Recommended Reads For Presidents Day: The Use Of Prosecutors

Two recommended reads that provide additional insights into the way the office of prosecutor fits into the progressive scheme for societal and political transformation. The two, of course, go hand in hand.

First, Andrew McCarthy weighs in:

The Progressive Prosecutor Project

How and why the nation's crime busters are becoming criminal enablers

McCarthy focuses on the activities of Chesa Boudin, one of the District Attorneys who was elected in various urban centers across the country thanks to huge amounts of George Soros' money:

A newly minted district attorney for a major American city vows to establish an immigration unit. At first blush, that would seem entirely normal for a prosecutor’s office. Immigration laws require enforcement, and prosecutors are in the law-enforcement business. 

But no—the new San Francisco DA actually has in mind an immigration defense unit. He wants to assign a staff of prosecutors to protect undocumented aliens—those who are either illegal and thus deportable to begin with, or for whom a criminal conviction could result in loss of lawful status and thus eventual deportation. The unit’s enforcement target would be not the law violators but the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who enforce federal laws, along with any local police and corrections officials who have the temerity to assist ICE in that endeavor. The prosecutors’ mission, in the words of their new boss, would be to “stand up to Trump on immigration”—the president having made signature issues of border security and the stepped-up deportation of aliens who flout the laws.

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DA candidates tend to be politically active lawyers who have gained prosecutorial experience as young attorneys before moving on to respected law firms. They are slated by their party to run for the chief prosecutor position. Often, these races are not competitive. In de facto one-party governance (Democratic), which controls most urban centers, the DA candidate runs virtually unopposed, the real contest limited to any intraparty vying for the nomination. 

Consequently, DA positions have been ripe for the taking. Over the last few years, a network of progressive activists backed by big money has seized the day. 

Most notable is George Soros, the 89-year-old billionaire investor and currency trader, whose Open Society Foundations lavishly fund leftist causes and politicians. As noted by the left-leaning scholar Rachel Elise Barkow (in her provocative bestseller, Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration), DA campaigns are traditionally modest affairs, with budgets that seldom exceed five-figure fundraising. This creates an opportunity, and the Soros network has pounced, overwhelming the field by pouring millions of dollars into the coffers of favored candidates. 

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As he recounts in his memoir Gringo: A Coming of Age in Latin America, Chesa Boudin cut his political teeth as a translator and think-tank researcher for Hugo Chavez’s regime. In this, he was tracing the footsteps of Ayers, a frequent visitor to Venezuela and devotee of the Bolivarian revolution’s education “reforms”—and how well that is all working out! Boudin eventually joined the San Francisco public defender’s office but did not try cases and had no prosecutorial experience when he ran for DA. 

In that progressive paradise, though, he is radical royalty, his candidacy lauded by Senator Bernie Sanders, Communist icon Angela Davis, Islamist apologist Linda Sarsour, and Shaun King, the civil-rights activist and Black Lives Matter promoter. His fundraising blew away the field, led by Soros ally Chloe Cockburn (program manager for criminal-justice reform at the Open Philanthropy Project, a left-wing mega-donor, after a stint as counsel to the ACLU’s “campaign to end mass incarceration”). Also included among Boudin supporters were such Soros-backed ventures as the Tides Foundation and the Brennan Center for Justice.

The second recommended read--an article by Adam Mill--simply examines the prosecutorial conduct in several high profile federal cases, including those of General Michael Flynn and Roger Stone:

Why Everyone Should Cheer That Roger Stone’s Corrupt Prosecutors Resigned

The prosecutors who attempted to deceive the court and their DOJ superiors all resigned in a huff. Let’s hope the door hit each of them in the backside as they stormed out.

Mill has an interesting, but entirely valid, take on these cases--a view of our country's justice system which conservative Americans have not traditionally accepted:

In 2020, I find myself wondering whether a college student in a distant country at an Amnesty International meeting might select the profile of Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, or Michael Flynn. All of these committed the unspeakable crime of helping Trump win an election. 

Flynn and Papadopoulos were guilty of nothing until FBI agents got them talking long enough to find a mismatch between secretly recorded conversations and their targets’ failing memories.

Manafort’s tormentors used torture through solitary confinement, violating international human rights standards. Everyone knows politics motivated the viciousness with which U.S. prosecutors pursued these men. 

If an international student were writing to seek justice for Stone, she would write the letter directly to Donald Trump, the president of the United States. The president has two constitutional powers that authorize his intercession to stop the persecution of a political dissident, which Stone absolutely is. 

First, as I’ve written before, Trump is the head of the executive branch. The Department of Justice is not an independent branch of government. Nobody at the DOJ stands for an election. Only through the president can the voters reach and control the awesome power of the federal criminal prosecutor. Second, the president has the un-appealable constitutional power to cancel any federal prosecution—even before the trial.

Having set current events within that context, Mill examines the details. He ends with this:

The Stone case is just one battle in a multi-front war against the constitutional right of the people to elect the leaders who have power over them. Over and over and over again, we’re told that the elected president threatens the Constitution by failing to submit to his un-elected bureaucratic masters. Impeachment was about the president failing to take direction from Lt. Col. Alex Vindman and failing to submit to unelected intelligence bureaucrats.

With the benefit of a middle school civics class, my son put it this way: England has ceremonial nobility, but power is determined through elections. In America, we have the opposite. That’s exactly right. These bureaucrats consider themselves more educated and moral than the grubby political leaders we send them after elections. All countries have elections. But if you want to live in a real democracy, the elected leaders must be allowed to wield power.