“as a historical matter, the critics are dead wrong when they insist that the Hunter Biden pardon is a unique and uniquely polarizing use of the pardon power. Presidents since George Washington have wielded that power, often in extraordinarily controversial ways.
The question isn’t whether Biden’s action was somehow singular in its offensiveness — history shows us that it is not. It’s whether the pardon power, a constitutional holdover from the divine rights of kings, is a power worth removing altogether from the Constitution.
Here are four earlier examples of controversial uses of the pardon power, from Washington to Bill Clinton. Together, they make Biden’s pardon look almost quaint.”
“Kash Patel, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to replace Christopher Wray as director of the FBI, has threatened to “come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens” and “helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.” What exactly does he mean by that? Given the position that Patel will hold if he is confirmed by the Senate, the answer could have serious implications not only for the anti-Trump journalists he has in mind but also for freedom of the press generally.”
“Situations like the ones we’ve seen in Lewisville, West Ocean City, and countless other places highlight how bankrupt our current approach to “helping human trafficking victims” is. If these women really are in trouble, there has got to be a better way to get them services than making them jack off a cop (sometimes several times) first. And if they’re neither victims nor perpetuating harm against anyone, then leave them alone.”
“Qualified immunity allows government officials to avoid liability even in cases where courts find that they violated the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights. Defenders of qualified immunity say it protects police from frivolous lawsuits, but in practice it also short-circuits credible allegations of civil rights violations before they ever reach a jury.”
“It is now clearer than ever that Garland was a highly questionable choice to serve as attorney general from the start. From the outset of the Biden presidency, it was readily apparent that Garland had little desire to investigate and potentially prosecute Trump.
The most comprehensive accounts on the matter, from investigative reporting at The Washington Post and The New York Times, strongly indicate that the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation and public hearings in 2022 effectively forced Garland to investigate Trump and eventually to appoint Smith in November of that year — nearly two years after Trump incited the riot at the Capitol.
There are many people — including many Democratic legal pundits — who have continued to defend this delay and may continue to do so, so let me be very clear: Those people are wrong.
It was clear after Trump’s loss in 2020 — even before Jan. 6 — that his conduct warranted serious legal scrutiny by the Justice Department, particularly in the area of potential financial crimes. But that probe, which could and should have been pursued by Biden’s U.S. Attorney and aspiring attorney general in Manhattan, somehow never materialized.
It was also clear — on Jan. 6 itself — that Trump may have committed criminal misconduct after his loss in 2020 that required immediate and serious attention from the Justice Department.
The formation of the Jan. 6 committee in early 2021 did nothing to change the calculus. There too, it was clear from the start that there would still need to be a criminal investigation to deliver any meaningful legal accountability for Trump.
In fact, the warning signs for where this could all end up — where the country finds itself now — were clear by late 2021, less than a year into Biden’s term. The public reporting at the time indicated (correctly, we now know) that there was no real Justice Department investigation into Trump and his inner circle at that point, even though the outlines of a criminal case against Trump — including some of the charges themselves that were eventually brought nearly two years later — were already apparent.
As a result, the Biden administration and the Garland Justice Department were running an extremely obvious risk — namely, that Trump would run for reelection and win, and that any meaningful criminal accountability for his misconduct after 2020 would literally become impossible. That, of course, has now happened. It was all eminently predictable.
Garland’s defenders over the years — including many Democratic lawyers who regularly appear on cable news — claimed that Garland and the department were simply following a standard, “bottom-up” investigative effort. Prosecutors would start with the rioters, on this theory, and then eventually get to Trump.
This never made any sense.
It did not reflect some unwritten playbook for criminal investigations. In fact, in criminal cases involving large and potentially overlapping groups of participants — as well as serious time sensitivity — good prosecutors try to get to the top as quickly as possible.
The Justice Department can — and should — have quickly pursued the rioters and Trump in parallel. The fact that many legal pundits actually defended this gross dereliction of duty — and actually argued that this was the appropriate course — continues to amaze me.”
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“None of this, however, excuses the Republican political and legal class for their role in all this as well. In fact, Trump could not have pulled it off without a great deal of help from them too.
Start with Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans in 2021. They could — and should — have voted to convict Trump after his second impeachment, which would have prevented him from running again for the presidency. Instead, McConnell and almost every other GOP senator let him off the hook.
Trump then proceeded to execute perhaps the most remarkable political rehabilitation in American history, but which should not have been nearly such a surprise. He never seemed to lose his grip on the party and in fact strengthened it over the course of 2021, as the likes of Kevin McCarthy and others quickly rallied around him.
The Republican presidential primaries also proved, in the end, to be a boon for Trump in his legal fight. By the time they concluded, Trump had been indicted by the Justice Department and local prosecutors in Manhattan and Fulton County. Under the traditional rules of politics, this should have provided incredible fodder for his adversaries and essentially killed his campaign.
Instead, his most prominent primary opponents — his opponents — came to his defense. As the prosecution in Manhattan came into focus, for instance, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis belittled the effort as “some manufactured circus by some Soros-DA.” Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy both said that they would pardon Trump if elected.
It was no surprise, then, that Republican primary voters rallied around Trump. Perhaps it was inevitable, but it was certainly made easier by the fact that Trump’s supposed adversaries were all endorsing his legal defense as well as his false claims about the prosecutions themselves.
Last but most certainly not least: The Republican appointees on the Supreme Court bailed Trump out this year — in the heart of the general election campaign and when it mattered most.”
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“The six Republican appointees — three of whom, of course, were appointed by Trump himself — sided with Trump on both counts.
They first slow-walked Trump’s appeal on immunity grounds this year and then created a new doctrine of criminal immunity for Trump that had no real basis in the law — effectively foreclosing the possibility of a trial before Election Day. It was a gross distortion of the law in apparent service of the Republican appointees’ partisan political objectives.”
“Trump’s decision to nominate Patel has proven particularly controversial, since his principal qualification appears to be his sycophancy toward Trump. (A Trump transition spokesperson said, “Kash Patel has served in key national security positions throughout the government. He is beyond qualified to lead the FBI and will make a fantastic director.”)
Many observers, including former federal law enforcement officials, oppose Patel’s nomination on the grounds that he would likely use the FBI to pursue Trump’s political opponents and that he might substantially corrupt the culture and professionalism of the bureau. To some, Patel calls to mind the specter of J. Edgar Hoover, the infamous FBI director whose nearly 50-year stint running the agency until 1972 was marked by egregious abuses of power — including illegal surveillance, blackmail and the harassment of political dissidents.
Patel clearly lacks the qualifications, experience and temperament to lead the agency. But how worried should the American public really be about him at the helm of the FBI?
The truth is that there are stronger internal and external safeguards in place against law enforcement abuses than during the Hoover era. He will indeed face some constraints because of the culture and bureaucracy of the FBI. But they may not contain him. And he will have plenty of opportunity to damage the bureau and its work — and to use and abuse the FBI for political ends. His nomination poses a considerable and unjustifiable risk to the country.”
“there are two main reasons Americans tend to overestimate the extent to which crime happens: Media coverage of crime can often overstate trends and sometimes sensationalizes incidents that grab people’s attention. And law-and-order campaigns — the kind of campaigns that Trump ran, for example — are a mainstay of American politics and appear in virtually every election cycle in local, state, and national races.”
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“The United States is, after all, a relatively violent country and has a higher homicide rate than its peers. But while crime is a problem, lawmakers tend to react too quickly to crime trends, often by passing shortsighted tough-on-crime laws that bolster the perception of public safety by, say, putting more cops on the streets, but end up exacerbating the existing flaws of the criminal justice system, including sending poorer and more marginalized people to prison.”
“Wray’s decision undermined decades of hard work — by Congress, presidents, the Justice Department and the FBI itself — to move it out of a partisan, political framework. The FBI’s highest guiding principle is supposed to be the rule of law — and federal law is clear: The FBI director serves a 10-year-term, a length meant to isolate the role from political winds. Similarly, in federal law, there is a mechanism for removing an FBI director who errs — they can be fired, but only for cause. The role is not meant to be like the CIA director, attorney general or Defense secretary and turn over at noon on Jan. 20 for a new administration; it is, in fact, explicitly designed to NOT do so. Ronald Reagan spent almost all of his presidency with Jimmy Carter’s FBI director; George W. Bush inherited Bill Clinton’s FBI director; Barack Obama, in turn, inherited Bush’s, and Joe Biden will have spent his entire presidency with Wray, Trump’s choice to head the bureau.
Those safeguards and traditions exist because the FBI, in the wrong hands, is incredibly dangerous to American democracy.
The FBI is the most powerful, best resourced, and far-reaching law enforcement agency, not just in the United States, but anywhere in the world. Nothing compares to the sweeping breadth of its investigative powers; the intelligence and information it collects, wittingly and unwittingly, on all manner of Americans, powerful and not, guilty and innocent alike; and the resources and technologies it can bring to bear against anyone in its investigative sights. Even its routine investigations can paralyze and bankrupt businesses, upend lives, careers and families, and destroy reputations — and even do so when it doesn’t bring federal charges at the end. Under J. Edgar Hoover’s half-century reign, he deployed those resources to ruin the lives of civil rights activists and antiwar protesters, harass literary figures such as James Baldwin, blackmail gay people and persecute anyone he didn’t feel was sufficiently patriotic. We’ve spent a half-century as a nation trying to make sure that never happens again — and now Trump is explicitly saying he wants to restart that darkest chapter of the FBI’s history.”
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“let’s be clear about what’s happening here: The only reason Trump wants to change FBI directors is he doesn’t think he can boss, bend and break Wray to his will sufficiently, that Wray would not be personally loyal to him in the way that he has wanted his FBI directors to be — and which, institutionally, they’re explicitly not supposed to be. Every single part of that is a dire warning sign about what’s to come under Trump II and what he and Patel intend to do with the bureau.
Wray had an opportunity to make that a fight — to force Trump to bear the political cost of firing him on invented pretexts, to force the president to be the one who destroyed that guardrail rather than Wray himself. And, instead of upholding that oath to the Constitution, the rule of law and duty to protect the bureau from outside influence, Wray just … capitulated.”
“These experiences have given Patel a worldview that I think is best defined as paranoid.
Patel believes that foreign enemies — ranging from China to Iran to drug cartels — are doing their best to infiltrate the United States and wreak havoc on its homeland. Only Trump has the strength and the fortitude to stand up against these enemies and defend American allies like Israel.
The Democrats, he believes, do not just disagree with Trump on how to handle these threats: They are actively aligned with America’s enemies.
In one War Room segment, for example, Patel hosted a discredited China “expert” named Gordon Chang to warn that China was “planning an attack on our facilities on our soil.” But it’s worse than that, Chang argued: China had installed Joe Biden as the president of the United States.
“They were actually able to cast the decisive vote in 2020,” Chang told Patel, claiming without evidence that China “poured money into Joe Biden’s campaign” through the Democratic crowdfunding platform ActBlue. Patel’s response was not skepticism but credulity: “I hope people are paying attention.”
But Democrats are not merely unwitting cat’s paws of foreign powers, per Patel: They are nefarious actors aiming to tear down American democracy.
One of Patel’s favorite phrases, one that he uses again and again on Bannon’s show, is “two-tiered system of justice.” In his mind, federal law enforcement employs two distinct standards — one for “the deep state’s” friends and another for its enemies. Its allies, like the Bidens, receive only limited and superficial scrutiny, while its enemies are constantly harassed and persecuted. The four prosecutions of Trump, for Patel, are not legitimate inquiries into wrongdoing and abuses of power, but rather agents of a corrupt system lashing out at the one man who threatens their grip on America.
For this reason, Patel has an enemies list — literally. His book Government Gangsters, which he is constantly hawking on War Room, contains an appendix listing dozens of names that comprise the “executive branch deep state.””
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“he is constantly proposing schemes — like Congress arresting Garland — that amount to efforts to criminalize political disagreements. This includes proposals to investigate prominent Democrats and even prosecute journalists.
“Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you,” he said in a guest appearance on War Room last year.
“Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.””
“Video footage of Phoenix police officers beating and tasing a deaf black man with cerebral palsy has led to an internal investigation and widespread media coverage—and it couldn’t come at a worse time for the city. This summer the Justice Department (DOJ) released a scathing report accusing the police department of systemically violating the civil rights of vulnerable residents.
Local TV news outlet ABC15 first published footage last week showing the violent arrest on August 19 of Tyron McAlpin, who is now facing felony aggravated assault and resisting arrest charges as a result of the incident.”