Swift Injustice With Andrew Weissman and Sarah Backus

Last week, a jury in Alexandria, Virginia convicted longtime political operative Paul Manafort on eight of the eighteen counts brought against him by Andrew Weissman, a prosecutor associated with the wide-reaching Special Counsel investigation initially launched to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential Election.  Tucker Carlson described Weissman as an “enthusiastic Democratic partisan” who attended Hillary Clinton’s election night party where she planned to celebrate her victory over Donald Trump.  Manafort definitely does deserve to face some punishment for the crimes he has committed but the 305 years that the prosecution called for seems way too excessive.  Just to put things in perspective, 305 years ago, the Constitution of the United States of America did not exist, as the United States of America did not even exist.  Assuming that scientists do not come up with a cure for immortality in the near future, the 69-year-old Manafort will not live to see his prison sentence come to an end if the prosecution has its way. 

If most other Americans only get a little over a year in prison for tax evasion, then why does the President’s Former Campaign Manager deserve such a lengthy sentence? Judge T.S. Ellis, the judge who oversaw the Manafort trial, perfectly explained why.  “You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud.  You really care about what information Mr. Manafort can give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump or lead to his prosecution or impeachment or whatever.  That’s what you’re really interested in.”  Prosecutors have effectively thrown the kitchen sink at Manafort because he dared to work as Donald Trump’s campaign manager for approximately 100 days.  Even before his trial began late last month, he spent 23 out of 24 hours a day in solitary confinement.  Although liberals don’t believe in the death penalty, based on the way they treated Manafort, it looks they would have no problem making an exception in his case.   

In New Mexico, authorities captured the ringleaders of a filthy compound in the Taos area, where five Muslim extremists had trained young children to become the next batch of school shooters.  While liberals claim to care about stopping school shootings as they demand gun control, Judge Sarah Backus seemed to think they posed no threat to society; simply describing the starving children as living in “far from ideal circumstances” and described the defendants as “living in a very unconventional way.”  She granted the defendants $20,000 bail, meaning that four of the five defendants now roam free in the Land of Enchantment with only ankle monitors and the promise of maintaining weekly contact with their attorneys keeping them in check.   Judge Backus, who hails from San Francisco, basically did the equivalent of President Obama telling Vladimir Putin to “cut it out” when it came to dealing with these Muslim extremists.  The fifth defendant, Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, remains in custody because of a warrant for his arrest in Georgia, where he abducted his young son.  Police believe that the remains of a young boy found at the compound belong to Wahhaj’s son, whom he saw as “possessed by the devil” because he suffered from epilepsy. According to The New York Post, prosecutors named Wahhaj’s father as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.   

During his tenure on Fox News, Bill O’Reilly frequently sent Jesse Watters out to confront judges who gave ridiculous sentences.  Judge G. Todd Baugh of Montana specifically comes to mind.  Baugh sentenced teacher Stacey Rambold to just 30 days in prison for raping one of his students.  The victim ended up committing suicide. According to Baugh, “the 14-year-old was as much in control of the situation as her defendant.”  O’Reilly sent Watters to Baugh’s house; the judge obviously did not appreciate the early morning visit, poking Watters in the chest as he shut the garage door in his face. 

Ann Coulter pointed out judicial double standards in a column entitled “God Hates Judges,” a play on the Westboro Baptist Church’s infamous line “God Hates Fags.”  Coulter pointed out that a panel on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out a jury verdict declaring the Westboro Baptist Church guilty of “intentional infliction of emotional distress” for showing up at a funeral of a fallen soldier holding signs proclaiming that “God Loves Dead Soldiers,” “God Hates Fags,” and “God hates you.”  The Westboro Baptist Church, which the left wants to paint as representative of Christianity as a whole, has developed a bad habit of showing up at dead soldiers’ funerals.  She also pointed out that “the Supreme Court has upheld shockingly restrictive bans on speech outside of abortion clinics: content-based restrictions on the speech of pro-lifers signing ‘Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight.’”  In one case, Hill v. Colorado, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that a Colorado law limiting protest, education, distribution of literature, or counseling within eight feet of a person entering an abortion clinic did not violate the First Amendment.  In their dissent, Justices Scalia and Thomas argued that “the eight-feet gap imposed by the regulation effectively operates as a regulation of speech, and the regulation is content-based because it covers certain specific categories of speech, such as education, counseling, and protection. First Amendment jurisprudence does not support the principles espoused by the majority, which appears to take a novel view of long-standing doctrine when abortion issues arise.”   

Cases like these make it hard to argue that the least dangerous branch of government has not in fact become the most dangerous branch of government.  The judicial branch has the power to make or break people and the Founders did not expect the judicial branch to use its power to settle political scores and/or make law. This can only happen when the players in the judicial branch, in some cases, the judge, in others the prosecutors and the jury, make their decisions based on politics rather than the law. In the O.J. Simpson trial, for example, the jurors obviously used their personal feelings about the popular football player and “Naked Gun” co-star in addition to their contempt for Mark Fuhrmann because he had used the N-word when making their verdict.  Simpson can effectively thank the doctrine of identity politics for letting him off the hook for murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her new boyfriend Ron Goldman.  His trial ended up taking place in Downtown Los Angeles, which has a fairly substantial African-American population.  Had the trial taken place in Brentwood, the location of his mansion, the case may have come out differently.  Polling taken after the verdict showed that a majority of African-Americans in Los Angeles County approved of Simpson’s acquittal while a majority of whites in the nation’s most populous county saw it as a miscarriage of justice. Because Simpson enjoyed folk hero status in the African-American community, the jury, which included nine African-Americans, could not bear to convict the man they so looked up to. Nearly everyone else in America knew damn well that he killed his ex-wife and her new boyfriend. 

More than a decade after the “trial of the century,” Simpson found himself behind bars as a result of an armed robbery he and others committed in Las Vegas.  Jackie Glass, the judge in the case sentenced Simpson to 33 years behind bars; he ended up getting out after nine and currently roams free. Many believed that Judge Glass imposed the harsh sentence in an effort to avenge the miscarriage of justice that took place in the mid-1990s; they might have had a point.         
History kind of repeated itself 22 years after the O.J. Simpson trial with the Kate Steinle case.  An illegal immigrant deported multiple times made his way to the sanctuary city and Mecca of the Counterculture Movement San Francisco, where he shot and killed 32-year-old Kate Steinle on a pier in broad daylight.  Bill O’Reilly, seeing the obvious connection between the city’s sanctuary policy and the untimely death of Ms. Steinle, sent Watters to San Francisco City Hall, where he held up a picture of Steinle as the uninterested Board of Supervisors largely ignored him.  A jury ultimately acquitted her killer of all murder and manslaughter charges, only finding him guilty of felony possession of a firearm.    

It looks like politics has already corrupted the once-respected intelligence community.  Liberals, who used to possess a fair degree of skepticism about the intelligence community, have largely become its mouthpiece because they see people like Former CIA Director John Brennan, Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe as allies in their 24/7/365 war on President Trump.  Therefore, they viewed President Trump’s revocation of Brennan’s security clearance as a violation of Brennan’s free speech rights.  Apparently, liberals now see security clearances as Constitutional rights, alongside abortion and gay marriage.

Civil libertarians, once a major force in the Democratic Party and on the political left, also used to raise questions such as “Does the punishment fit the crime?”  That question surely makes sense to ask in the case of Paul Manafort yet liberals don’t really care about the draconian sentence because their hatred for President Trump and all those associated with him matters more than the principles they once held dear.  Some purist civil libertarians do still exist, such as Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, who has become an object of scorn on the left for daring to defend President Trump.  The American Civil Liberties Union has largely remained silent on the excessive sentencing as they have made defending illegal immigrants their top priority. 

Unfortunately, many judges, juries, and lawyers have made a mockery of the American judicial system by offering very light sentences for serious crimes such as rape or murder and much harsher sentences on crimes that do not merit such punishments; often times based on whether or not the defendant(s) fall into one of the sympathetic groups protected by the left at all costs (i.e. illegal immigrants.) Hopefully, the poor example given by some in the legal community will encourage more conservatives to pursue careers in law and criminal justice and begin a reversal of this disturbing and unsettling trend of “swift injustice.”