Sunday morning, former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo that Special Counsel John Durham’s report on Department of Justice/FBI crimes and abuses committed during its investigation of Donald Trump reads like a tombstone for the American justice system. And its epitaph is two lines long:
Here is our account of the crimes they committed—
And our record of holding no one accountable for them.
Many of late have taken to talking about America’s “two-tiered system of justice,” meaning that the ruling party and its allies pay no price for committing the same crimes for which others are punished. As Nunes, now the CEO of Truth Social, pointed out, the fault lies not just with executive branch agencies like the Department of Justice but also with the judicial branch of the government.
Judge Emmitt Sullivan’s unlawful prosecution of (ret.) Gen Michael Flynn after the DOJ decided to drop its fraudulent case was a taste of things of come. Today Washington, DC federal court judges regularly violate the constitutional rights of January 6 defendants by detaining them unlawfully and delaying their trials. When they finally get their day in court, they can’t get a fair hearing from Washington, DC juries drawn from a pool brainwashed by the press to cheer on their impoverishment, imprisonment, and destruction. The fact that a magistrate signed off on the warrant to raid the home of a former American president and leading candidate for the 2024 GOP nomination reminds us of how this all started — when a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court granted a warrant to the FBI to spy on Trump’s 2016 campaign.
The phrase “two-tiered system of justice” suggests that the side elected to appoint those responsible for administering justice will not hold its own to the same standards it holds others. For instance, the fact that Hunter Biden has not been called to account for breaking the same laws — foreign corrupt practices, federal gun laws, etc. — for which others would be prosecuted looks like an unfair justice system.
But let’s look more closely: When federal law enforcement authorities stand up a task force to censor social media reports of corruption to protect the oligarchy’s preferred presidential candidate, this is proof of something much more sinister than “hypocrisy.” It’s evidence rather of government institutions using powers under the color of law to wield the instruments of law for the purpose of increasing their powers. In this framework, there is no law, only power.
A little more than six years ago, Nunes held a press conference at the Capitol to say he’d seen evidence that Trump aides, and maybe the president himself, had been spied on. Nunes’ investigation uncovered the extent of the operation targeting Trump and his circle. For those who followed, and were grateful for, Nunes’ exertions on behalf of the republic, on behalf of the law, there is little new in the Durham report, details that may shed some further light on the corruption of the men and women tasked to protect Americans and defend the constitution.
But it can hardly come as a surprise that in those six years, the justice system’s failure to hold anyone accountable for breaking the law has incentivized lawlessness. When William Barr failed to have indictments lined up before the summer of 2020, he guaranteed that the same public institutions and private industries that interfered in the 2016 vote would have freedom to retry their efforts for the 2020 election. It’s hardly a coincidence that the Democrats’ largest donor, George Soros, backs district attorneys who vow to turn felons loose on American cities.
Certainly, plenty of US states, districts, and towns, sheriffs and local courts, keep the law, and across the country good citizens abide by it. But the bigger message, issuing from the nation’s capital is hard to miss: America is lawless.
Classic Westerns like “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” dramatize the origins of our justice system. It wasn’t enough to have a constitution and expect everyone to abide by it, especially in places far outside the reach of civilized society. In the wilderness, far from those parts of America that had been long settled, there was frontier justice and no justice at all. The founding fathers gave us the blueprint for our justice system, but the foundations were built by men and women of hard resolve who faced down chaos to forge from it order, our constitutional order.
There are no American movies about what we are seeing now, the purposeful destruction of the justice system, only dystopian fantasies imagining what happens to civilization after the pillars of law have been overturned. To keep those dark shadows at bay and restore order will demand the same sort of strength and courage that first built our order in the wilderness, where we again find ourselves.
