Equal Justice For All?

For John, BLUF:  Are we creating an "under class" who are treated by a different set of rules, maybe Deplorables who are unredeemable?  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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McCabe and Papadopoulos:  Two-Tiered Justice

Here is the sub-headline:

“Equal justice under the law” is not supposed to be an aspiration or a quaint slogan. It is supposed to be a guarantee.

From National Review, by Author Andrew C McCarthy, 24 August 2019.

Here is the lede plus one:

The date of a meeting, that’s all the lie was about. George Papadopoulos claimed that a meeting he’d had with the mysterious Maltese professor, Josef Mifsud, happened slightly before the green-as-grass 28-year-old was recruited into the Trump campaign.  In reality, it was slightly after.

It wasn’t a very important lie.  It was of no consequence to the FBI or the special counsel’s investigation. Papadopoulos was such an afterthought that the Bureau did not bother to interview him until late January 2017 — about 10 months after he met Mifsud.  By the time Papadopoulos was charged, the Trump–Russia investigation had been ongoing for well over a year — it was already clear that there was no conspiracy.

Here is how the article ends:

For about ten days, I’ve had a new book out on Russiagate, called Ball of Collusion.  I’ve gotten to do lots of speeches and interviews.  Most interesting are the ones when members of the audience ask questions.  Without fail, they home in on the thing I least like to talk about:  What is going to happen to government officials who are suspected of abusing their powers and misleading such bodies as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court?  A name that reliably comes up is Andy McCabe.  People who have followed the story know the IG referred him to the Justice Department for a possible false-statements prosecution.  They know other aspects of McCabe’s conduct are still under investigation.

I hate this topic because I am not one to cheerlead for comeuppance against law-enforcement people.  I know how hard their jobs are, how readily errors can be made because one often has to act on imperfect information; because there is a natural zeal to catch bad guys that can easily become overzealousness.  I have no problem analyzing their judgment calls — mine got analyzed plenty, and we all make our share of mistakes.  But I am hard-wired not to presume bad motive.

So I tell people what they don’t want to hear:  We don’t know all the salient facts; we should wait for the imminent reports of investigations being conducted by Horowitz and John Durham (the Connecticut U.S. attorney tasked by AG Bill Barr to probe Russiagate); and we should disabuse ourselves of the notion that errors in judgment and abuses of discretion, even egregious ones, necessarily entail criminal-law violations.  It is much more important to have a factual accounting of what happened, and to take whatever curative measures are apt to prevent bad things from happening again.

Suffice it to say, this does not get a warm reception.

There is a great deal of anger out there.  People see the kid-gloves approach to the Clinton-emails investigation, and they can’t square it with the aggression of the Trump–Russia probe.  They see the laws contorted to let Mrs. Clinton slide, while the screws get put to Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort over the Logan Act and the Foreign Agent Registration Act – statutes the Justice Department almost never invokes.

They see the false-statements investigations of Andy McCabe and George Papadopoulos and think, “Hey, wait a second . . .”

“Equal justice under the law” is not supposed to be an aspiration or a quaint slogan. It is supposed to be a guarantee.

If I don't have equal rights, equal access to justice, am I really part of the social compact, really an equal citizen?

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff