Tuesday, May 19, 2020
One Standard Of Justice
In everything that was happening yesterday, Attorney General William Barr said something that got lost in the shuffle. I'm not referring to his demurring as to whether Barack Obama will face any criminal liability for Obamagate.
I am referring to how he described what happened in the 2016 campaign and afterwards. He referred to the abuse of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies and to two standards of justice. Here's what the attorney general saidthat the media largely ignored:
"What happened to the president in the 2016 election and throughout the first two years of his administration was abhorrent. It was a grave injustice and it was unprecedented in American history.
"The law enforcement and intelligence apparatus of this country were involved in advancing a false and utterly baseless Russian collusion narrative against the president.
"The proper investigative and prosecutive standards of the Justice Department were abused in order to reach a particular result. We saw two different standards of justice emerge. One that applied to President Trump and his associates, and the other that applied to everybody else. We can't allow this ever to happen again.
"The Durham investigation is trying to get the bottom of what happened. And it will determine whether there were any federal laws broken. And if there were, those who broke the laws will be held to account."
TDS On Full Display
Yesterday, President Trump made a simple statement to reporters during an event with restaurant industry leaders. He announced he has been taking hydroxychloroquine in consultation with the White House physician.
Little else he said at the event made the news. But the reaction of the left-wing media and Nancy Pelosi to that minor remark was indicative of the need for a lot of other people to consult with their doctors for some medication to help them calm down.
This anti-viral medication has been around for decades as a treatment for malaria. It is also used off-label to treat lupus and other conditions. Thousands of hospital workers and first responders in Michigan are currently participating in a major study of hydroxychloroquine's effectiveness.
It is totally within the right of the president or any other individual to ask their doctor for an off-label use, even though it has not been approved by the FDA as treatment for Covid-19.
But the president is exposed to a lot of people, and several White House staff members have recently been infected with the coronavirus. The president's physician, Commander Sean Conley, noted that he and the president had numerous discussions about the drug, and "concluded that the potential benefit from treatment outweighed the relative risks."
Yet the media and the progressive left put their Trump Derangement Syndrome on full display with another knee-jerk reaction to this simple statement.
Another Impeachment
House liberals told the Supreme Court yesterday that they must have access to the sealed grand jury testimony collected by Robert Mueller in his defunct Russia collusion investigation because they are planning another impeachment effort.
This is another example of the left imposing a different standard of justice that Attorney General Barr mentioned in his remarks yesterday. Grand jury information is almost never released, especially when the subject of the investigation has been cleared of wrong doing.
For the radical politicians to tell the Supreme Court that they may impeach President Trump again, this time for something that Robert Mueller said did not happen, is a total waste of time and beyond outrageous as the nation struggles to recover from the coronavirus pandemic.
The Resistance Grows
I must confess that I was getting a little worried about the reaction of the American people and the legal system to the ongoing shutdown of our country. Of course, we want to be prudent and save as many lives as possible. But the ease with which some governors and bureaucrats were able to shutdown freedom of speech and freedom of religion was deeply unnerving.
Thankfully, there seems to be two counterreactions sweeping the country. One is people saying, "ENOUGH!" They just won't sit still anymore as their businesses are being destroyed. They are taking to the streets to exercise their freedoms and reopening their businesses in defiance of government mandates.
The other is normal people just wanting to live their lives. They want to sit on a beach and get a sunburn. They want to enjoy a dinner out. They want to attend sporting events. And for most people under 60, they're not taking a horrific risk.
The other pushback, which took long enough, is coming from our legal system. We reported in recent days that judges in Kentucky and Wisconsin have rolled back excessive orders that infringed on religious liberty and personal freedoms.
You can add North Carolina to that list, and hopefully soon Oregon and even Illinois. Various law enforcement agencies have resisted enforcing draconian orders.
All of these things are encouraging signs of the good health of the American spirit.