Jackson Cosko, a former aide to Senator Maggie Hassan and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, is headed to prison on Wednesday. Cosko is responsible for doxxing GOP senators during the Kavanaugh hearings last fall.
The former aide, Jackson Cosko, pleaded guilty in April to crimes related to an unparalleled effort to ransack a Senate office, extorting a Democratic senator, illegally harming Republicans for their political views, and blackmailing a witness.
Prosecutors asked for nearly five years in prison for Cosko, a onetime congressional IT aide to Hassan. Cosko admitted he stole the New Hampshire Democrat’s data out of revenge for being fired, then used it to doxx Republicans during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings.
“The government believes that a significant sentence would help to make clear that difference of political opinion do not entitle people to engage in politically motivated, criminal attacks threatening elected officials with whom he disagrees, and would thereby encourage respect for the law, and deter future criminal conduct,” prosecutors wrote.
Due to the rising threat of politically motivated attacks, prosecutors are hoping to make an example out of him to deter others from following in his footsteps.
Prosecutors said Cosko had “self-righteous entitlement” and a “belief that he could violate the sanctity of the United States Senate at will and threaten individual Senators as he pleased.”
He wanted to use stolen data “to punish people who disagreed with his politics” by publishing the personal information of Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham, Orrin Hatch, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, and Mitch McConnell, the memo says, which noted that Cosko laughed about his actions.
Prosecutors said his case must be a deterrent to what they said are rising politically-motivated attacks.
“The defendant operated under the belief that he was entitled to inflict emotional distress upon United States Senators and their families, simply because they disagreed with the defendant and had different political views,” prosecutors wrote. “The government believes that there appears to have been an increase in similar criminal harassment, particularly through social media channels, by people across the political spectrum.”
A liberal feeling entitled? You don’t say! Who would have thunk it? GOP members of Congress were shot at during a baseball practice in June 2017. Senator Rand Paul was physically assaulted while mowing his lawn by a neighbor. Deranged liberals all over the country have been attacking Trump supporters and Republicans because they’re convinced everyone who doesn’t believe in leftist ideology is a Hitler-incarnate. Making an example out of liberals who believe they have a moral obligation to attack Republicans in spite of the law and human decency is a good start, but I think the problem is bigger than this one case. The media ignores anti-Trump hate crimes and actively promotes the narrative that Trump and the GOP are evil. It would be nice to believe that the left will get the message from Cosko having the book thrown at him, but I’m not confident they will.
That said, I love seeing justice handed out.
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Matt Margolis is the author of the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. His new book, Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama’s Legacy, will be published on July 30, 2019. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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