“Like Patel, Bondi was confirmed after promising to be guided by the facts and the law rather than the president’s grudges. “The partisanship, the weaponization, will be gone,” she declared. “America will have one tier of justice for all….There will never be an enemies list within the Department of Justice.”
Blanche sang the same tune during his confirmation hearing. “Politics should never play a role in the Department of Justice,” he said. “We will work to restore the American people’s faith in our justice system.”
Whether or not Bondi and Blanche meant those words when they said them, the president plainly does not share the vision they described. “They’re all guilty as hell,” Trump said in the Truth Social rant addressed to Bondi, which mentioned Adam Schiff, the not-yet-indicted Democratic senator from California (whom Trump also mentioned on Wednesday), along with Comey and James—a list to which he has now added three more names. Guilty of what? The Justice Department’s job, as Trump sees it, is to figure that out.”
“Every American who is concerned about the state of our liberties ought to find harrowing President Donald Trump’s recent declaration that the National Guard is now in place in Portland, Oregon. As he wrote on social media, the goal is to restore law and order as “conditions continue to deteriorate into lawless mayhem.”
There are some protests against ICE’s increasingly abusive raids and detentions, but this is nothing more than a pretext to exert federal control over cities. I’m in Portland regularly, and it’s one of the nation’s most placid and safest big cities. Protests have at times been unruly over the years, but are well within the ability of local police to control.
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We should all be fearful when politicians exaggerate problems to grab more power. And it’s not just Portland. Trump previously deployed National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles and is threatening to do so in Chicago and Memphis. The president’s declared reason—to tamp down on protests—should raise the hair on everyone’s neck. He also suggested federal troops would target crime problems.
In his speech to the nation’s generals, Trump said, “We should use some of the dangerous cities as training grounds” for military intervention, as he prattled about a “war from within.” That’s authoritarian bluster of the sort heard in despotisms. Note the support or eerie silence from limited-government, constitutional conservatives who spent years warning us about government oppression.”
“The legal rationales for prosecuting James Comey, Adam Schiff, and Letitia James suggest the president is determined to punish them one way or another.
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Trump fired Comey in 2017 out of anger at the FBI investigation of alleged ties between his 2016 campaign and the Russian government. In the years since, Trump has made no secret of his desire to punish Comey for that “witch hunt,” which Patel cited as a justification for the charges against Comey.
Those charges, however, seem to stem from an entirely different investigation: the FBI’s 2016 probe of the Clinton Foundation. Although the skimpy indictment is hazy on this point, it implicitly alleges that Comey authorized the disclosure of information about that investigation and then falsely denied doing so during a 2020 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
That claim is highly doubtful for several reasons, as former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy notes in a National Review essay that describes the indictment as “so ill-conceived and incompetently drafted” that Comey “should be able to get it thrown out on a pretrial motion to dismiss.” McCarthy’s take is especially notable because he wrote a book-length critique of the Russia probe that concurs with Trump’s chief complaints about it.
In other words, even if you think that investigation epitomized the “politicization of law enforcement” (as Patel puts it), that does not necessarily mean the charges against Comey are factually or legally sound. In fact, the case is so shaky that neither career prosecutors nor Erik Siebert, the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, thought it was worth pursuing.
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Schiff, a longtime thorn in Trump’s side, spearheaded his first impeachment and served on the House select committee that investigated the 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol. James sued Trump for business fraud in New York, obtaining a jaw-dropping “disgorgement” order that was later overturned by a state appeals court, which nevertheless thought she had proven her claims.
Although Trump has averred that Schiff’s conduct as a legislator amounted to “treason,” it plainly does not fit the statutory definition of that crime. And whatever you think about the merits of James’ lawsuit, the fact that both a judge and an appeals court agreed Trump had committed fraud by overvaluing his assets suggests her claims were at least colorable.
Casting about for a legal pretext to prosecute Schiff and James, the Justice Department is mulling allegations that both committed mortgage fraud by claiming more than one home as a primary residence. Although it’s not clear there is enough evidence to convict either of them, that is beside the point as far as Trump is concerned.
As the president sees it, Schiff and James, like Comey, deserve to suffer because they wronged him. “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” he told Bondi.
Judging from the Comey case, Bondi probably will follow the president’s marching orders, to the cheers of his most enthusiastic supporters. But the rest of us have ample cause to conclude that Trump has conflated justice with revenge.”
And revenge for actions that were much more appropriate in the first place.
Over the 20th century, the U.S. developed norms that separated the justice system from the whims of the president. Trump is breaking that down and weakening the United States as a strong democracy.
“The constitution doesn’t guarantee Kimmel a talk show, but it does guarantee that the government won’t quash his speech because of what he chooses to say.
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The basic facts of Kimmel’s suspension are straightforward. The late-night host has been accused of mischaracterizing the motives of the alleged assassin of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, suggesting he may have hailed from the political right. On Wednesday, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, appeared on Benny Johnson’s podcast and described Kimmel’s remarks as part of a “concerted effort to lie to the American people.” The FCC, he said, has “remedies that we can look at.” He added: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way …. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
After Carr’s threat, Nexstar, an owner of many ABC affiliate stations, said that it wouldn’t run Kimmel’s program “for the foreseeable future” because of his Kirk comments. (Notably, Nexstar is planning to acquire a rival company, Tegna, in a $6.2 billion deal that will require FCC approval.)
Mere hours later, ABC had removed Kimmel from the air.
When the Supreme Court dismissed the Covid-social media suit against the Biden administration, it held that the plaintiffs lacked a legal right to sue — called standing — because they could not link anything the federal government did to the suppression of their speech. As Justice Amy Coney Barrett put it, the flaw in the case was a “lack of specific causation findings with respect to any discrete instance of content moderation.”
Here, by contrast, the evidence of “specific causation” is plain to see: Carr threatens ABC unless it sanctions Kimmel. ABC does as Carr asks. The FCC, to be sure, does not have authority to police the alleged truth of statements made on television. But that doesn’t mean that the agency can’t use its investigative powers to raise costs for targeted media outlets and it can clearly exert its influence on any potential acquisitions. And for all his recent talk about supporting free speech, this isn’t Carr’s first pressure campaign against a perceived antagonist of President Donald Trump. In July, he issued threats against Comcast, demanding more favorable coverage of Republicans from its NBC affiliates.
The Trump administration also has a clear model when it comes to leaning on media firms to silence speech it dislikes: The president’s executive orders punishing law firms for their association with disfavored clients and advocacy of out-of-season causes likewise deployed regulatory tools to try to achieve plainly impermissible censorship. Like Carr’s action this week, those executive orders in part worked through the economic pressure firms experienced, even as their First Amendment rights were being violated.
Although the Supreme Court did not ultimately decide the merits in the social media case, no justice doubted the clear-as-day First Amendment principle that, as Alito explained, “government officials may not coerce private entities to suppress speech.” Indeed, less than a month beforehand, the unanimous court held in a different case that the First Amendment “prohibits government officials from relying on the ‘threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion . . . to achieve the suppression’ of disfavored speech.”
In a separate opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch explained what a plaintiff needed to show to get into court: Could the government’s conduct, when “viewed in context,” be “reasonably understood to convey a threat of adverse government action in order to punish or suppress the plaintiff ’s speech?”
This principle is both simple and sound: The government can’t do indirectly, through shadowy threats and mafia-like intimidation, what it is barred from doing directly. Indeed, this is a principle that even Trump apparently believes in: In July 2021, he filed civil actions against Facebook, Twitter and YouTube alleging that unconstitutional government jaw-boning of those firms led to the take-down and shadow banning of his and others’ speech.
Kimmel may have contractual remedies against ABC. But he also has a powerful constitutional claim for prospective relief and damages against the federal government much like the one that Trump sought to vindicate in 2021. A principled consistency would require those who objected to the Biden administration’s engagement with social media firms to support Kimmel. (To be clear, I am not holding my breath.)”
The Kirk shooter so far seems to have no connections to anti-facist groups. “right wing” violence kills far more people than “left wing”. Of course, most left wing people and most right wing people have nothing to do with any of this violence.
Designating drug gangs and then domestic organizations as “terrorist” organizations could lead to persecuting political opponents not because they are somehow funding, or a part of, a terrorist organization, but because they are political opponents.