Remember also, this wasn’t a case of “he said, she said,” as it would have been if she claimed the incident happened when she and Kavanaugh were alone in a parking lot somewhere. Once she chose to say there were four additional people at the house, it becomes a “they said.” And all four, including Leland Ingham Keyser, a classmate of Ford’s at the all-girls school Holton-Arms, said they weren’t at the party she describes and don’t know what she’s talking about.1
What would this tell me as a prosecutor about Ford’s memory? If they weren’t there, it’s possible Kavanaugh wasn’t there, either.
Ford’s 2012 therapy session is crucial to this case, in my opinion. Ford now says she mentioned Kavanaugh’s name during that session, for the first time since the alleged assault. That Ford’s lawyers wouldn’t hand over the notes taken by her therapist spoke volumes to me.2 Ford herself was evasive when questioned by the prosecutor on this issue. It turned out she didn’t mention Kavanaugh’s name in therapy when she had a chance and that makes me wonder whether they may have done some hypnosis to refresh Ford’s memory. In a courtroom, judges and juries are entitled to know if hypnosis is used, because it is an unreliable means of refreshing one’s recollection. There is a risk of confabulation of recent events reported on television and in newspapers that impact one’s memory.
There were other problems with her story not directly related to the alleged events in the 1980s. We were told she hesitated to come to Washington to testify because she was afraid to fly, then found out she’d had an internship in Hawaii that required her to fly there regularly. In fact, it was later revealed that she wasn’t afraid to fly at all. The woman has flown all over the country, to the South Pacific and Hawaii! So unless she was paddling in a canoe, one must assume she was flying in an airplane.
As a prosecutor, I would only bring a case to trial if I thought I had a good chance to win. I don’t want to go into court against a defendant who might well be acquitted if I don’t think my victim’s story is going to hold up under cross-examination. It’s the defense attorney’s job to defend his client to the best of his ability, meaning he’s going to challenge the victim’s claim with the same vigor as he would a woman who was making a false accusation. An acquittal for the defendant in a case where the woman was telling the truth can feel like the jury found her guilty. And that can do even more harm.
In Ford’s case, I would never have gone to trial because she was contradicted by her own witnesses, and she showed none of the signs I typically saw in victims. Ms. Ford may have believed what she was saying, but she didn’t convince me her story was true.
The people who manipulated her into going public with the accusation against Kavanaugh didn’t care about any of that. They didn’t care about her, about justice or the precedents they were setting. Ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee Dianne Feinstein could have proceeded with a confidential investigation upon learning of Ford’s allegations, but she chose not to for political reasons. Instead, she referred Ford to attorneys partially funded by Left-wing activist billionaire, George Soros, who failed to inform Ford of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigators’ offer to interview Ford at home instead of in front of the whole world.3 They were out to wring maximum suffering out of Ms. Ford, solely for political purposes.
They were desperate to win at all costs. Take a man and his family down? No problem. Destroy the principle of presumption of innocence? So be it. Democrat Senator Mazie Hirono all but said this explicitly. When asked directly if Kavanaugh was entitled to the same presumption of innocence as anyone else, she replied, “I put his denial in the context of everything I know about him in terms of how he approaches his cases.”4
In other words, Hirono makes judgments about the accusations against Kavanaugh based purely on what she perceives as his political beliefs, not his innocence or guilt, or the merits of the evidence for or against him. For the Democrats, this is a political fight to the death—of our country and our liberty, if necessary.
Looking back, I’m just glad that the Senate voted to confirm Kavanaugh in spite of this painful three-ring circus. If things had gone a bit differently, we might well have had to witness a whole parade of fake Kavanaugh accusers coming through the Senate, telling their BS stories to get their fifteen minutes of fame. I can only imagine what it would have been like if Michael Avenatti, a man who has since been indicted for multiple felonies and narrowly escaped domestic abuse charges, had been allowed to bring his crew of crazy clients in to accuse Judge Kavanaugh of “gang rape,” an accusation so absurd that even Lindsey Graham couldn’t keep his cool when bringing it up during his closing statement. As usual, we were saved from the Left by their own incompetence.
The Use of Violence
In June 2018, Democrat Congresswoman Maxine Waters stood on the steps of a courthouse in Los Angeles and gave a gang of her liberal followers these marching orders: “Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
They got the message.
That same month, Kirstjen Nielsen, President Trump’s former Homeland Security Secretary, went to a Mexican restaurant with her family and was met by a crowd of self-described “democratic socialists,” who started screaming insults at her. The main chant consisted of one word: “Shame!”
Seriously? What is this? Game of Thrones? Were they going to hold some kind of witch trial out on the sidewalk?
Then, as if the heckling wasn’t enough, these idiots followed her inside the restaurant and crowded around her table. The restaurant did nothing to stop them. “We will not let her dine in peace,” said one of these hippie lunatics. After ten minutes of listening to the Batty Bernie Sanders Brigade screaming their nonsense, Nielsen left the restaurant. (For protection, she probably should have walked into a history classroom. Lord knows how much democratic socialists hate those.)
And what exactly was her crime?
Doing her job. Faithfully executing the orders of the President of the United States, and following the laws as written as she had sworn she would when she accepted that job. For that, she was called a white supremacist, a Nazi, and a purveyor of hate.
It didn’t stop with Nielsen.
Later that month, the president’s former press secretary, Sarah Sanders, was rudely asked to leave a restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia, just because she worked for Donald Trump. Just this last June, Eric Trump walked into a restaurant in Chicago and a waitress walked up and spat on him. Although the Secret Service took the waitress into custody immediately, Eric took the high road and chose not to press charges. He called the incident “a disgusting act by somebody who clearly has emotional problems.” Even the liberal mayor, Lori Lightfoot, said it was “very gracious” of him.
As of July 2018, John Nolte at Breitbart had compiled a “rap sheet” of 639 cases5 of violence and public harassment against Trump supporters, which are increasingly condoned by the media—including the “new media,” social media—which I will discuss in more detail later. You’ve already heard about the high-profile cases of Republican legislators or media figures being chased out of restaurants by angry leftist mobs. But it gets much worse than that.
A boulder was thrown through the window of House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s office last year.6 Less than a week later, shots were fired into a Republican Party office in Florida.7 Minnesota House of Representatives candidate Shane Mekeland was punched in the face by an angry leftist in a bar8 and a Tennessee restaurant owner endured threats against his life for renting a room for a breakfast meet-and-greet campaign event to a Republican U.S. Senate candidate.9
These are just a few incidents from a single month in 2018, which was hardly atypical. Virtually every day since Donald Trump announced his campaign, anyone even suspected of supporting him has been subject to
harassment, public intimidation, threats, beatings, assaults, and even arson. Yet, if the media mention any of this, they blame President Trump! The president is so provocative in his speech, they say, that unhinged leftists cannot help themselves in committing violent acts against his supporters.
The deranged Left doesn’t limit their aggression to supporters of the president. My colleague Kat Timpf was forced to leave a bar in Brooklyn, New York, after being chased around and screamed at by a woman who recognized her as a Fox News contributor.10 Kat leans more libertarian than conservative and has been outspoken in her criticism of President Trump’s immigration policies on the very channel that seems to have inspired so much rage in this woman. No matter, Kat was found guilty and exiled from an establishment serving the public based on one unhinged Leftist’s delusions about who she is and what she believes—all of which were incorrect.
For all their crying about being triggered, “microaggressions,” and needing safe zones, it is the Left that commits real violence and harassment for political reasons. You can bet it’s going to get worse as we approach the next election, with any attempt by the Trump administration to enforce law and order portrayed as fascist suppression of dissent by a media hostile to Trump and receptive to the political heirs of the Yippies, the Weather Underground, and other violent Left-wing groups of the 1960s.
Two Sets of Rules
As I said, the rule of law doesn’t begin at a criminal trial. There are rules for the investigators into a crime as well. The Fourth Amendment protects us from unreasonable searches, the Fifth against being compelled to be witnesses against ourselves, and the Sixth guarantees we have the benefit of a lawyer for our defense. Based on these fundamental protections, other rules have been established to ensure those suspected of a crime are treated fairly by government investigators.
While no system is perfect, I never had reason to doubt these principles were generally being followed during my over thirty-year career as a prosecutor, judge, and district attorney. As I said, on the rare occasions where even the hint of impropriety existed in the gathering of evidence presented to me on the bench, I threw it out, even if I believed the accused to be guilty of the crime. It goes without saying that it didn’t matter if the defendant was a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or even a communist. If the rules said they should walk, they walked.
Now consider the way the FBI, the highest law enforcement agency in the land, handled two cases: Michael Flynn’s and Hillary Clinton’s. Were the same principles of impartial justice applied to both of them?
The fundamental question: On January 24, 2017, was Michael Flynn treated as per the rules, like any other FBI target? The answer is a resounding no. He was treated differently, which brings us to the question: Why? The facts of this story are simple. Flynn was in the crosshairs of the FBI, targeted by the same players who we already know from publicized text messages and emails, tried to prevent a certain candidate from becoming president and promoted another. They were dirty. They lied, some under oath. They were leakers. And they were corrupt.
First, they leaked a story that Flynn had called Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on December 29, 2016, leading the public to believe there was something improper about these calls because Obama was still president11 and any contact with Russia was considered suspect. They then put out a story implying Flynn would testify against Trump in exchange for immunity. Anyone following these reports in the media could have assumed nothing other than that Flynn broke the law by contacting the Russian government before Trump became president and that he was going to implicate Trump with his testimony.
There was only one problem with this phony narrative: The conversation Flynn had with the Russian ambassador during the transition was legal. Perfectly legal. Take that to the bank. It is what is done in every new administration.
Michael Flynn was set up. Not only was he unmasked, he was told by FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe that the FBI wanted to talk to him about the Russians, and the quickest way to do it was to keep the lawyers out. Comey recently reveled in saying he took advantage of the White House being too new to require the normal procedures when interviewing someone of Flynn’s stature. “Something we’ve—I probably wouldn’t have done or maybe gotten away with in a more organized investigation—a more organized administration. In the George W. Bush administration, for example, or the Obama administration,” Comey said.12
This was a clear violation of protocol, White House rules, and ultimately Flynn’s constitutional rights. We know this because US District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered prosecutors to hand over FBI files of the Flynn interrogation instead of sentencing him as scheduled. Forty-eight hours later, the files were sent to the judge, although incomplete and redacted.
Those files confirmed what Director Comey himself admitted and what the judge may have suspected, despite his later negative comments about Flynn: the DOJ and FBI intentionally avoided protocol and standard operating procedure in questioning Michael Flynn without an attorney present. Even Comey admits this when he pulls off his Cardinal Comey mask to reveal the face of a hardened political operative.
Contrast Comey and the FBI’s treatment of Flynn with their treatment of Hillary Clinton, who, when questioned in July 2016, was accompanied by a small army of lawyers, including her personal attorney David E. Kendall.13 Clinton was investigated for committing a serious crime—the mistreatment of classified information—as compared to Flynn’s having a perfectly legal phone conference with a foreign diplomat. Yet, despite announcing to the world during an unprecedented news conference that Clinton had perpetrated every element of the crime, Comey went on to say that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case” against her.14
Part of Comey’s reasoning was that the FBI didn’t find criminal intent on Clinton’s part. Hillary’s behavior so established intent on her part that you could do a law review article on it. But here’s the rub: in determining guilt under the relevant federal law (18 US Code § 793—Gathering, transmitting, or losing defense information) intent is not a necessary element of the crime! Only gross negligence in handling classified information is necessary for a person to be guilty of that crime. The perpetrator need not have had criminal intent to mishandle, which makes a lot of sense. As Andrew McCarthy astutely observed in National Review, “People never intend the bad things that happen due to gross negligence.”15
To add insult to injury, Comey also stated Clinton was “extremely careless” in handling classified information. Now, any legal dictionary—any dictionary, for that matter—defines negligence as “failure to take reasonable care” or words very close to those. In other words, being “careless.” Negligence and being careless are virtually synonymous, legally and in everyday usage, so “extremely careless” and “grossly negligent” mean the same thing. By using the words he did, Comey all but said, “We have proof Hillary Clinton committed a felony, for which others have gone to jail, but we aren’t going to charge her. We decide whom the rules apply to and to whom they don’t.”
In the end, Michael Flynn plead guilty to a felony, lying to the FBI. Curiously, he has not been sentenced and has recently hired a spitfire, FBI-hating lawyer to attack his conviction as well as the actions of the investigators in his case. His reasons for pleading guilty are his own, although they may have included threats of prosecution against his son or other family members, bankruptcy and other consequences not related to his guilt or innocence. The government can bring an awful lot of pressure on someone to plead, even when they follow the rules. Whether that is right or wrong is a discussion for another day.
What should concern us all right now are the two sets of rules applied to Flynn and Hillary Clinton. On the one hand, they used the most aggressive tactics and the strictest application of the law to railroad Michael Flynn, who stands convicted merely of lying to an agency that has been taken over by the biggest liars in the world. In fact, there are several members of the FBI who don’t believe he lied
to them. On the other hand, they applied the most lenient standards possible, rewriting the law to include an element of intent it does not contain, in order to avoid prosecuting Hillary for one of many crimes of which I believe she is guilty. This is not American justice as we have known it for the past two centuries.
The Most Barbarous Ages
If you’re a liberal who generally votes Democrat, you may not be overly bothered by anything I’ve told you in this chapter. But you should be. The erosion of equal justice under the law, selective abandonment of the government’s fundamental duty to protect life and property, and the disregard of the protections of rights of the accused are all swords that cut both ways. These principles have been established by trial and error over thousands of years to produce the highly civilized society we live in today.
We joke about “banana republics.” We even have a clothing store chain named after them. But they’re no joke. In countries without our long traditions of equal justice, liberty, and property rights, people can’t depend upon the freedom and security we take for granted. These are countries where justice is not dispensed impartially and bribes, bullying by local bureaucrats and police, and politically motivated prosecutions followed by harsh punishments are a way of life—where the rule of men prevails over the rule of law and every citizen is a slave, forced to kowtow to the local commandant or face victimization. The law is used as a weapon against opponents and as a license for friends.
Radicals, Resistance, and Revenge: The Left’s Plot to Remake America Page 7