No major reforms have taken place at the Department of Justice or FBI even as its politicized bungling of prosecutions and investigations has made major news. //

Despite Rep. Fortenberry’s efforts to cooperate, when he didn’t recall details the government’s informant had been directed to describe to him nearly a year earlier prosecutors waited until the Biden Administration was in power and then brought multiple charges that had nothing to do with their campaign finance investigation,” said Fortenberry spokesman Chad Kolton. “This set up of a highly effective and well-respected member of Congress is another alarming example of a Justice Department and FBI that are out of control and destroying the lives and reputations of far too many Americans.” ///

It is called "entrapment".

Scott Morefield
@SKMorefield
QAnon Shaman gets 41 months in prison for walking around the Capitol.

Leftist Antifa member gets probation & a fine for taking an axe to a senator's door, and the FBI even returned the axe.

Sounds about right.

8:42 PM · Nov 29, 2021 //

Starks pled guilty to the destruction of government property. Federal sentencing guidelines recommended that he get between 10-16 months. But instead, he was given probation and only had to pay $2,784 in restitution. He even got the ax he used in the commission of the offense back. Starks mocked the FBI for giving the ax back to him. //

More differences? Starks got to raise money for his defense on GoFundMe while the effort to raise money for Kyle Rittenhouse was pulled by GoFundMe officials.

Three North Dakota Democratic officials even donated to Starks. //

We are a country based on the rule of law, which includes the concept of equal treatment under the law. But when we see things like this, it eats away and erodes that basic foundational principle of our government. It makes us question if there still is that equal treatment under the law or whether your politics determine how you will be treated. It would be an incredibly dangerous thing to lose that cornerstone on which we were built.

tobybrut
26 minutes ago
These cases are superficially similar but have a huge difference between them. In the Coffee case, Coffee was considered the bad guy and was arrested and tried. In the Taylor case, the police were assumed to be the bad guys with lies about Taylor being innocently in bed being thrown around in order to railroad the police officers. In both cases, you saw criticism by conservatives on the policies surrounding how these officers ended up getting in shootouts. Whether it was lies about no-knock warrants or whatever, it wasn’t the officers who screwed up. It was the people who put them in that position. The left kept lying about the Taylor case, yet the right pointing out the lies are somehow hypocrisy when there were no such dynamics in the Coffee case. There were no leftist lies to debunk because the left was utterly silent on the case. In that respect, politically, these cases are not remotely similar.

In both cases, conservatives were fine with the outcome. Both boyfriends got off on murder charges, where people understood in both cases, self-defense was an issue. The boyfriends didn’t know they were cops shooting at them and had legitimate rights of self-defense. In the Taylor case, one officer was charged with indiscriminately shooting into the next apartment. Whatever happens to him is fine with whatever the law says. If he goes to prison according to the law, that’s the way it should be. Coffee is going to prison for a gun charge, which is fine because it has nothing to do with his right of self-defense.

The big difference in the Taylor case was that the left was trying to destroy the cops before the case was even investigated. In the case of Coffee, nobody had heard of the case until a few days ago, so people had a different perspective with which to decide since the jury had already resolved it. We saw the Coffee case, heard the jury’s decision, and thought, good, it seems the law was followed and the right decision was made. There were no politics about anti-cop versus pro-cop surrounding that case, merely the right of self-defense. The only reason conservatives brought it up was to fight the politics surrounding Kyle Rittenhouse and how both were self-defense cases. The only reason Coffee’s race mattered was because the left accused Kyle of white supremacy. If the left had said nothing about Kyle, no one would have ever mentioned the Coffee case as it likely would not have generated any controversy. Was the Coffee case opportunistic for refuting the left’s arguments against Rittenhouse? Yes, because the same result happened for people of different races as it should. Opportunistic is not the same as hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is saying Coffee was innocent while Rittenhouse was guilty. The hypocrisy is all on the left.

Absent the Rittenhouse case, I can say conservatives would have responded to the Coffee case the same as they did with the Rittenhouse case. Justice was done and the right decision was made. The Taylor case was different in that the emphasis was on the cops, not the boyfriend, as to who did wrong. The boyfriend was practically an afterthought while the left demanded the cops be charged. But in all three cases, it seems justice was done. Where is the hypocrisy on the right?

LGB //

VRW
28 minutes ago
I think the real question is why is the Left choosing to use the Taylor case to push their race-baiting defund the police systemic racism narrative, but not the Coffee case.

It’s always a good thing to evaluate why the Left supports an issue since generally the “issue” is not the issue.

You seem to be painting with a very broad brush, Scott, and it’s not a good look. As for the Taylor case, why is a no-knock raid that ends tragically a sign of systemic racism? I keep hearing about this system that is racist, but no one can ever give specifics. It’s so tiresome. Is it a system in desperate need of reform? Absolutely. That doesn’t make it racist. Is it a system that disproportionately affects poor people negatively? Absolutely. It doesn’t make it racist.

Ask yourself this, Scott, had Breonna Taylor and her boyfriend been white would we have ever heard about them? Nope. No one would give a sh** about her. This constant pandering to race is muddying the waters to a real problem this country has, that problem being an ever increasing descent into totalitarian government control.

the same people who find George Floyd a problematic hero for the left, are suddenly foisting felony-convicted police assaulter Andrew Coffee IV upon a tower and claiming “justice was done!” The same people who claimed Breonna Taylor got what she deserved for formerly dating a drug dealer, are the same people ignoring that Alteria Woods was in bed next to Andrew Coffee IV. The same people saying Gaige Grosskreutz shouldn’t have been in possession of a firearm without a license, are praising a man who shot at police with an illegally possessed firearm. Here, they are cheering Andrew Coffee IV, who is still going to prison for possession of a firearm as a convicted felon, but should you ask these same people the name of Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend, they wouldn’t have the first clue. Can you blame me for thinking the only reason they care about this case is that Coffee’s blackness could be weaponized against claims regarding Rittenhouse? If it isn’t, why do they support Coffee and not Walker?

This brand of conservatives is so laser-focused on opposing the left that they are willing to sacrifice truth and justice at the altar of “owning libs.” Instead of taking a look at the facts of cases and making their own determination as to what “justice” looks like, they look to the left to see what they are doing so that they can do the exact opposite. Instead of taking a moment to acknowledge that we are failing at “liberty and justice for all,” they are busy googling “black guy self-defense acquittal.” They aren’t choosing what to support. They are choosing to oppose BLM and the left at all costs.

Both of these cases are tragedies. Both of these cases are examples of injustice. Both deserve our support and outrage and not just when it serves our narrative. If anything, the Breonna Taylor case is more of an injustice and something for which we should be more outraged, but I guess there were no white kids recently acquitted of self-defense at the time.

Furthermore, two innocent women are dead as the result of the incompetence of police officers, and no one is being held accountable. That is the biggest injustice. //

Being at war with the left should also be a war against the type of tactics they employ. Not the use of them. Being glad that Coffee was acquitted is commendable. I am glad to see conservatives supporting it. I just wish it was because they understood the case and agreed with it and not because they are using it to dunk on liberals.

Kyle Rittenhouse: "This case has nothing to do with race."

Watch our exclusive interview, tomorrow at 8pm ET on @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/vXLEVtfycc

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) November 22, 2021 //

Tucker Carlson
@TuckerCarlson
"It wasn't Kyle Rittenhouse on trial in Wisconsin. It was the right to self-defense on trial."

Tonight at 8pm ET on @FoxNews

11:10 AM · Nov 22, 2021

Justin Hart
@justin_hart
Did you hear of the guy who was acquitted of murder by pleading self-defense today? No not that guy Kyle… This guy…
8:10 PM · Nov 19, 2021 //

It is interesting that there are no cries of injustice, systemic racism, or a weighted judicial system on the Andrew Coffee IV trial. In fact, it didn’t even hit the national press, mainly because it does not fit their chosen narrative of gun control and dangerous white men with guns.

But the same trial-by-jury system, and the same gun freedoms and gun laws upheld the rights of two young men: one White, the other Black, to defend themselves. The same American court system in different states affirmed those rights for both men. It is absolutely schizophrenic, not to mention disingenuous, to cry that the system worked for one person because of their race, but didn’t work for another in spite of theirs.

The defense had previously raised two issues.

The first is that the prosecution improperly infringed on Kyle Rittenhouse’s constitutional right to remain silent when, during questioning, ADA Thomas Binger tried to suggest that Rittenhouse hadn’t made a comment until he was able to hear everyone else testify. That caused fireworks with the judge admonishing the prosecutor and saying he was on the line and maybe over it.

The second issue was that the prosecution had tried to introduce evidence that the judge had already ruled they could not introduce. The judge had also admonished the prosecutor over that, saying that he didn’t believe the prosecution when Binger claimed that he didn’t think the judge’s ruling applied to the evidence he, Binger, was trying to introduce. The judge chastised Binger, saying “Don’t get brazen with me,” “I don’t believe you,” and “There’d better not being another incident.”

Now, in a formal filing for a motion for mistrial with prejudice that they made on Monday, the defense mentions those issues but also raises another — that the prosecution withheld evidence from defense. The defense argues that on November 5, the prosecution turned over a compressed version of a drone video that had been taken on that day showing some of the incident of Rittenhouse running into the lot with Joseph Rosenbaum chasing him and then the shooting. Meanwhile, the defense is saying that the prosecution had a clearer version of the video that they did not provide until after both sides were finished presenting their cases. //

‘The problem is the prosecution gave the defense a compressed version of the video. What that means is the video provided to the defense was not as clear as the video kept by the state.’

The motion goes onto explain that the file size of the defense video is just 3.6MB while the prosecution’s is 11.2MB.

Authorities at an airport last year seized a bag of cash that Kermit Warren was carrying to buy a truck. It was his life’s savings but prosecutors contended the money was linked to drugs. //

The seizure, on Nov. 4, 2020, led to a yearlong ordeal that highlighted what Mr. Warren’s lawyers call the injustice of civil forfeiture, which allows law enforcement officials to seize the cash, cars or other personal property of people suspected of crimes but not charged.

The practice is a popular way to raise revenue but has been easily abused and widely criticized for depriving people of their right to due process and for disproportionately affecting poor people and people of color like Mr. Warren, who is Black. //

On Thursday, federal prosecutors agreed to return all $28,180 to Mr. Warren and to dismiss their civil forfeiture complaint “with prejudice,” which means that it cannot be refiled, Mr. Alban said.

In the agreement, prosecutors did not admit any wrongdoing. Prosecutors and the D.E.A. did not respond to emails seeking comment on Saturday.

The COP26 international climate-change negotiations have just begun in Glasgow, Scotland, and the vibes are … ambivalent. The leaders of Russia and China haven’t bothered to attend, but did promise to help end deforestation by 2030—though many observers are skeptical that they will keep their word. In the United States, President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan lost a powerful provision that would have helped convert the nation’s electricity grid to renewable energy, but still includes an unprecedented $555 billion to combat climate change. //

Brian O’Neill, the director of the Joint Global Change Research Institute, a partnership between the U.S. Department of Energy and the University of Maryland at College Park, has a clearer view of this question than most of us. He was one of the lead architects of the five different futures—called “shared socioeconomic pathways,” or SSPs—developed for the latest IPCC report. //

The path we seem to be on, at least for now, looks closer to SSP 2, which the authors call “Middle of the Road.” This is a world in which “social, economic, and technological trends do not shift markedly from historical patterns.” A world, in other words, in which we do not heroically rise to the occasion to fix things, but in which we also don’t get much worse than we already are. //

One thing he wants to make very clear is that all the paths, even the hottest ones, show improvements in human well-being on average. IPCC scientists expect that average life expectancy will continue to rise, that poverty and hunger rates will continue to decline, and that average incomes will go up in every single plausible future, simply because they always have. “There isn’t, you know, like a Mad Max scenario among the SSPs,” O’Neill said. Climate change will ruin individual lives and kill individual people, and it may even drag down rates of improvement in human well-being, but on average, he said, “we’re generally in the climate-change field not talking about futures that are worse than today.” //

But the world we are heading toward may be one in which the average human is living longer and making more money than ever, but some vulnerable humans and many nonhumans are collateral damage.

This is why many climate activists frame global warming as a problem of justice.

The same firms that volunteered to represent 9/11 terrorists pro bono now have no interest in defending the American citizens languishing in prison since January. //

At least 50 high-powered law firms that went out of their way to defend foreign terrorists in Guantanamo Bay free of charge are nowhere to be found as hundreds of American citizens languish in prison for charges related to entering the U.S. Capitol building during the January 6 riot.

When foreign terrorists, including the accused mastermind who helped plan the 9/11 attack, were being held in the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, law firms from across the country volunteered to represent them pro bono. Now, nearly 600 Americans face an intense legal battle over their participation in the events of January 6, and these same firms are leaving them defenseless. Not one of the legal firms that assisted Gitmo terrorists have helped any of those charged with ties to January 6. //

Without a strong criminal defense, the government can take away individual rights without a clear demonstration of the guilt of the accused. The firms who trumpeted the right to a strong defense for everyone charged in the American legal system when it came to Guantanamo Bay are well aware of the need for a competent defense for citizens today, yet they have not allocated any resources to an equal defense for some accused of crimes.

Like the American Founders and the Declaration of Independence, King didn’t seek to abolish the rule of law, but to appeal to it. King saw, as Thomas Jefferson did, that it wasn’t enough to define law as whatever the sovereign power declared it to be. He saw, as did the Founders, that law defined as such provides no constraint on tyrants who want to reduce it to a matter of their own will and power. //

So what distinguishes a just law from an unjust one?

In addressing this question, both King and the Declaration of Independence drew on a classical tradition that perceives law as rooted in objective reality, in the way that things are. It’s a tradition at least as old as Aristotle. King cited St. Augustine as stating the principle that “an unjust law is no law at all.” He cited St. Thomas Aquinas as teaching that “an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.” //

Communism and Nazism both accept a relativism that reduces “truth” to a matter of will and power, while seeking to impose their own truth on others. They’re obviously tyrannical, if not totalitarian. But we see the same tendencies in ideologies and movements promoted by Western elites that deny objective truth and seek to suppress free speech, open debate, and democratic decision-making.

The tyranny of radical relativism is one of its paradoxes. It denies the very existence of objective reality while insisting on its own truth. //

The point is simply that justice depends on recognizing the real, objective nature of truth (beyond what the state or party or leaders says it is at the moment), establishing the truth of the matter, and then telling it (or at least not lying about it), even when the cost of truth-telling is high in terms of job security or, in these days of doxxing, in terms of the risk to one’s family.

This man lost nearly $87,000 for the crime of having cash on him.

Pirates of the Caribbean actor Greg Ellis wrote a book about corruption in the family courts called The Respondent: Exposing the Cartel of Family Law, detailing not only his experience but the experiences of people all over the country who say they’ve been railroaded by a money-making criminal organization dressed up as justice. Ellis sat down with me on “The Fringe” to discuss his harrowing experience.

Ellis told PJ Media:

It’s a complex web of intrigue, the family courts… It’s the Wild West of family law. It’s a $60 billion-a-year annual American divorce machine and industry that is racking up billable hours and sacrificing children and parents, and really just looking at estates of families and seeing how much money they can make.

This system is well-known by everyone who has been ground through it, but when will the legislatures, which have the power to check judges and clean up this mess, do their jobs? Instead of taking responsibility for the family courts, the state legislatures have abandoned their power to “oversight boards” that are tasked with hearing complaints from litigants. These boards rarely discipline anyone. Reuters just did an incredible investigation into judicial corruption and found that thousands of judges accused of misconduct remain on the bench.

Judges have made racist statements, lied to state officials and forced defendants to languish in jail without a lawyer – and then returned to the bench, sometimes with little more than a rebuke from the state agencies overseeing their conduct.

Recent media reports have documented failures in judicial oversight in South Carolina, Louisiana and Illinois. Reuters went further.

In the first comprehensive accounting of judicial misconduct nationally, Reuters identified and reviewed 1,509 cases from the last dozen years – 2008 through 2019 – in which judges resigned, retired or were publicly disciplined following accusations of misconduct. In addition, reporters identified another 3,613 cases from 2008 through 2018 in which states disciplined wayward judges but kept hidden from the public key details of their offenses – including the identities of the judges themselves.

Colin Kaepernick
@Kaepernick7
“What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? This Fourth of July is yours, not mine…There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.”

• Frederick Douglass

12:03 PM · Jul 4, 2019

Ted Cruz
@tedcruz
You quote a mighty and historic speech by the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, but, without context, many modern readers will misunderstand. Two critical points:

(1) This speech was given in 1852, before the Civil War, when the abomination of slavery still existed. Thanks to Douglass and so many other heroes, we ended that grotesque evil and have made enormous strides to protecting the civil rights of everybody.

(2) Douglass was not anti-American; he was, rightly and passionately, anti-slavery. Indeed, he concluded the speech as follows:

“Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country.

“There are forces in operation, which must inevitably, work the downfall of slavery. ‘The arm of the Lord is not shortened,’ and the doom of slavery is certain.

“I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from ‘the Declaration of Independence,’ the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age.”

Let me encourage everyone, READ THE ENTIRE SPEECH; it is powerful, inspirational, and historically important in bending the arc of history towards justice: https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/2945

Attorney General Robert Jackson, later a Supreme Court justice and Nuremberg prosecutor, warned against “picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him,” in which case “the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.”

But that’s what’s been going on. Whether you like or you hate Trump, you should condemn it. Not just because it’s wrong on its face and against our Constitutional order, but also because if it can happen to Trump even when he was the President of the United States, it can happen to anyone if you land on the wrong side of the powers that be. That’s exactly what happens in banana republics.

The four-justice majority concluded that while Castor had not provided Cosby immunity from prosecution, the state had violated Cosby’s due process rights by charging him after the original district attorney committed not to prosecute Cosby in order to force him to testify in Constand’s civil case. The court held that “[i]n light of these circumstances, the subsequent decision by successor D.A.s to prosecute Cosby violated Cosby’s due process rights. No other conclusion comports with the principles of due process and fundamental fairness to which all aspects of our criminal justice system must adhere.” //

When the new D.A. first filed charges against Cosby, his attorneys sought to prevent the criminal case from proceeding based on Castor’s decision in 2005 not to prosecute Cosby. Yet the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected those attempts, even though yesterday the high court relied on that same decision to toss Cosby’s conviction. But that decision came only after Cosby faced two trials and spent nearly three years in prison. Further, the courts all refused to allow Cosby to remain free on bail pending the appeal, ensuring that he spent that time in prison even though his conviction was overturned.

And then there is the way the prosecutors obtained the conviction in the first place: Following the first mistrial, at which the jury was hung, the trial court permitted the prosecutors to present testimony from five of Cosby’s other accusers. In the first trial, only one other woman was allowed to testify, and the jury in that case was unable to reach a unanimous verdict. Nothing changed between the trials to justify allowing five women to testify, instead of just the one.

On appeal, Cosby’s attorneys also challenged his conviction based on the trial court’s decision to admit this evidence of other crimes, but because the court concluded his conviction must be overturned based on Castor’s decision not to prosecute Cosby, the majority opinion did not address whether the trial court also erred in admitting this evidence. //

.... while Cosby may have walked out of prison a free man yesterday, the courts saw to it that he endured two criminal trials, at which multiple women testified that he sexually assaulted him—with much of that testimony likely inappropriately admitted—and then the courts allowed Cosby to waste away in prison for nearly three years while his appeal percolated.

Given the overwhelming number of women accusing the former star of sexual assault, America’s sympathies may not favor Cosby, but the Constitution does.

They investigated the Trump organization for three years and the best they could come up with is unpaid taxes on fringe benefits? This is the kind of thing you normally handle as a civil matter. In fact, as my prior write-up noted, the Times literally could not find a previous example of a prosecutor filing criminal charges in a similar case. That’s how much of a politicized witch-hunt this entire thing is. //

This is the kind of thing that typically is handled with a bill in the mail. The fact that charges are being filed is simply a way for these partisan prosecutors to justify all the money they’ve wasted. //

What the FBI and DOJ did was obviously the pinnacle of malfeasance, but to have state prosecutors propagating a joke investigation and prosecution like this further testifies to how far our justice system has fallen.

What this means is that the Democrat Justice Department intends to continue to file criminal charges against EVERY PERSON who entered the Capitol on January 6 when they can verify the identities of the persons captured on videotape.

EVERY PERSON.

That means that anyone who attended the January 6 protest and went inside the Capitol, but has not yet been charged, will wake up every morning until the statute of limitations expires and wonder, “Will today be the day the Democrat Justice Department arrests me because I protested the election of Joe Biden?” //

the heavy-handed policy of “no exceptions” which is being followed only ensures that the damage to the country created by political divisions which exist will only get worse. It is a statement by the Biden Administration that it intends to criminalize to the greatest extent allowed by law the sentiment following the 2020 election that the outcome was not legitimate.

More significantly, it is a legitimate basis upon which the segment of the population who politically oppose the Biden Administration can reasonably claim the Administration is employing the criminal justice system to delegitimize that political opposition by declaring it to be based in criminality.

Jenna Ellis
@JennaEllisEsq
Buried deep in the Atlantic piece is this real gem.

To my knowledge, Barr never interviewed one witness or reviewed one affidavit.

He simply formed a conclusion, sandbagged Trump’s effort to get to the truth, and let the clock run out. //

According to The Atlantic, the DOJ never opened a formal investigation into any of the claims.

Think about that for a second. Of course, if they never open any investigation, they’re never going to find anything. Yet he applied that expletive to it anyway.

So what did he actually do, if anything?

Hirono’s philosophy when it comes to judges is on full display. She attempts to assert that gay marriage would not have been legalized had judges followed “originalism.” Now, I’m not sure of the legal merits of that claim (as far as whether originalism was a deterrent instead of other factors) but it’s a blatant admission that she wants her judges to be partisans who legislate from the bench. In fact, it’s an admission she wants her judges to have no limiting principles whatsoever. Call it the “wise Latina” standard set by Justice Sotomayor, who is very open about the fact that she rules based on the idea of “justice” and impact instead of what the law actually says.

Hirono, in this case, gets very angry when Cruz points out her ridiculous notion, claiming that he was “mansplaining” to her. It’s one of the more cringe moments in the video, akin to your grandmother trying to sing rap lyrics. Cruz then ties her in knots by asking her to note exactly what he mischaracterized about her silly rant.