Two-Tiered Justice System on Full Display
This was not a banner week for the idea that justice is alive and blind in America.
Three separate stories converged to drive home the obvious truth that America has a two-tiered justice system: the Justice Department's decision to not indict the guilty-as-sin plotter Andrew McCabe, the attempt to give Roger Stone an outrageous jail sentence, and the Army's decision to shrug that one of its officers attempted to orchestrate the removal of his commander-in-chief.
Even in the unlikely scenario that the Barr-Durham investigations send the full stable of coup-plotters to jail for decades, it will not erase the obvious fact that it pays to be a Democrat if you are going to commit crimes, particularly if they are political.
There are a couple of simple reasons for this. The most obvious reason is that the entire federal bureaucracy is one giant Democrat machine. This cannot be repeated enough. Nearly every member of almost every single department is a Democrat.
How bad is it? Back in 2016, 95 percent of campaign contributions for the presidential race went to Her Royal Awfulness. The Justice Department overachieved, coming in at 97 percent.
Those are William Barr's employees, the ones who are cranking out the paperwork. Federal rules make it nearly impossible to fire any of these employees. When Barr gives direction, those 113K employees of his Department are the ones carrying it out in whatever creative, and often subversive, ways they can. They are the ones producing the staff work and recommendations that daily land on Barr's desk and in his inbox, if their directives even make it that far before being implemented.
Being an attorney general under a Republican president is one of the hardest and most thankless jobs in the world. A Democrat attorney general is free to brag about being the president's "wingman" and acts quite brazenly in that role.
Imagine if Barr commented, as Eric Holder did, that "I'm still the president's wing-man, so I'm there with my boy." Or if he met secretly, in the mode of Loretta Lynch, with Mrs. Trump on an off-the-beaten-path airport to "discuss their grandkids." He would be impeached. A Republican attorney general's every action and word are scrutinized and leaked for the worst possible effect.
It does not really require sinister groups of plotters, although no doubt there are plenty of Lois Lerner and Strzok-Page types. All that is required is for these people to show up to work with their ideological blinders on, ready to do what they see as God's...er, Gaia's...work. Secure in their echo chamber, they think they are doing good, which is echoed back at them by their friends in the media.
Liberal scolds are always lecturing Americans on how they are racist, imperialist, misogynistic, homophobic monsters, even if they don't know it due to implicit bias. This is nonsense. But it is curious that these same fools see no problem with implicit bias when the entire government-media-academia complex is one giant exercise in leftist groupthink.
It doesn't take a very stable genius with a Ph.D. in psychology to realize that agencies loaded with people of one ideological worldview will favor like-minded individuals while attacking those who are outside their norm. When vested with the power of the Justice Department, the result will be an ugly mess of injustice. No doubt, plenty of these people do see Roger Stone as someone worse than Ted Bundy. In their demented worldview, that's a simple truth that everyone should understand.
They then count on the media, who share the same disease to set the narrative and provide protection. It also provides a feedback loop that ensures them that they are doing right and standing on the side of justice.
And should an investigator ever get to the point to where he is ready to indict a Beltway Democrat, the problem of geography rears its ugly head. There is the old saying that you can indict a ham sandwich. In Washington, D.C., that's not entirely true. If a prosecutor is seeking justice against a Democrat for a political crime, that had better be one horrible sandwich smeared with overwhelming evidence of the most heinous type. Because the jurors and the judges are also going to largely be sympathetic Democrats. A hardcore anti-Trump social media–posting partisan as foreperson of the Stone jury? U.S. district judge Amy Berman Jackson seemed to think this was a swell idea.
Identifying the problem is far simpler than coming up with practical solutions.
The biggest mistake the president made during his first term was not immediately replacing every political appointee with his own people. Ideally, that would have been done in the first hours. President Trump underestimated just how much damage a group of disloyal political appointees could do backed up by similar-minded bureaucrats.
This is understandable, since there wasn't exactly a large pool of patriotic Americans aligned with the president's agenda in 2016 waiting to step in. What President Trump has accomplished in three short years with all these forces arrayed against him is nothing short of miraculous.
But the president is in a much stronger position now with 95% approval among Republicans and does not have to rely on the compromised liberal establishment types he has done such a commendable job in smoking out.
The second solution, and one I truly hope to see carried out during a second term, is cutting the bureaucracy, which is admittedly a hard thing to do since institutional antibodies will kick in. The political appointees who are put in place to execute the president's policies in the Executive Branch would be far more empowered if they had much leaner staffs that weren't trying to drown the president in bureaucratic malfeasance. Cutting some of the more political of the agencies in half would constitute a good start.
There also needs to be serious reform of the intelligence agencies. At least half of America has no trust in these agencies and sees them for what they have become. Chuck Schumer inadvertently diagnosed the problem fairly well. He observed, "Let me tell you, you take on the Intelligence Community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you." There is nothing funny in that statement. These agencies are far too powerful and political, emboldened by the lack of accountability inherent in complete Democrat control of the bureaucracy.
From a longer-term perspective, there needs to be more grassroots effort to educate and send conservative young people into areas where the Democrats hold control. This is critical. There have been some successes in this area, which is why Samantha Bee had a near on-air meltdown this week over the fact that people were actually watching PragerU and getting dangerous ideas. But far more needs to be done.
Every effort needs to be made to break the corrupt Democrat triumvirate of government, media, and academia. America's future depends on it.
In the meantime, Americans will continue to live under a two-tiered justice system, which will breed far more righteous anger. That fury is building toward a dangerous boiling point.
Fletch Daniels can be found on Twitter at @fletchdaniels.