The Politicization of American Justice
Renee Parsons
The American criminal justice system has long been a sharp painful thorn in the nation’s consciousness as if to remind us of a major flaw in the American way of life.
Mostly, that awareness has focused on the inequities of prosecution and sentencing between the privileged upper-class elites, the have-nots of the blue-collar underclass and our nation’s minorities.
Since 2016 the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has had an increased national presence initially as it related to the discredited Russiagate collusion campaign and now, as long-standing corruption within the DOJ and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) surfaces, the status quo can no longer be tolerated.
Only those with a childlike innocence would be surprised by the sudden, untimely death of Jeffrey Epstein while incarcerated in the US Federal prison system.
Attorney General Bill Barr described himself as ‘appalled’ that the planet’s most politically connected trafficker of adolescent female flesh had ‘suicided’ out. Epstein was also reported to be a valuable Mossad asset who used his unique position to blackmail a multitude of unsuspecting elite schmucks.
If Barr brings the same level of incredulity to the ongoing systemic investigations of the effort to disrupt the 2016 presidential campaign and to unseat a sitting US President, we might as well roll up the last copy of the Constitution and use it for kindling.
Despite a history of prejudicial bias and unethical conduct that is incompatible with a free, open and democratic society, injustice including one’s demise at the hands of the American criminal justice system is nothing new.
Whether Epstein was mortally wounded or is sunning himself on an Israeli beach leads to the same conclusion: It can no longer be denied that corruption of the nation’s law enforcement system is widespread (ie civil asset forfeiture) as its top officials and many of its privileged Federal judges are implicated.
While a Grand Jury Inquiry into 911 has been stalled by the US Attorney at the US Southern District since April, 2018, it is anticipated that the DOJ Inspector General’s report on FISA Court abuses will detail systemic criminal behavior at the highest levels of government perhaps reaching into the Obama White House.
Which brings us to the presidential campaign of Sen. Kamala Harris as walking – talking proof of why, as a prosecutor, she should be ineligible for election to any position of public trust.
There is little reason to believe that Harris is an aberration but rather the product of an odious infection that Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals described as “an epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.”
Considering its hallowed beginnings with the Judiciary Act of 1789 which established the Supreme Court, created the nation’s Federal Court system including the first US Attorneys and US Marshals and the first Circuit and District Courts, the nation’s law enforcement and judicial institutions are deeply embedded in the Constitutional roots of the Country.
The Act also created the office of the Attorney General.
In particular, a Federal Prosecutor is an omnipotent, most powerful person in any legal proceeding and armed with an unlimited pot of taxpayer funds.
With high profile prosecutions as plum assignments, many prosecutors cannot resist the grandstanding and opportunity for fame and glory. They are in total control of the Grand Jury process with unfettered discretion to run roughshod over any defendant. Losing sight of the fact that they are officers of the Court, they are untouchable as they possess a legal immunity from their own criminal misconduct.
There is an outstanding opportunity for the American public to better understand the level of corruption at the DOJ with a Must Read of Sidney Powell’s “Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the US Department of Justice.” Powell’s book reads like a political expose, leaving the reader profoundly disturbed and stunned by the level of unimpeded corruption in the absence of any checks and balances.
Reading more like a fast-paced crime novel with one tragic suicide and one suspected murder, all the indictments were based on fabricated criminal allegations, a unanimous Supreme Court reversal, repeated Constitutional violations of withholding evidence (ie Brady Rule) as well as wrongful imprisonments – all conducted by the highest levels of the country’s criminal justice system involving two US District Court Judges and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
All defendants were initially found guilty only to have their convictions reversed on appeal with one still guilty of perjury/obstruction and concluding with the politically- inspired prosecutorial promotions to increased positions of power and influence within the DOJ or the revolving door to some of the nation’s million dollar law firms.
The following summaries of the three cases outlined in Powell’s book do not do justice to the complexity and divergence from the Rule of Law as so effectively detailed in Licensed to Lie:
Enron Task Force Targets Arthur Anderson
In March, 2002 with the GW Bush Administration in office, the DOJ began their investigation into the Enron collapse by indicting Arthur Anderson, the country’s leading accounting firm since 1913.
The entire company of AA was indicted rather than any single individuals responsible. As the auditor representing Enron along with 2,300 other publicly traded companies, the immediate impact of the indictment forced Anderson to close its doors leaving its 85,000 worldwide employees unemployed.
One Enron witness who refused to testify and plead guilty was put in solitary confinement for months until he wilted and agreed to testify per DOJ’s instructions. District Court Judge Melinda Harmon was cooperative of the government’s case amending jury instructions to lessen the prosecution burden to prove their case. The jury found the company guilty with the conviction affirmed by the Fifth Circuit.
In 2005, the Supreme Court found that AA had committed no criminal conduct and unanimously reversed the conviction 9-0.
DOJ Enron Task Force Targets Four Merrill Lynch Executives
In September 2003, four Merrill Lynch executives were indicted under an ‘honest services’ charge for conspiring to defraud Enron of its CFO services even though no fraud was committed. Defense Council Powell could find no precedent for making the honest services claim a federal criminal offense.
The basis for the allegation was a five-minute telephone conversation on December 23 regarding Enron’s guarantee to Merrill that they would buy back some Nigerian barges.
The Task Force assured Defense Counsel’s repeated requests that no Brady evidence existed. “Cooperative” prosecution witnesses included Enron’s CFO Barry Fastow who was the criminal mastermind of multiple mega-million dollar thefts as compared to the four Merrill defendants who took no money and received no benefits. Fastow served less than five years in prison.
As the jury returned a guilty verdict, District Judge Ewing Werlien denied all defense motions as the Task Force requested immediate incarceration forcing the defendants to report to prison that day. The Task Force had requested a 24-year sentence although each received 3 -4 years
Always at issue was whether the DOJ prosecutors abided by the Brady Rule which constitutionally requires the prosecution to provide the defense with all exculpatory evidence that might benefit the defense. Six years later, as one of the four defendants was still in appeals court, the Task Force accidentally revealed their withholding of evidence from Defense Council that would have exonerated the Merrill Four six years earlier.
DOJ Prosecution of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)
In July of 2008, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) was indicted by a federal grand jury for failure to report gifts related to a home renovation and was found guilty on October 27th. Less than a week later, Stevens, a forty-year member of the US Senate, lost his re-election bid which changed the balance of power in the Senate as Barack Obama was elected President and the Democrats assumed control of the Senate.
Soon after, in a rare display of ethical and moral fortitude, an FBI whistleblower revealed that the Task Force attorneys had withheld exculpatory evidence from the Stevens defense, again violating the Brady Rule.
Newly appointed Attorney General Eric Holder was forced to dismiss the charges against Stevens with District Judge Emmett Sullivan overturning the Stevens conviction and ultimately appointed a special investigator to review the DOJ’s behavior.
The Schuelke Report targeted mid level FBI attorneys while vindicating its top supervisors. The suggestion that the Steven’s indictment was ideologically driven remains a possibility.
*
It remains an imponderable curiosity as to how an incestuous group-think led to these stunning levels of abuse of political power. Why would some of the highest ranking officials within the DOJ seemingly consciously destroy the Constitutional presumption of innocence; that is, that any citizen is innocent until proven guilty – even as the concept has been a political football since the 2016 election.
On Federal matters, the burden is always on the government to prove their case “beyond a reasonable doubt” and yet, the government never met that burden in all three of the cases cited above. It is as if there was deliberate intent to devastate the reputation and integrity of the country’s leading law enforcement agencies thereby destroying its ability to ever again function as a credible advocate on behalf of the Bill of Rights.
The term ‘prosecutorial misconduct’ does not adequately sum up the damage done to the thousands of lives affected in the three cases; livelihoods ruined, financial instability and physical well being destroyed due to an improper, excessive display of the politicization of justice.
What is equally astounding is that for the DOJ to have failed in all three cases with prosecutorial misconduct, the unanimous Supreme Court reversal and repudiation of the Department’s legal prowess, any one of these cases were sufficient to merit a Congressional oversight hearing including what disciplinary action had been taken.
In addition, while Powell’s book should have been a NY Times bestseller, that once authoritative “newspaper of record” refused to ‘review’ the book just as the NY Post backed off a story when the DOJ refused to make comment and book distributors have been less than cooperative.
And lastly, given the multiple Brady Rule violations, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) introduced the “ Fairness in Disclosure of Evidence Act of 2012 “ which failed to attract more than four co-sponsors.
Edit: In an earlier version of this article AG Bill Barr was mistakenly referred to as Bob Barr.
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Here is a prime example of the problem:
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/08/28/john-kiriakou-in-search-of-a-russiagate-scalp-the-entrapment-of-maria-butina/
I have read too much about the abuse of the American injustice system .It gives me severe heart burn just thinking about it.I could hardly read this above article though it needs to be said and thank you Renee for exposing it. Another trip down this dark world would be to read Whiney Webb’s 4 part series on Epstein and all his underworld and government connections .
Here is part 1 .Just follow the links for all the others.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/shocking-origins-jeffrey-epstein-blackmail-roy-cohn/260621/
All this sort of thing is quite old hat to us in Britain. Most of us lost any belief in the integrity of British justice by about 1990, if not before.
As you may know, the British had a civil war in Northern Ireland on and off for a few centuries before the Good Friday Sgreement. In the 1970s, there were a series of pub bombings which killed several people. In two of those cases (incidents in Birmingham and Guildford), what basically happened was that six (Birmingham) and four (Guildford) Irishmen were fitted up and remained in jail for over twenty years despite the most senior officers in the IRA making it clear that they were not the guilty parties. Forensic evidence was falsified, Home Secretaries repeatedly stonewalled attempts to reopen the cases and judges showed they had about as much interest in justice being served as America has in allowing free trade overseas (none, in other words).
There was a fairly brazen attempt to jail a Whitehall civil servant in the 1980s for ‘photostatting a few memos and sending them over to Halitosis Hall’. The CS in question, Clove Ponting, was merely informing an honest MP that Ministers had knowingly lied in the HOC, which convention dictates is immediately to be followed by resignation. Far from the liar resigning or Mrs Thatcher doing her constitutional duty by sacking him, the whole Government machinery was brought to bear to try and send the honest man to prison. The Attorney General should have sacked for publicly stating that ‘he hoped that a suitably severe member of the judiciary would be on hand to hear the case’, no sacking resulted. The judge may have been severe, more importantly he was utterly corrupt and his summation should be studied by every law student as a benchmark of judicial malfeasance through distorting evidence in every conceivable way prior to directing the jury to convict. The jury’s response, a twenty four finger salute contained in a 12-0 Not Guilty verdict, remains one of the seminal reasons for continuing to be tried by ones peers and not by a judge who will say anything, do anything and deny anything to serve his corrupt and unprincipled masters.
Then there have been numerous cases of ‘reversible Alzheimer’s’ leading to claims that defendants were ‘not fit to stand trial’ due to illness. Amazingly, all those cases were diagnosed amongst the rich and powerful and amazingly enough, they recovered suffciently to work at Board Level in the private sector as soon as legal proceedings against them were terminated. Personally, I would have taken a twelve bore to their QCs and shot them in full view of the Old Bailey, as their brazen contempt for the law stood in direct contravention of every principle of justice. At least that would mean that the criminals would struggle in future to find legal representation…..
Then we have forty years of corruption in police forces across the country ensuring that every child abuse investigation leading toward public figures would be shut down. The officers doing the investigating were always competent and delivering results. Their superiors were always supine, corrupt and utterly disinterested in eliminating crime from Establishment hierarchies. The security services were deeply entwined in this organised criminality, setting up paedophile rings as honey traps and considering the abused children to be utterly expendable, worthless pieces of meat. Public castration of those Security Services animals would be too good for them. They should be hunted down like nazis and if they are doddery eighty year olds, treated the way they treated defenceless children….
As for murky goings on in the City of London, you could fill a few books with that lot….
There is an urgent need to cut all ties with the US. This is in order to help them deal with their internal problems.
People (and highly likely, nations) behave differently when they are under watch. So, Let the American off-the-radar for a while. Let’s not show them any direspect. We just need to respect their privacy, until the new US is born and the criminal mindsets at the highest levels are dealt with –internally.
This could be seen as a typical ‘Who was there first, the chicken or the egg?’ issue. For a very long time it has been out in the open that there are two ‘laws’ the world over – but especially in the U.S.:
One law for the rich and one law for the poor.
That is just the way it has been for a very long time. The above essay describes the fallout of this egregious and persistent crime against humanity. Because prosecutors never belong to the class that is subjected to the law for the poor. Neither do people at the highest level of the justice system. These people are so removed from the part of society they rule over and investigate, that they likely feel no other allegiance than to their own career, or political view points, read political affiliations.
Most prominently displayed in the pathetic shoving into the ‘supreme’ court of people that come from this system of lawlessness within the ‘justice’ system based on political affiliation. It is there, at the highest level of injustice, that, what Renee Parsons calls so diplomatically ‘child like innocence’, is most prominently displayed by the entirety of the American population.
The citizenry – mostly with minor dissent – accepts the machinations of the unjust justice system – because it is aware that it is unfit to understand the works of this system. The propaganda organs keep reiterating this childlike ignorance in regards to the justice system. The people have long accepted that “they don’t know” how the justice system works. And that it has been designed this way.
For all the attempts to shed light on this inherently flawed system of injustice, all the many courageous efforts to change the system for the better, towards a more just justice system – will not scratch on the truth that the U.S. was founded on the premise that there is one law for the rich and one law for the poor. The occasionally thrown under the bus exception of a rich person doing time and have their assets forfeited does not change the truth about this perverted system.
Interesting, now I know where the Thais got their ideas of a ‘justice system’.
The rich get off, the militay-coup-supporting scum get off, but pro-democracy, and anti-royalists are murdered, or given ridiculous prison sentences. And the West, the U.S., says nothing…
The lie and the father of it, goes forth and multiplies.
It is not widespread so much as pervasive and internalised as the ‘way things work’.
The cost of the lie is sacrifice of true and so is fouling its own nest, undermining and hollowing out the very life it yet depends on to seem to be independently possessing of power of possession and control.
Ingenuity of redistribution runs as the ‘sustainability’ of a lie presenting or masking in something true.
But its ‘deal’ is your sacrifice in payment of its toxic debts.
But its false promise or allure is your personal salvation or mitigation of otherwise unavoidable penalties.
The appointment of people to positions of public trust or responsibility as ‘trusted hands’ works backwards to those in high places who only trust what they have control over and have traded their responsibility to their office for personal gains, privilege or protections against invalidating exposures.
The idea that any ‘others’ of any perceived alternative outcome is the greater evil, over against which protection must be maintained, serves the justification of ‘lesser evils’ as just, necessary or unavoidable.
The narrative framing and assignment of good and evil is therefore its nature. But always as one set over against the other with nothing recognized wholly Good.
A lie never is true but it can be truly believed, suffered and died in.
A lie is the wish truth be something else, given priority.
Each is responsible for their own giving and receiving.
But in false witness can no longer know themselves free,
or share in anything wholly Good.
The frame of a world set in lies is not a true inherence.
But nor can it be someone or something else who makes me choose now.
Those who believe they have forfeited the right to love are merely listening to lies.
A true inherence remains true – and held in trust for those who run off with a false copy and die in it -by giving hate away as if to escape it all by themself.
But isolation from truly relational and universal being is dispossession by a false sense of control.
Identity theft can be redeemed by yielding the false for the restoring of true.
Nothing can substitute for the truth of your own being – here and now..
But ‘nothings’ presented as ‘deals’ or an offer you cant refuse – seek and find their target.
It is all about fear of pain of loss seeking sustainability under impossibly conflicted conditions.
The mind of framing in conflict is not your friend – but nor to be feared – else how would you look on what is not the truth of you now, and seeing this clearly, leave it unused, to be restored to that which restores you.
As I see this, anyone who opens and active willingness in any moment of noticing, serves the whole – even if we each seem to be in our own specific pattern of conflict and fragmentation. Growing in willingness is growing a consciousness in place of a reactive identity of conditioned past experience.
The mind of discernment is reintegrative, balancing and thus just, within a willingness to grow in perspective, rather than lock it down to the denial of relationship in symptom-dissonance perceived as threat to survival and so ‘justifying’ attack as power of protection. Running on top of protection and nurturing of grievance and ‘enemy’ – as the source and establishment of ‘sustainability’ – taken as the only ‘life’ there is or can be. For to question this is to question ‘too big to fail’.
Suicide in slow motion is set over and against the ‘Unknown’. Yet the latter is where we project our deepest fears and cling to the devil we think we ‘know’.
there’s a lot of this going on nowadays in the US. Unz just posted an article on this subject at his own website, too
Amazing! You copied my comment exactly–even the Oxford comma. You forgot the link though.
Oh, a technical point:
I think Renee means Bill Barr in this case, not Bob Barr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Barr
Renee is right: there’s a lot of this going on nowadays in the US. Unz just posted an article on this subject at his own website, too: http://www.unz.com/article/unequal-justice-and-the-persecution-of-steve-stockman-proud-boys-andy-ngo-is-u-s-already-a-third-world-country/