The Weaponization of Justice

 Clarice Feldman

If you read nothing else this week, read Victor Davis Hanson’s article in American Greatness detailing how Obama began “the most radical revolutions” in our history. As legal matters -- the lawfare waged against former President Trump and the Department of Justice’s pussyfooting around the Biden bribery took this week’s center stage, it’s useful to note his remarks on the weaponization of justice in this country.   ........Jack Smith, with a long history of partisan conduct, is the prosecuting attorney in the case in the District of Columbia charging Trump with disinformation regarding the 2020 election, a confection of dubious legal basis.  This week, the parties argued before District Court judge Tanya Chutkin the prosecution’s right to muzzle Trump during his campaign as he and his team poison public opinion and a potential jury pool with leaks and accusations of wrongdoing. Judge Chutkin has a history of sentencing J6 defendants to longer sentences than even the prosecution requested. She warned counsel for Trump that politics had no place in her courtroom, but in at least one transcribed exchange with one of those defendants she tipped her hand, expressing her view that it was wrong that Trump was not yet jailed:  .....Depending on which source you read about her decision on this -- she either slapped down the prosecution or preserved Trump’s right to free speech.

In actuality, I think she is allowing the prosecution to interfere with his reelection bid, and has greased the ladder to intervention by the Supreme Court.   ......"

MUST-SEE video: Tucker Carlson’s interview with the former Capitol Police chief

 Andrea Widburg

Fox News shut Tucker Carlson down right before his show was to have aired an interview with former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund. Yesterday, Tucker released a new interview he did with Sund, and it confirms everything you’ve suspected: The Capitol Police were kept in the dark about possible problems on January 6 and, when problems finally occurred, they were consistently denied timely aid. In other words, it was a set-up....... Sund claims “we now know FBI, DHS was swimming in that intelligence” about potential violence at the Capitol and “military seemed to have some concerning intelligence as well.” Yet, no one told him anything. Nobody gave him documents or gave him information over the phone. He was in an information vacuum.  ......What happened on January 6 wasn’t an organic event originating with Trump supporters. It was an event that the Deep State created to destroy Trump and his supporters once and for all. That’s why I believe the threats were manufactured later.

And if you want more evidence that this was a government operation, Sund also describes how Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell delayed for 71 minutes, despite Sund’s increasingly frantic 32 phone calls, before sending him reinforcements. Meanwhile, the General in charge of the National Guard delayed even longer because of “optics.” Eventually, when he finally authorized the National Guard, the guardsmen, who were located near the Capitol, were instead first routed to the armory and then sent back to the Capitol at 6:00 p.m., when everything had ended, for… a photo opportunity because of the good optics.

By the next day, Sund was fired. Then, when he tried to testify before Congress, he was told that they were only accepting testimony from people currently employed by the Capitol Police. Sund also said that Rep. Benny Thompson (D-Miss.), who chaired the hearings, said that any inquiry into Nancy Pelosi’s conduct was “off-limits, so they wouldn’t get any of her records, her phone records.”

The Obama Factor

 David Samuels

There is a fascinating passage in Rising Star, David Garrow’s comprehensive biography of Barack Obama’s early years, in which the historian examines Obama’s account in Dreams from My Father of his breakup with his longtime Chicago girlfriend, Sheila Miyoshi Jager.......In Jager’s telling, the quarrel that ended the couple’s relationship was not about Obama’s self-identification as a Black man. And the impetus was not a play about the American Black experience, but an exhibit at Chicago’s Spertus Institute about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.  ....In Jager’s recollection, what set off the quarrel that precipitated the end of the couple’s relationship was Obama’s stubborn refusal, after seeing the exhibit, and in the swirl of this Cokely affair, to condemn Black racism. While acknowledging that Obama’s embrace of a Black identity had created some degree of distance between the couple, she insisted that what upset her that day was Obama’s inability to condemn Cokely’s comments. It was not Obama’s Blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn antisemitism....."

What Biographer Garrow Missed in His Obama Takedown

 Jack Cashill

On August 2, two days before Barack Obama’s reported sixty-second birthday, the Jewish journal Tablet published an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights historian David Garrow.  ......The exchange between the two deserves to be read in full. Rather than summarize that exchange, I will focus on a few key truths, both those they nailed and those that squirmed away. Most intriguing in the latter category are the questions about Obama’s literary talents and about his birth. Garrow’s opinion matters. His 2017 bio, Rising Star. The Making of Barack Obama, is easily the boldest and most accurate of the Obama biographies.

One thing Garrow and Samuels get right is their take on Obama as president. Says Garrow, “I think even the fanboy journalists would acknowledge, under a little bit of pressure, that it ended up being an underwhelming, disappointing presidency.” On the subject of race relations, Garrow does not equivocate: “There’s no question in anybody’s mind, that on that score, that scale, the presidency was a total failure.”

....Obsessed with Trump and still smitten by Obama, the Washington press corps failed, says Samuels, “to imagine, let alone report on, Obama’s role in government.” He believes that Obama is still the man in charge. He points out that Obama’s continued residence in D.C. is an historical first for an ex-president. Then too, “large parts of White House policymaking” belong to Obama in that they’re “staffed by his people, who worked for him and no doubt report back to him.”