Whether you either hate or like former President Donald Trump, there is no excuse for the blatantly partisan double-standard investigations of him while evidence of Hillary Clinton's destruction of classified documents and Biden family foreign influence peddling remain ignored.
There’s little wonder why two separate polls show that a majority of Americans believe the U.S. currently has a two-tiered justice system.
According to a July-August survey of more than 1,000 likely general voters conducted by the Trafalgar Group and Convention of States Action, 66.7% of Democrats and 87.8% of Republicans said there was one system benefitting political insiders, and the other favoring their enemies.
A second survey by the same organizations found that nearly half of the respondents, 47.9%, believed that former President Trump’s political enemies were behind the FBI raid on his private Palm Beach, Florida Mar-a-Lago residence, whereas 39.7% said an impartial justice system was, and about 12% said they weren’t sure.
Notably, in both polls in which the majority of respondents were white, women and Democrats, 70.5% of Democrats said an impartial justice system was behind the raid, while 76.6% of Republicans said it was Trump’s political enemies.
In the most recent of a continuing series of abuses, three days after Trump announced another bid for the presidency, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed Jack Smith, a former federal and international war crimes prosecutor, as the third special counsel to oversee DOJ investigations into previously unsupported charges of criminal wrongdoing.
Stating that, "This appointment will not slow the completion of these investigations," there can be no ambiguity that this latest DOJ action is intended to block candidate Trump’s presidential eligibility, or failing this, to cloud his electability.
AG Garland’s statement on the decision said, "Based on recent developments, including the former president’s announcement that he’s a candidate for president in the next election, and the sitting president’s stated intention to be a candidate as well, I have concluded that it is in the public interest to appoint a special counsel."
Incidentally, this is the same Jack Smith who, during his stint as an attorney at DOJ, is linked to the Obama administration’s infamous Lois Lerner/IRS targeting hundreds of conservative groups including Citizens United.
The IRS delayed their tax-exempt status applications between 2010-2012.
According to testimony filed by then- House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chair Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., Smith sought Lerner’s help to prosecute tax exempt groups which Republicans charged was a pressure campaign against organizations favorable to them.
In this latest third round special counsel probe, Jack Smith’s high-profile assignment will be to conduct an ongoing probe into the former president’s possession of classified documents leading to a DOJ-authorized armed FBI raid on his private Mar-a-Lago residence and the entirely one-sided Democratic House kangaroo court hearings, attempting to link his Jan. 6 activities or statements to the tragic U.S. Capitol mob riots.
Members of the House select committee witch hunt — all of whom had previously voted for Trump’s impeachment — issued an unprecedented mid-October subpoena ahead of November elections calling for him to testify before their transparently-veiled inquisition.
Recall that although it dominated the headlines for two years, U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s first investigation into charges of Trump collusion with Russian agents to interfere with Hillary’s 2016 presidential bid turned up exactly nadda.
Nevertheless, after then-U.S. Attorney William "Bill" Barr determined the special counsel’s evidence was insufficient to establish Trump committed a crime, reports are emerging that House Committee-led investigation transcripts of interviews show that top intel officials affirmed they also had no such collusion evidence.
Attorney General Barr then appointed another special counsel, John Durham, to investigate origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigations which instead reveal very cozy relationships between the agency and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
The arrangement paid a high-priced Washington law firm to engage an opposition research firm run by former British spy Christopher Steele to fabricate a salacious "dirty dossier" to defame Donald Trump, Hillary's 2016 opponent.
We now also know from Special Counsel John Durham’s probe that the FBI was aware by 2017 that a false "smoking gun" Trump organization Russia Alpha Bank Connection fabricared by the Clinton campaign was bogus.
As for former President Trump’s "unauthorized" possession of classified materials, compare this with far less DOJ interest in Hillary’s destruction of thousands of government documents including classified communications contained on her insecure computer servers from times she served as U.S. secretary of state.
The Durham investigation revealed that former Obama CIA chief John Brennan knew about this clearly illegal activity.
Meanwhile, the DOJ and FBI also sat on clear evidence on Hunter’s infamous "Laptop from Hell" that the Biden family had engaged in numerous compromising name-peddling deals with foreign adversaries when Joe was vice president and continuing throughout his 2020 candidacy.
Expect this lack of interest in equitable prosecutorial standards to change when new GOP House oversight committees with subpoena power take control in January.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.