Conservative former Congressman Steve Stockman was one of the left’s recent victims of the deep state. They made up allegations of charity fraud against him in the early 2010s, and an Obama-appointed judge sentenced him to 10 years in prison. Although every other diabetic over age 60 in his prison was released to home confinement due to COVID-19, he was not due to political bias, and he ended up contracting the virus. Now, conservatives are urging President Trump to pardon Stockman because he’s been able to obtain no justice through the justice system. The deep state is still heavily entrenched in the DOJ, and the left still controls much of the judiciary.
Few paid attention to Stockman’s prosecution because the left had not yet weaponized the criminal justice system to a noticeable level. Sure, there were a handful of notable political prosecutions like Ted Stevens, Dinesh D’Souza, Rick Perry, Tom DeLay, Rick Renzi and Sheriff Joe Arpaio. But for the most part, people just shrugged them off thinking those targeted would eventually beat the charges. Not all did. D’Souza ended up serving eight months in confinement. Renzi served about two years in prison. Most were forced to spend millions defending themselves; DeLay spent over $12 million.
Emboldened by their success, the left is now preparing to go after Trump and his associates. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. is a partisan Democrat who is trying to start a grand jury investigation into Trump’s family business and taxes. The Constitution protects sitting presidents from prosecution. Although Trump could pardon himself in advance, it only applies to federal crimes, and Vance intends to prosecute him for state crimes. Vance will no doubt go after Trump’s family members and associates, too.
With left-wing judges dominating the state, court proceedings could go on for years with endless MSM articles about every minor ruling or procedural move against Trump and anyone associated with him. Probably the only way he will be exonerated is if he finds a way to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, not easy to do with state crimes. DeLay was indicted in 2005, but it took nine years of adverse court decisions against him until he was finally exonerated by an honest court in 2014. The New York Times printed a tiny, three-sentence paragraph about the exoneration that was buried in the print edition on page A20.
With Biden in charge of the DOJ, and the ability to bring prosecutions in areas of the country controlled by Democrat-appointed judges, Democrats could keep Trump tied up in prosecutions for years until he was able to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
And what Democrats will do in the meantime is go after the low hanging fruit: Trump’s associates who have no fame, money or connections and are therefore easy targets. It will be easy to get many of them to turn on Trump and take a plea deal, unable to come up with millions of dollars to defend themselves. If they don’t, it will be easy to persuade a jury to convict them, using vaguely written laws to nail them on process crimes (e.g. since you used the internet, phone or money while your alleged crime was committed, you are guilty of wire or mail fraud or money laundering).
Criminal defense attorney Harvey Silverglate wrote a book called Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, which explains how there are so many federal criminal laws nowadays, so vaguely written, that the average person commits three felonies a day and doesn’t even realize it.
The left is talking eagerly about coming after Sidney Powell, who has filed lawsuits regarding election fraud. Powell has one of the most reputable legal careers in the country, having worked as a prosecutor in the DOJ for many years and serving as lead counsel in over 500 federal appeals. She wrote the book Licensed to Lie, exposing how DOJ prosecutors crookedly target innocent people. I’ve been writing articles mentioning her work for several years now, so it’s been astonishing to see people now claiming she is an unethical attorney. So far, the left is merely complaining that she had mistakes in her complaints — which is normal, no attorney is God and they’re going to make easy recognizable errors that can be amended, that’s what amendments are for. With the incredible pressure on Powell including the time constraints, combined with threats against attorneys helping her, which no doubt got them to back out and not help, it would have been a shock if Powell didn’t make mistakes.
An easy way to go after conservative attorneys is using state bars to disbar them. State bars are controlled by the left and hold kangaroo court proceedings in order to discipline whoever they don’t like. The attorneys aren’t given real trials in a court of law. Even if there is no criminal proceeding against them (because it would be laughed out of court) or even civil proceedings against them, state bars will find them “guilty” and destroy their career and reputation. After a state bar takes away an attorney’s license, other states will not let that attorney practice there either. Their career is over.
Rep. Bill Pascrell, a far-left partisan New Jersey Democrat, has filed bar complaints in five states against 22 attorneys working on Trump’s election complaints. He alleges that the attorneys engaged in "conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation." Now in a real court of law, prosecutors would have to show beyond a reasonable doubt to regular American jurors that an attorney committed crimes like fraud. But state bar rules are set up to allow state bar management — which is controlled by big left-wing law firms — and a complicit left-wing state bar disciplinary “judge” to make these decisions instead. So it will be easy to disbar the Trump attorneys.
Many of these attorneys are going to feel pressured to turn on Trump in order to take a deal so they don’t lose their licenses. They know that on their own they have no chance of beating the state bars. Even if they try to appeal the disbarments, they will likely never reach a fair court because the U.S. Supreme Court only accepts about 80 cases a year out of around 10,000 appeals; they don’t accept cases from no-name attorneys. All this will make Trump look guilty in the eyes of the public.
In a sign that conservatives are finally waking up to these kinds of successful tactics, five House Republicans asked Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate Pascrell over his move. They say he violated Trump’s civil rights by trying to deprive him of attorneys in order to see that every legal vote is counted and illegal votes are challenged. But five isn’t many. Sadly there are going to be many more conservative attorneys destroyed before something starts to change. Rep. Andy Biggs, one of the members of Congress who signed the letter to Barr, tried unsuccessfully when he was in the Arizona State Legislature to dismantle the corrupt Arizona State Bar — after all, why are attorneys forced to join a union in a right-to-work state? It’s a huge problem that will finally see some light now that it’s happening at this level. And maybe the same will go for all the political prosecutions, too.