabid population of Democrat jurors will do all they can to send you to Big Sandy.
If you doubt me, you haven’t heard of Tomeka Hart, the nasty partisan jury foreman in Stone’s trial who should have never been on the jury in the first place.
The Scales of Justice come in two versions, one for Democrats and one for Trump.
Let’s examine those Justice Department “career lawyers.”
It is now plain that “career lawyer” isn’t a euphemism for unbiased and impartial. It’s exactly the opposite. It usually means Democrat, leftist, elitist, culturally hostile to middle America and feverishly anti-Trump.
When I was at the Department of Justice, it was no different. I wrote a whole wild book about the prevailing madness, years before the country got a taste of Andrew Weissmann’s partisan biases.
Justice Department “career lawyers” are highly skilled at finding reasons to kill cases against cabinet officials who disclose top-secret information, put State Department emails on private servers, or who lie on FISA warrant applications. The lessons learned in Ivy League law schools are put to good use in developing plausible excuses to avoid any grand jury presentations — at least plausible excuses to the Washington Post and now bankrupt McClatchy.
After all, did any of the “career lawyers” bring the Holder criminal contempt findings to a grand jury? Did former U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu agree or disagree with their inactivity?
These are some of the unanswered questions that led to a president yanking a nomination.
But when the target is Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, or dozens of Trump campaign officials who were served with grand jury subpoenas, by golly have the “career lawyers” got an argument in favor of action.
This is what the president began to realize was happening at the United States Attorney office in the District of Columbia – biased justice.
It wasn’t just the Trump campaign being targeted for unequal justice by the U.S. Attorney’s office.
It was the sweetheart deal for the Awan brothers, the dynamic duo who worked for Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz who may have been involved in foreign espionage when they stole data from House email servers.
It was the manipulated outcome in another national security matter involving Democrat senate intelligence staffer James Wolfe, who leaked secret data to his girlfriend. Liu actually signed off of that plea personally, joined by “career attorneys” Jocelyn Ballantine and Tejpal Chawla. For lying to the FBI, Wolfe got two months. For the same behavior, Liu’s “career prosecutors” recommended nine years.
It was the non-prosecution of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for lying to investigators about his media leaks.
It was the collusion with Mueller’s special prosecutors in allowing them to punt the Ukraine-related prosecution of Obama lawyer Greg Craig to Liu’s shop. Mueller and his team avoided an embarrassing prosecution of an Obama pal and Liu’s “career lawyers” prosecuted the case in D.C. Not surprisingly, a D.C. jury acquitted Craig.
It was failing to aggressively prosecute the radical #resist leftists who sought to disrupt the inauguration, even though James O’Keefe successfully recorded them plotting the violence.
And most notably, it was a 9-year sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone by four “career lawyers” in Liu’s office.
All of it, all of the biased justice, led to Trump yanking her nomination.
These pages have been covering the ideological biases of DOJ lawyers for nearly a decade.
Trump has now learned the details of what is going on inside one Justice Department office, the D.C. United States Attorney’s office. He also learned details about people who accepted appointments in his administration and took their jobs while holding their noses.
This was the week that Trump got his sea-legs. He campaigned on draining the swamp, and he has learned how subtle and how sophisticated the swamp is.
Meanwhile, institutionalists, including some Republicans too cowardly to be quoted by name, have gone on record as clutching their pearls at Trump’s actions. They want the bureaucrats to be unmoored from the executive branch.
The “career lawyers” at the Justice Department did not stand for election and win. The entire Department should take note. There is a unitary executive. Elections matter. The president ran against the elites who are dispensing biased, sanctimonious unequal justice in Washington, D.C.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that he is keeping his promises.
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