Misrule of Law

Another weekly news round-up for the Michael Patrick Leahy Show.

The Democrats’ neo-confederate insurrection against Trump 2.0 continues, but will ultimately fail due to the supremacy of federal law

Week after week, we have seen news reports of blue state governors and blue city mayors attempting to dox ICE officers, hamstringing their enforcement efforts, comparing them to “Gestapo,” accusing them of “kidnapping” people off the streets based on their skin color, emboldening the violent crowds (including Antifa) who assault ICE personnel (sometimes using cars to ram ICE vehicles), opposing the deployment of the National Guard, and, most recently, threatening ICE officers with prosecution (as Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and California Rep. Nancy Pelosi have done).  California even passed a law making it a crime for ICE officers to wear masks while on duty, which is necessary to protect themselves and their families from attacks by domestic terrorists and ruthless cartels.

This is despicable and seditious. They are trying to make it impossible for ICE to operate in blue state “sanctuaries”—as if their states and cities are separate fiefdoms not subject to federal authority. This is a replay of past rebellions, notably the Civil War and most recently the failed resistance to desegregation.

Illegal aliens are not American citizens; they are trespassers subject to deportation. ICE is simply doing its job and enforcing laws passed by Congress. The resistance to ICE is an attack on the rule of law.

But listen to what 2028 presidential candidate wannabe Pritzker is up to. As reported in the Wall Street Journal:

The Democratic governor and possible 2028 presidential candidate signed an executive order to establish the Illinois Accountability Commission, an independent board that will focus on the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

The commission will collect testimony, hold hearings and gather information from individuals, subject-matter experts, local officials, faith leaders and others.

Speaking to reporters in Chicago, Pritzker acknowledged the commission won’t have subpoena power or the ability to directly charge anyone with misconduct or a crime. Still, he said, it is critical to build a public record.

“While states have limited abilities against federal immunity, we must remind everyone that this is not forever,” he said. “There will come a time where people of good faith are empowered to uphold the law. When the time comes, Illinois will have testimony and the records needed to pursue justice to its fullest extent.”

That time could come as soon as 2027, Pritzker said, if Democrats manage to win control of one chamber of Congress in November 2026 and hold investigative hearings.

“Trump’s masked agents have detained innocent American citizens and legal residents,” he said. “They have used unmarked cars, a Black Hawk helicopter, automatic weapons and battering rams to raid an apartment building filled with almost entirely, well, families and children.”

This is active interference with ICE operations—a threat of retaliation. This goes beyond Alabama Governor George Wallace standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama to protest the enrollment of black students pursuant to a federal court order. This borders on firing on Fort Sumter, which was the spark that ignited the Civil War.

In blue states, some rogue federal judges (mainly appointed by Biden or Obama) are aiding and abetting this madness, but it will not stand. Federal law won’t permit cities and states to interfere with ICE enforcement, the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution makes federal law paramount to state law, and the higher courts will suppress the judicial insurrection. This has already begun.  

Ninth Circuit decision overturning Portland judge and affirming the President’s authority to deploy the National Guard

Last week, even the notoriously-liberal Ninth Circuit recognized that the President has the authority to deploy the National Guard if necessary to protect federal property or enforce federal law. Thus, on October 20, a three-judge panel in Oregon v. Trump overturned the activist decision by a rogue judge in Portland, Karin Immergut (a Trump 1.0 appointee), that enjoined the President’s order to federalize 200 members of the Oregon National Guard for 60 days to protect federal personnel and property at the Lindquist Building, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland, Oregon.

Citing 10 U.S.C. § 12406(3), the Ninth Circuit ruled that the President has broad discretion to determine that he was unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States. President Trump believed that local mobs, including Antifa, were interfering with the ability of ICE to apprehend and deport illegal aliens. This decision is surely correct. As Berkeley law professor John Yoo has pointed out, “Article II of the Constitution places on the President the duty to ‘take care that the laws are faithfully executed.’” 

The Ninth Circuit severely rebuked Judge Immergut. This decision will be upheld—and possibly even extended–by SCOTUS, and the holding will be applied to recalcitrant jurisdictions such as Chicago, located in the 7^th Circuit. As Professor Yoo has said,

Trump critics in Portland and Chicago cannot claim that Presidents lack the authority to call out the troops to protect the national government and enforce federal law. Presidents have used these same authorities to desegregate southern schools in the 1950s after Brown v. Board of Education and to protect civil rights protesters in the 1960s. Those who cheer those interventions cannot now deny the same constitutional authority when it is exercised by a president they oppose. If critics want the federal government to have the power to enforce civil rights laws against resistant states, they also must concede to President Trump the authority to enforce immigration laws against rioters in the cities of Portland and Chicago. Pritzker and [Oregon Governor Tina] Kotek are making the same mistake as these earlier opponents to federal authority. They believe political opposition to the Trump administration justifies defiance of valid federal law. But historical precedent and constitutional structure say otherwise. If Illinois and Oregon persist, they, too, may find that the courts, the Constitution, and the people will again side with the President.

Resistance by far-left actors is a desperate attempt to maintain the open-borders policies of the Biden administration, which sought to flood the country with illegal aliens who would demand amnesty, become voters (legal or not), and become a permanent constituency for the socialist Democratic Party. Our national sovereignty is under assault. Democrats are to blame.

Latest on Virginia Attorney General candidate Jay Jones

We have spoken before about the revelation that Democratic candidate for Attorney General in Virginia, Jay Jones, had in 2022 fantasized in writing about murdering the Republican Speaker (by putting two bullets in his head) and also killing his wife and children. When these appalling text messages surfaced, Jones refused to withdraw from the race, and Democrats such as U.S. Senator Tim Kaine and gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger (now serving in Congress) refused to disavow Jones and call for his to drop out. Jones has fallen in the polls but remains a contender.

It turns out that Jones has other problems as well. In 2022, Jones was cited in Virginia for reckless driving for going 116 miles an hour on a stretch of highway where the speed limit was 70 MPH. This is not a trivial offense. Similar defendants serve jail time for driving at such excessive rates of speed, but Jones somehow got away with a fine and 1,000 hours of community service. He reportedly spent 500 hours of his “community service” working on Democrats’ political campaigns in 2023 under the auspices of his own PAC, “Meet Our Moment.” He reportedly spent the other 500 hours doing work in 2023 for the Virginia chapter of the NAACP, which happened to be a “pro bono” client of the fancy law firm where Jones worked, Hogan Lovells.

The Federalist reports that in 2023 Hogan Lovells was representing the NAACP in a lawsuit against “the Youngkin administration regarding a dispute over public records pertaining to voting restoration practices for previously convicted felons.” The lawsuit was a partisan political stunt, in other words. It is possible that Jones received credit for “community service” for “pro bono” work he did as a highly-paid lawyer. The Federalist concludes:      

In sum, it sure looks like much of Jones’ 1,000 hours were spent advancing his political career, both in terms of supporting his own PAC and litigating voting issues against Republicans. At least some of that political work seems to have been undertaken as part of his day job, for which he was paid handsomely. No wonder he’s being investigated.

This sleazy hack is seeking to be Virginia’s top law enforcement officer. National Review reports that “A special prosecutor has been appointed in the investigation into Democratic Virginia attorney general nominee Jay Jones’s 2022 reckless driving case, … raising questions about the nature of the ongoing probe into a legal matter that was ostensibly finalized nearly two years ago.” This stinks. Jones is a bad actor. Virginia voters would be making a huge mistake if they elected him to be their AG.

Justice is coming for the coup plotters and Deep State traitors

The indictments will not end with James Comey, Letitia James, and John Bolton. Next up may be former CIA Director John Brennan, who lied to Congress about his role in the Russia collusion hoax. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan has made a criminal referral of Brennan to Attorney General Pam Bondi. John Hinderaker summarizes the referral at Power Line:

Jordan’s letter says that Brennan perjured himself in testimony he gave a committee investigator in an interview on May 11, 2023. In that interview, Brennan repeated essentially the same statements that he made in 2017:

No, I was not involved in analyzing the dossier at all. I said the first time I actually saw it, it was after the election. And the CIA was not involved at all with the dossier. You can direct that to the FBI and to others.

In fact, documents that have recently come to light confirm the CIA’s role in promoting the Steele dossier, and that of John Brennan in particular. 

After Brennan, the next batch of indictments may be the DOJ officials behind the Arctic Frost scandal: former Attorney General Merrick Garland, former Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and former FBI Director Christopher Wray, who authorized the monitoring of the personal cell phone data of nine Republican lawmakers — eight Senators and a Representative! Senator Chuck Grassley is on the warpath, declaring that “Arctic Frost and related weaponization by federal law enforcement under Biden was arguably worse than Watergate.”

The Swamp is being drained, one miscreant at a time.

James Comey’s lawyer was an accomplice? Meet Patrick Fitzgerald

When it comes to Democrat-inflicted lawfare, it is sometimes hard to tell who is the lawyer and who is the client. Take James Comey, for example, who faces a federal indictment for lying to Congress about leaking classified information to the press while he was FBI Director. It turns out that one of the people Comey was leaking information to was his buddy Patrick Fitzgerald, who is now representing Comey in court! This arguably makes Fitzgerald an accomplice, and certainly a potential witness. A lawyer cannot ethically serve as counsel and witness in the same case. As reported by The Federalist, “Right now, federal prosecutors are attempting to oust Fitzgerald for the obvious conflict of interest, citing in part Comey’s leaks to Fitzgerald.”

This is not Fitzgerald’s first rodeo. Recall the 2007 persecution of Scooter Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, who was convicted by a D.C. jury composed of 11 Democrats and a member of the Green Party (based on false evidence) of obstruction of justice, making a false statement and perjury in connection with the supposed “outing” of CIA employee Valerie Plame? The “special counsel” who led the inquisition against Libby (whose sentence President George W. Bush commuted while declining to pardon him altogether) was none other than Patrick Fitzgerald. The actual leaker of the information regarding Plame was not Libby.

According to Wikipedia, “Robert Novak’s testimony in Libby’s perjury trial made it known that the two senior administration sources he cited in his article were Richard Armitage and Karl Rove.” The Libby case was a witch hunt. Hoover Institution fellow Peter Berkowitz did intensive research into the Libby case and concluded that

Mr. Fitzgerald didn’t charge anyone with leaking Ms. Plame’s identity or disclosing classified information to reporters. From the moment he took over the FBI leak investigation in December 2003, he knew that Mr. Armitage was the leaker but declined to prosecute him, Mr. Rove or Mr. Harlow because the disclosure of Ms. Plame’s identity wasn’t a crime and didn’t compromise national security.

Having failed to find any underlying crime, Mr. Fitzgerald nonetheless pressed on for someone to prosecute, eventually focusing on Mr. Libby, whose trial became a contest of recollections. The excruciatingly inconsequential question on which his conviction turned was whether, as Mr. Libby recalled, he was surprised to hear NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert ask him about Ms. Plame in a phone call on July 10 or 11, 2003….

With a virtually unlimited budget, a malleable mandate, a single case and little in the way of oversight or time constraints, the special counsel operates outside the usual system of formal and informal checks on prosecutorial conduct. This gives him the power to transform executive branch slip-ups, oversights and faulty recollections into criminal offenses capable of crippling the White House and wreaking havoc on individuals and their families.

In other words, the prosecution and conviction of Libby was a miscarriage of justice. In 2018, Libby was pardoned by President Donald Trump.

Just to demonstrate how small a pond the Swamp really is, Fitgerald was appointed as special counsel to prosecute Libby by Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who was acting in place of Attorney General John Ashcroft due to Ashcroft’s recusal. Comey and Fitzgerald have been cronies for decades!

As reported by The Federalist, “According to a 2019 Office of Inspector General report, in May 2017, James Comey sent four confidential FBI memos to his personal lawyer Patrick Fitzgerald, along with instructions to share the documents with two other lawyers: Daniel Richman and David Kelley. Fitzgerald and Kelley are Comey’s defense lawyers in the case brought by Halligan.”  This type of incestuous connection in Democratic legal circles is consistent with the recurring role played by partisan lawyers such as Abbe Lowell (now representing Letitia James, and previously Hunter Biden) and Marc Elias, who engineered the mail-in ballot travesty that rigged the 2020 election and who was the architect of the infamous Steele dossier.

Democrats have been engaged in lawfare for decades and have perfected it to an art form. It is simply absurd for them to complain that President Trump’s efforts to restore equality under the law is a form of “retaliation” or “selective prosecution.” Truth be known, were it not for the statute of limitations and a jury pool (and bench) in Washington, D.C. that are highly biased in favor of Democrats, dozens of people could be righteously prosecuted for their misdeeds. Make your own list: Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney, ….