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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 Trumps 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.

Lets start with Roger Stone for now.

Lius 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 didnt 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 Trumps impeachment, Justice Department investigations of Trump, Lius yank, and the entire political saga of the last three years.

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 havent heard of Tomeka Hart, the nasty partisan jury foreman in Stones 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 isnt a euphemism for unbiased and impartial. Its 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 Weissmanns 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 wasnt just the Trump campaign being targeted for unequal justice by the U.S. Attorneys 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, Lius 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 Muellers special prosecutors in allowing them to punt the Ukraine-related prosecution of Obama lawyer Greg Craig to Lius shop. Mueller and his team avoided an embarrassing prosecution of an Obama pal and Lius 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 OKeefe successfully recorded them plotting the violence.

And most notably, it was a 9-year sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone by four career lawyers in Lius 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 Trumps 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 shouldnt surprise anyone that he is keeping his promises.

See the article here:
President Trump Starts to Drain the Swamp, Yanks Liu - PJ Media

He should take personal responsibility for making dangerous arguments in defense of Trump.

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The arguments Alan Dershowitz made during the Senate trial as to why Trumps behavior didnt constitute an impeachable offense were roundly panned by most legal scholars. Since lawyers tend to engage on an intellectual (rather that personal) level, that is how they responded.

Initially, Dershowitz suggested that his arguments had been taken out of context, which wasnt true. But now he is pretending to occupy the high ground, while playing the role of victim, by claiming that his detractors are simply demonizing defense lawyers.

I have been demonized by many on the left who refuse to understand why a liberal Democrat would defend the constitutional rights of a controversial Republican president. This is the mirror image of the McCarthyism of my youth, when many on the right could not understand why anti-communist centrist lawyers would defend the rights of communists.

Those lawyers were demonized as I am being today. I have a thick skin, developed over many years of defending controversial and unpopular clients and causes. But I am concerned that young lawyers will be deterred from representing such clients and causes for fear it will destroy their careers. I am hearing that from young lawyers and students.

Demonizing defense lawyers for representing politically incorrect clients and causes is the true road to tyranny.

First of all, I suspect that most liberal Democrats parted ways with Dershowitz a long time ago for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that he has become a regular commentator on Fox News as a disseminator of that networks propaganda.

But when Dershowitz claimed to be concerned about young lawyers being deterred from representing controversial clients, I immediately did a Google search to see if he had said or written anything about a civil rights lawyer named Debo Adegbile.

Back in 2013, Tom Perezwho had served as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rightsbecame the Secretary of Labor. Obama nominated Adegbile to replace Perez at the Civil Rights Division. He had spent the previous twelve years working as a lawyer at the NAACP. But his confirmation blew up when he was accused of defending a cop killer during his tenure there.

The case involved a racially-charged trial in the 1981 shooting death of a white Philadelphia police officer, Daniel Faulkner. Mumia Abu-Jamal, a black journalist, was convicted and sentenced to death. The NAACP began handling his appeals before Adegbile started his tenure with the organization. But he eventually contributed to the filing of a 2009 court brief arguing that Abu-Jamal faced a discriminatory juryan appeal found to have merit by a judge. Abu-Jamals sentence was eventually reduced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

That is all it took for Republicans to launch a campaign against Adegbiles confirmation by suggesting that he was an extremist who helped get a cop-killer off the hook. In the end, seven Democrats joined Republicans in blocking a vote on Adegbiles confirmation. It was one of the most shameful examples of political capitulation to racist sentiments in the years just prior to the Trump presidency. As then-Attorney General Eric Holder said, It is a very dangerous precedent to set for the legal profession when individual lawyers can have their otherwise sterling qualifications denigrated based solely on the clients that their organizations represent.

When he had his chance, Dershowitz certainly didnt lead the charge in defending Adegbile for his minimal role in representing a politically incorrect client. So heres my message to the famed defense lawyer: Spare me your crocodile tears of concern, Alan. As your colleagues in the legal profession have pointed out, your arguments on behalf of Donald Trump were not only wrong, they were dangerous. Its time for you to take some personal responsibility for your own actions. You are not the victim here.

If you enjoyed this article, consider making a donation to help us produce more like it. The Washington Monthly was founded in 1969 to tell the stories of how government really worksand how to make it work better. Fifty years later, the need for incisive analysis and new, progressive policy ideas is clearer than ever. As a nonprofit, we rely on support from readers like you.

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See the article here:
Alan Dershowitz Tries to Play the Victim Card - Washington Monthly

It was expected that Democrats would be up in arms over the news that the Justice Department retracted and rewrote Roger Stones sentencing recommendation memo, but once again I find myself astonished by the rank hypocrisy of Democrats.

But before I get into that, I think its worth mentioning that the prosecution of Stone and, quite frankly, the sentencing, was excessive. The prosecutors, many of whom were part of the Russian collusion hoax investigation team of Mueller, literally ordered a pre-dawn raid on Stone's home in Florida, complete with a CNN detail ready to cover the event for the country to watch as it unfolded. The recommendations for sentencing were completely absurd. Violent criminals, including rapists, get less time than what they were recommending for Stone. In due time, I am sure that will become clear, but, once again, I feel compelled to bring to light that the Democrats outrage over this is just the latest example of their hypocrisy because for eight years under Barack Obama we saw actual corrupt manipulation of the justice system in favor of Barack Obamas allies.

Under Obama and his radical attorneys general, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, the Justice Department became a hotbed of political favoritism, pretty much from day one.

I have picked five examples of Obama's allies being protected from justice in various ways by his administration that Democrats didnt give a hoot about and when you read them, youll understand why.

You may remember images and video from Election Day 2008, with members of the New Black Panther Party standing outside a Philadelphia polling place wearing military garb making racial remarks and discouraging people from voting. A voter intimidation case against the New Black Panthers began weeks before Obama took office. It was an open-and-shut case, and the New Black Panthers didnt even show up in court to defend themselves, assuring the governments victory in the case. Then in May 2009, the case was inexplicably dropped by Attorney General Eric Holder.

By the summer of 2010, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights declared there was evidence of possible unequal administration of justice by the Justice Department in the New Black Panther Party case. It was quite clear that under Obama and Holder, civil rights cases against minorities discriminating against whites were being systematically ignored. Holder still denied there was a racial motivation during a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing in March 2011, justifying the decision not to prosecute the NBPP by bizarrely citing the roadblocks African Americans endured when trying to vote in the South during the era of Jim Crow laws.

Attorney General Eric Holder took part in a scandalous, incompetent gun-running project known as Fast and Furious from 2009 to 2011, and did everything in his power to protect his boss, Barack Obama, during that investigation. In return for his steadfast loyalty, Obama protected Holder, who was aggressively stonewalling the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee investigation into Fast and Furious. Obamas asserting of executive privilege was not only to protect himself but also to protect Holder ahead of the Oversight Committees vote to declare Holder in contempt of Congress for withholding documents from the committee. Ultimately it didnt save Holder from being held in contempt of Congress by a bipartisan vote.

In 2012, just days before the November election, ICE agents were ready to arrest an illegal immigrant and registered sex offender, but were ordered by the Department of Homeland Security to wait until after the election. Why? The suspect was a volunteer intern for Senator Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and there would be significant interest from Congress and news organizations about the arrest. Menendez was seen as vulnerable in the 2012 election, and the delay of the arrest saved him from a potentially politically damaging scandal on the eve of voting. All the while letting a sexual offender avoid justice for six weeks.

In 2009, Barack Obama illegally fired Gerald Walpin, the inspector general for the Corporation for National and Community Service. Walpins only crime was that he was investigating Obamas friend and donor, Kevin Johnson. Johnson had misused federal grant money for AmeriCorps by funneling it to his personal nonprofit group, paying for political activity, and using it to pay hush money to underage girls hed sexually abused. When Walpin recommended charges against Johnson, Obama, in violation of federal law, fired him.

An investigation by Congress into the illegal firing was met with stonewalling by the Obama White House, and the withholding of documents. The Obama White House also deliberately misled Congress about the reasons for the firing.

Its hard to think of anyone who has managed to avoid accountability more than Hillary Clinton, and her response to the Stone sentencing story was her latest example of a lack of self-awareness.

It was not all that long ago that Hillary Clinton was the heir-apparent to Barack Obama, and Obama wasnt going to let her criminal behavior get in the way of her winning the election and keeping his legacy intact. Thanks to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and FBI Director James Comey, Hillary was never going to be punished for her illegal private server and mishandling of classified and top-secret information that would have seen anyone else indicted. In fact, FBI Director James Comey had drafted her exoneration letter before Hillary had even been interviewed by the FBI. And through the entire process, Barack Obama wanted to be kept in the loop, according to text messages between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok.

Hillary Clinton benefited from Barack Obama and his Justice Department doing everything they could to protect her, and she has the nerve to criticize the Trump administration for reducing the excessive sentencing of Roger Stone? Seriously?

_____

Matt Margolis is the author of Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama's Legacy and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis

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5 Times Barack Obama Protected His Allies from Justice and Democrats Didn't Care | News and Politics - PJ Media

Scott got a lot off his chest in his post called Jeff Sessions: The Open Questions, a critique of my post called Its John Boltons turn. Thats good. However, it will take more than one post for me to respond.

This first post will focus on matters related to Jeff Sessions and what I take to be the demonizing of him.

Scott opens by saying that demonizing anyone other than demons would be wrong by definition. Not really.

The definition of demonize I had in mind is to portray (someone or something) as evil or as worthy of contempt or blame. If someone deserves contempt or blame to a significant degree, it is not wrong to demonize him.

President Trump has portrayed Jeff Sessions as worthy of contempt or blame. He has vilified the man. Sessions does not deserve this treatment.

The title of Scotts post suggests as much. If there are open questions about Sessions, he should not be portrayed as worthy of contempt or major blame until the questions are answered satisfactorily.

What are Scotts open questions? In his email to me about the post he critiques, Scott said that if Sessions couldnt ethically perform his job in the Russia investigation, he shouldnt have taken the job or [should have] resigned.

I hadnt addressed this point in my post. To fill the gap, I addressed it here.

I showed that Sessions couldnt have known in mid-November 2016, when he agreed to be attorney general, that his role would include overseeing an investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. I also discussed in some detail why, later on, it wouldnt have made good sense for Sessions to withdraw from consideration or resign.

Scott doesnt address these arguments except to say they are well informed, but speculative. It isnt possible to consider the wisdom of a decision in this case Sessionss decision not to withdraw of resign without considering what the likely consequences of making a different decision would have been. And such consideration necessarily involves a certain amount of speculation.

I take Scotts characterization of my analysis as well informed, coupled with the fact that he doesnt challenge any of it, as confirmation of the reasonableness my speculation and of my conclusion that Sessions doesnt deserve to be attacked for taking the Attorney General job and for not resigning.

This was the only criticism of Sessions that Scott leveled in his email to me. But now he levels an additional one. He doubts that Sessions needed to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. (To be clear, I dont understand Scott to be demonizing Sessions for this decision.)

Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation because that investigation centered on the Trump 2016 campaign, and Sessions was a central figure in the campaign. In addition, Sessions had met members of the Russian government a few times while the campaign was in progress.

I think Sessions made the right decision as a matter of legal ethics. No one should oversee the investigation of an enterprise he was intimately involved in, especially when its possible that his testimony will be sought in the investigation.

This, I take it, is why Attorney General William Barr says that Sessions probably made the right decision when he recused himself. One can disagree with Barr, of course. However, given the high regard in which Scott and I hold the current AG, it seems unfair to portray Sessions with contempt or blame for making a decision Barr says was probably right.

Barrs view is supported by the fact that the legal ethics advisers at the Department of Justice counseled Sessions to recuse himself. In an email to Scott, Andy McCarthy said he doesnt doubt that the advice came from the same people who were signing off on the preposterous Carter Page FISA warrants.

I dont know who at the DOJ performed the legal analysis regarding the Sessions recusal matter, and from Andys careful phrasing it seems he doesnt know either. I dont assume that the legal analysis of the ethical issue was performed by someone who approved the Page FISA warrant.

In any case, I think the ethics advice was sound. If an Obama attorney general had worked on an Obama election campaign that was under investigation (whether or not the investigation was labeled criminal), and that attorney general remained in charge of the investigation, Im pretty sure conservatives would have screamed bloody murder. And justifiably so.

Sessions was right not to put himself in that conflicted position. And those who, like the president, attacked him for it were wrong to do so, in my view.

Finally, Scott takes issue with my statement that Trump wanted Sessions to be his consigliere. But Trump expected Sessions to protect him (and I assume wants Barr to do the same, seemingly a source of mounting frustration for Barr). Thats my understanding of what a consigliere does, albeit typically in relation to a mafia boss. (I hope readers understood that I was not accusing Trump of being a mafia boss.)

According to reports, Trump complained to Don McGahn, the White House counsel, that he needed his attorney general to protect him the way Robert Kennedy protected JFK and Eric Holder protected Obama. Trump asked McGahn, Wheres my Roy Cohn?

Bobby Kennedy and Cohn were consigliere-like, in my view. Holder described himself as Obamas wingman. He didnt fit the literal definition of a wingman, but the description was apt nonetheless. Trumps view of his attorney generals role doesnt fit the literal definition of a consigliere, but I think the description is apt nonetheless.

Admittedly, my choice of words was harsh. But it was based on my view that Trump has (or at least had) a terribly misguided view of the attorney generals proper role. That role is not to protect the president, it is to enforce federal law.

Trumps view of the AGs role as his protector, if it persists, risks making the Justice Department an instrument for the advancement of the presidents personal interests. It risks making our justice system about the rule of a man, not the rule of law.

Jeff Sessions had the correct view of the attorney generals role. If anything, he should be praised, not demonized, for that.

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Regarding Jeff Sessions: A reply to Scott Johnson - Power Line

"Do you really trust these clowns?" So asks a new billboard going up on New York City's Times Square this weekend. The video broadcast on the billboard was exclusively provided to PJ Media. The video ad mocks leaders in the Democratic Party by putting their heads on the bodies of clowns at a circus.

The "DC Clowns" circus show features "Crazy Joe Biden," "Bernie Socialist Sanders," "Nervous Nancy Pelosi," "Shifty Adam Schiff," "Wacky Elizabeth Warren," "Lil Jerry Nadler," and "Clueless Chuck Schumer."

The Committee to Defend the President, a super PAC supporting President Donald Trump, launched the ad as part of a $40,000 ad buy.

"From the Democrats making fools of themselves on the campaign trail to those who foolishly sought to impeach President Trump, the Democratic Party is now a circus of epic proportions," PAC Chairman Ted Harvey told PJ Media. "The Committee to Defend the President will continue to expose their foolishness and support President Trump, as he prepares to serve Americans for a second term."

While it may seem undignified to mock the Democrats in this fashion, many of the figures in this ad have indeed beclowned themselves many times over.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for instance, rushed the impeachment of President Donald Trump, insisting that the House of Representatives had no time to defend its subpoenas against the president's executive privilege in court. This led the House to add a second impeachment article "obstruction of Congress." Law professor Jonathan Turley famously called impeaching the president on these grounds an "abuse of power." Yet weeks later when the House had passed the articles of impeachment, the very same Nancy Pelosi refused to send them over to the Senate, delaying the very process she insisted must be rushed to prevent Trump from threatening the 2020 election.

In a similar vein, House impeachment managersReps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) argued that Trump's executive privilege was an impeachable offense when they had vociferously defended former President Barack Obama's executive privilege after Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress for refusing documents in the "Fast & Furious" scandal.

Joe Biden has beclowned himself over and over and over on the campaign trail, from his infamous Silver Star story fabrication to his calling a New Hampshire voter a "lying dog-faced pony soldier." He began the New Hampshire Democratic debate last Friday by conceding he would likely lose, and then he shamefully skipped town on the night of the primary, leaving his campaign staff and volunteers in the lurch as he rushed down to South Carolina. I'm not sure "crazy" is a sufficiently offensive moniker.

As for Elizabeth Warren, it is certainly both "wacky" and clownish to present yourself as Native American for years, even getting touted by Harvard and published in a Cherokee cookbook, and then to insist you never received "any benefit" from the ruse whatsoever. Warren's pie-in-the-sky "plans" for government takeovers of whole industries also received much-deserved derision last year.

Bernie Sanders may be the greatest clown of all. He's more eloquent than Joe Biden and far more authentic than Elizabeth Warren, but his victory would represent the Soviets finally winning the Cold War against the U.S. While he firmly rejects the label now, he oncedidn't mind being called a communist. He infamously honeymooned in the Soviet Union in the 1980s and worked with various Marxist political parties during his time as mayor of Burlington, Vermont. He endorsed Socialist Workers Party candidates for president in the 1980s when that party was pointing to Soviet-aligned countries like Nicaragua and Cuba as inspirations for U.S. policy. His support for this party prompted an FBI investigation.

Democrats are terrified of having Bernie at the top of the ticket, but a Sanders nomination would be a fitting capstone for the Democratic Party's increasing clownishness.

While Americans should be terrified of this party, Jack Dunphy pointed out that it's healthy to have a laugh at some of the absurdity.

Watch the ad below.

Tyler O'Neil is the author ofMaking Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Follow him on Twitter at@Tyler2ONeil.

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Times Square Billboard Mocks Clowns in the Democratic Party - PJ Media