Misrule of Law

Despite the obstacles, a determined Trump administration is restoring the rule of law and equal justice under the law. The day of reckoning for treasonous Deep State plotters is coming.

Thanks to Instapundit (here) and Ace of Spades HQ (here and here)!

Your Monday morning report:

Jury Nullification in the Nation’s Capital

Last week’s new stories contained a small report from Washington, D.C. that, while not terribly significant by itself, symbolizes the state of our legal system in this divided nation, large portions of which are in rebellion against the election of President Trump in 2024. Ignoring the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, blue states and blue cities behave as if they are independent fiefdoms not subject to federal law. The incident to which I refer is a D.C. jury’s acquittal of Sean Dunn, the former Department of Justice employee who hurled a foot-long sandwich at a Border Patrol officer in the course of an angry confrontation on a D.C. sidewalk in which Dunn loudly condemned President Trump’s law enforcement takeover of Washington. Dunn denounced the Border Patrol as “fascists.”

Following the widely-publicized incident, the video of which went viral, Dunn was arrested, identified as a DOJ employee, and promptly fired. That’s when the Resistance intervened. A grand jury in D.C. refused to indict Dunn for felony assault of a federal officer. Unwilling to let Dunn walk away scot-free, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro filed the case as a misdemeanor assault, which doesn’t require an indictment. The misdemeanor charge proceeded to trial in D.C., in front of a jury. Dunn’s lawyers argued that throwing the sandwich at a Border Patrol officer was a “harmless gesture.” Last week, the jury acquitted Dunn despite videotaped evidence of the assault.

The defiance of federal law amounts to a “soft” secession.

How did an unemployed federal employee manage to line up a team of lawyers to defend him in this case? This is the icing on the cake. Dunn received “pro bono” (i.e., free) legal assistance from a fancy D.C. law firm, Steptoe LLP, which like most of its counterparts in what is known as “Big Law” is very much aligned with left-wing causes.

This is an example of “jury nullification,” akin to the acquittal of lynchers in the Jim Crow south, or of O.J. Simpson for murder by a downtown L.A. jury. Many J6ers went to prison for years for less than this. Tragically, D.C. exemplifies unequal justice under the law.

The anti-Trump climate in D.C. is so bad that at least six administration officials, including Stephen Miller, are forced to live in military housing because of death threats.

All in the Nation’s Capital, home of the vast federal government workforce and—not coincidentally–the most anti-Republican voters in the country.

Whack-A-Mole at the U.S. Supreme Court

Left-wing Democrats may control blue states, blue cities, the universities, the media, and the legal profession, but thanks to President Trump we have a 6-to-3 conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court is working hard to correct the tsunami of activist rulings being issued by rogue district court judges.

Passport Ruling

One of President Trump’s many executive orders decreed that U.S. passports (issued by the federal government) would specify the passport holder’s biological sex, not whatever delusional designation the passport holder may desire. Predictably, a lawsuit was filed challenging the EO as a violation of equal protection, and just as predictably, a forum-shopped rogue judge in Massachusetts (appointed by Biden) issued an injunction against enforcement of the EO. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s team of lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court. 

A 6-to-3 majority of the Court issued a stay of the district court ruling, opining that “[d]isplaying passport holders’ sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth—in both cases, the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment.” Three justices dissented, in an  opinion written by Ketanji Brown Jackson, who accused the majority of engaging in a “pointless but painful perversion of our equitable discretion.” John Hinderaker, writing at Power Line, commented on the dissent: “ This is the solid phalanx of Democratic Party obstruction that President Trump deals with every day, in the judiciary as in every other arena.” Indeed.

The Wall Street Journal reports the reaction of the defeated ACLU lawyer: “Jon Davidson, a lawyer for the ACLU, said: “This is a heartbreaking setback for the freedom of all people to be themselves, and fuel on the fire the Trump administration is stoking against transgender people and their constitutional rights.”” Boo hoo.

SNAP Ruling

Last week I mentioned that two rogue district judges, both appointed by Obama, had issued injunctions ordering the Trump administration to continue paying SNAP benefits, despite the government shutdown due to Congress’s failure to pass a budget. This was a wholesale hijacking by unelected judges of the Article I spending power—an unconstitutional abomination. The two judges (one in Massachusetts and one in Rhode Island) are both within the purview of the First Circuit Court of Appeals, which declined to issue a stay. So the Supreme Court had to intervene, and did, staying the crazy district court rulings.

The justice assigned to the First Circuit is Ketanji Brown Jackson, who signed the order. This must have been uncomfortable for the activist KBJ, but sometimes the judicial insurrection is so brazen that even liberals on the Supreme Court have to step in to stop it!

You Can’t Fix Stupid

In a democracy, voters get the government they deserve, and this week’s elections proved the wisdom of that maxim.

Des Moines School Board

On the heels of the scandalous revelation that the Des Moines School Board had hired an illegal alien with bogus credentials (and a criminal record!) as its $300,000 per year superintendent (previously reported here), one would have expected Des Moines voters to clean out the incompetents running the school board at the first opportunity. Instead, the voters in Des Moines re-elected the clowns responsible for this travesty. The Federalist covered this story with the apt headline “Des Moines Election Proves Once Again You Can’t Fix Stupid,” and it seems undeniable that voters in Des Moines, Iowa are stupid. Not only did the voters re-elect the buffoons who hired an illegal alien as superintendent, they also approved—by a nearly three-quarters margin–a $265 million bond to fund a plan promoted by the inept school board, entitled “Reimagining Education, Reinvigorating Schools.”

So the derelict school board members got re-elected and rewarded!

Virginia Voters Elected a Left-Wing Scofflaw Who Fantasized About Murdering a Republican Colleague

Another story that I previously covered was the murderous fantasies of Jay Jones, who was running for Attorney General in Virginia. Despite considerable controversy over Jones’ text messages expressing his desire to “put two bullets in the head” of a Republican colleague, to murder his children in front of their mother, and to piss on his grave, Virginia voters handily elected Jones, defeating the Republican incumbent despite his solid record.

This is blue state madness. I’m old enough to remember when Virginia was a conservative state. Not anymore. It is now the functional equivalent of New Jersey.

Justice (Not “Revenge”) is Coming for the Deep State Traitors 

John Brennan  

Communist-voting John Brennan is (finally) facing the music. The former CIA Director who lied to Congress about his role in vetting the notorious—and wholly-fabricated–Steele dossier is reportedly in the crosshairs of a federal grand jury in southern Florida as part of an investigation into the treasonous “Crossfire Hurricane” plot to kneecap President Trump in 2016. Julie Kelly reports that “a full scale investigation will be run out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, now led by Trump appointee Jason Reding Quiñones. MSNBC reported on Thursday that Quiñones is preparing a series of grand jury subpoenas related to the Brennan inquiry.”

Fox News has additional details, reporting that “A federal grand jury has subpoenaed former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, among others as part of the Justice Department’s investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, Fox News Digital has learned. Sources told Fox News Digital Brennan; Strzok, the FBI’s former deputy assistant director of counterintelligence; and Page, a former FBI lawyer, were served with federal subpoenas on Friday.”

James Comey

James Comey’s notes show he is guilty as sin. The Federalist reports that Lindsey Halligan, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia (where Comey was indicted)

filed an extraordinary batch of documents in the public docket of her case against former FBI Director James Comey. The exhibits range from Comey’s communications with his handpicked FBI leaker, Daniel Richman, a Columbia law professor the bureau employed specifically to funnel Comey’s preferred narratives to the press, to text messages between Richman and New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt. But the most significant document by far is Comey’s own handwritten notes proving, beyond any doubt, that he knew early on the entire Russia collusion story was a Clinton campaign fabrication.

The documents represent the proverbial “smoking gun.” Whether out of sloppiness or the efforts of a whistleblower to preserve the incriminating documents, The Federalist points out that “It is remarkable that these documents survived at all. They were found in an FBI ‘burn bag,’ a method for destroying sensitive materials. For reasons still unknown, several of these bags, reportedly five in total, were never incinerated. Instead, they were placed inside an unused, locked Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) at FBI headquarters.” 

John Solomon calls Halligan’s filing a “bombshell,” adding that the “trove of personal emails show [that] then-FBI Director James Comey openly talked in the days before the 2016 election that he expected to be working soon for President-elect Hillary Clinton and was being kept apprised by a top FBI aide on efforts to anonymously provide information to the news media.” Contrary to Comey’s sworn testimony, he coordinated with Daniel Richman to leak confidential information to friendly news outlets, and was aware that Richman had done so. Solomon summarizes the bombshell documents:

“Well done my friend. Who knew this would. E [sic] so uh fun,” Comey wrote in an early November 2016 email after then-FBI special government employee Dan Richman briefed the FBI director on Richman’s efforts to provide information and guidance to The New York Times on an article involving Clinton’s email scandal.

The filing utterly refutes Comey’s claim that he is a victim of a “vindictive” prosecution. He is obviously guilty of perjury. He should be convicted and sentenced to prison. (Biased judges may hinder that result.)

 Arctic Frost

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Arctic Frost perpetrators will be held to account. Writing at The Federalist, Rachel Bovard states that

Arctic Frost was never the inquiry into Donald Trump and Jan. 6 that Attorney General Merrick Garland and Special Counsel Jack Smith said it was. Rather, it was an unprecedented, illegal conspiracy of partisan prosecutors and FBI agents to surveil, harass, and prosecute “the entire Republican political apparatus” for the crime of being conservative. There has never been anything like it in American history — a sweeping, open-ended, fishing expedition conducted by the regime against the opposition party. Arctic Frost weaponized the federal criminal justice system not just to defeat Trump in the 2024 presidential election, but to permanently rig the U.S. political system against the GOP.

Bovard is not exaggerating.Writing at Power Line, John Hinderaker offers a similar opinion:

Taken together, these Democratic Party scandals, from the Russian Collusion Hoax to Crossfire Hurricane to the Dirty 51 to Arctic Frost–and likely others that have not yet come to light–represent by far the worst political corruption in American history. There has never been anything like it.

Democrats talk about Watergate. On a 100 point scale, Watergate was maybe a 6. These Democratic Party scandals, taken together, are perhaps an 87. The Democrats were actually trying to 1) alter the results of presidential elections, 2) disable an incumbent president, and 3) put their political opponents in prison. With the possible exception of the Democrats firing on Fort Sumter in 1861, there is nothing remotely like it in American history.

Just so.

The Judicial Resistance Continues

Chicago

I have previously reported on the hijinks of Chicago’s Obama-appointed Judge Sarah Ellis, who is unlawfully trying to hamstring and micromanage the ICE personnel in Chicago in their efforts to apprehend and deport illegal aliens.  Ellis wasn’t deterred by the 7^th Circuit’s emphatic smackdown and persists with her lawless meddling. As reported by the Associated Press,

A federal judge in Chicago on Thursday issued an extensive injunction restricting federal agents’ use of force, saying Thursday that a top Border Patrol official leading an immigration crackdown repeatedly lied about threats posed by protesters and reporters.

The preliminary injunction came in response to a lawsuit filed by news outlets and protesters who allege federal agents have used excessive force during the operation that has netted more than 3,000 arrests and led to heated clashes across the nation’s third-largest city and its many suburbs.

“I see little reason for the use of force that the federal agents are currently using,” said U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis. “I don’t find defendants’ version of events credible.”

A Department of Homeland Security official said in a statement that DHS plans to appeal the ruling, calling it “an extreme act by an activist judge that risks the lives and livelihoods of law enforcement officers.”

Judge Ellis is an active accomplice in the attempted nullification of federal immigration law by Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker. They are trying to preserve Chicago as a “sanctuary city” where illegal aliens are immune from ICE. I predicted that “a repeat performance by Judge Ellis will lead to an even more dramatic rebuke by the 7^th Circuit.” We shall see.

Rogue Judges Must Be Curbed

In a highly-unusual, but long overdue, development, it was reported last week that

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan on Wednesday urged Chief Justice John Roberts to probe possible ethics violations made by federal judges. The letter specifically refers to anonymous statements federal judges have made to the New York Times that appear to smear the Supreme Court, and describes the relationship between the high court and lower courts as a “war zone.” The chairmen argued the comments cast doubt on the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary branch and may constitute an ethics violation by violating the Code of Conduct for United States Judges.

Due to the politicized judicial appointments made by Obama and Biden, the federal judiciary now consists of a cadre of left-wing activists who disdain the Constitution’s separation of powers and use their courtrooms to legislate from the bench. The Supreme Court must decisively put an end to the judicial insurrection.     

Judge Boasberg May Be Impeached

I have previously reported on Chief Judge James Boasberg’s crusade against the Trump administration (and Republicans in general). This Obama-appointed rogue judge exemplifies the abuse of power and disregard for the judicial role. Boasberg’s role in the scandalous Arctic Frost project was particularly contemptible. Boasberg may finally be getting his due. As reported in Legal Insurrection,

Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX) has introduced articles of impeachment against U.S. District Judge James Boasberg due to his role in the Arctic Frost investigation….“Chief Judge Boasberg has compromised the impartiality of the judiciary and created a constitutional crisis. He is shamelessly weaponizing his power against his political opponents, including Republican members of Congress who are faithfully serving the American people within their jurisdiction,” Gill told Fox News Digital.

“Judge Boasberg was an accomplice in the egregious Arctic Frost scandal where he equipped the Biden DOJ to spy on Republican senators. His lack of integrity makes him clearly unfit for the gavel. I am proud to once again introduce articles of impeachment against Judge Boasberg to hold him accountable for his high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Republicans need to begin hosing out the Augean Stable of the D.C. bench. Impeaching the rogue Judge Boasberg would be a good first step.

But There Are Also Some Good Judges (and Juries)

Not all the news last week was bad. A Fifth Circuit ruling upheld Texas’s ban on drag shows for children.

Moreover, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed and remanded a district judge in New York who had disallowed President Trump’s “removal” to federal court the “hush money” case brought in state court by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg alleging that a payment to Stormy Daniels was a crime because it should have been treated as a campaign expense, when federal law clearly says otherwise. Moreover, keeping the case in state court prevented adequate consideration of the scope of the President’s immunity, as recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court. This is further vindication of President Trump’s legal positions in the frivolous and vindictive campaign of lawfare waged against him. (President Trump is separately appealing the state court judgment, even though Judge Juan Merchan, on the eve of Trump’s inauguration in January, sentenced him to an unconditional discharge.)

Finally, a Virginia jury returned a $10 million verdict for the first-grade teacher shot in her classroom by a six-year-old student nearly three years ago. As reported by the New York Post, “Former first-grade educator Abigail Zwerner sued Ebony Parker, the former vice principal of Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Va., for gross negligence, alleging Parker failed to act on multiple warnings that the 6-year-old boy had a gun and was acting alarmingly the day of the January 2023 shooting. After over five hours of deliberation on Wednesday and Thursday, the seven-person jury ruled in favor of Zwerner — who had been seeking $40 million in damages….Parker — who is facing criminal child neglect charges related to the shooting — didn’t testify in her own defense.” Parker resigned two weeks after the shooting.

The Supreme Court Has Many Important Cases This Term

Constitutional law scholar John Eastman has written a masterful overview of the Supreme Court’s docket this term. One of the cases involve President Trump’s authority to impose tariffs. That case was argued last week. Several of the justices posed tough questions to the Solicitor General, representing the government’s position. If the Court rules against President Trump, Congress will have to strengthen the President’s authority to impose tariffs. Unfortunately, due to the close margins in both houses, and the filibuster rule, Congress can’t even pass a budget, much less enact significant legislation.