Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

SHEFFIELD: Democrats’ Jan. 6 Fiasco Is Just Another Example Of Conservatives Being Treated As Second-Class Citizens

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This week’s Jan. 6 carnival barkers never mentioned the name of Ashli Babbitt, a Donald Trump supporter killed by a Capitol Police officer during the January 6 riots. The Jan. 6th carnival barkers also ignore that many Jan. 6 defendants are being denied the Sixth Amendment guarantee of a speedy and fair trial.

Both omissions by the Jan. 6th barkers are just the latest examples of a flagrant, two-tiered justice system that treats conservatives — especially anyone supporting Trump — as second-class citizens.

There were many troubling conflicts of interest at Sussman’s D.C. Beltway swamp trial venue. A reported three of the 12 jurors were Hillary Clinton donors, and as Open Secrets reports, just 1.6% of U.S. adult women and 2% of men have given $200 or more in political donations.

In other words, only the most truly committed believers put dollars behind their political ideology. Given the District of Columbia has a much higher per-capita of donors because of its professional political class, sure it might have been a little harder to find a non-Clinton donor, but given the hyper partisan nature of the attacks lobbed by the Clinton campaign, these donations should have been grounds for jury dismissal.

On top of the tainted donors, trial Judge Christopher Cooper was Sussmann’s colleague at former President Bill Clinton’s Department of Justice during the 1990s. Attorney General Merrick Garland, appointed by President Joe Biden, officiated during Cooper’s wedding to Amy Jeffress, a former Obama DOJ official now in private practice representing none other than….. Lisa Page, the infamous former FBI lawyer and Clinton booster.

Cooper also refused to grant prosecutor John Durham’s request to dismiss a juror whose daughter is a crew teammate of Sussmann’s own daughter. And Cooper limited the evidence and testimony prosecutors could bring.

In another instance of DOJ’s double standards, former President Barack Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, faced no repercussions after Congress held him in contempt for refusing to comply with their Fast and Furious investigation. Meanwhile, former Trump adviser Peter Navarro was put in leg irons during an ambush arrest at the airport for the same charge of contempt.

Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was financially destroyed by a federal investigation, meanwhile fired former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe won back his taxpayer-funded pension even though McCabe admitted to lying to the FBI about a press leak. Former CIA Director John Brennan, a serial Trump antagonist, repeatedly lied before Congress. His penalty? A lucrative book deal and no leg irons.

And let’s not forget the 51 former “intelligence” officials who wrote an open letter calling the Hunter Biden laptop story (verified by even leftist media outlets like The New York Times) Russian disinformation. They’ve faced no professional sanctions, no stripping of security clearances, even though they refuse to apologize.

Obama’s Internal Revenue Service, thanks to bureaucrat Lois Lerner, targeted conservative non-profit groups for harassment. This led to cleanup — a rare government remedy — by the Trump administration, which settled a lawsuit filed on behalf of more than 400 conservative nonprofit groups claiming they’d been discriminated against.

A repeated line by the Left is that conservatives are a threat to democracy because they erode “democratic norms.” With norms like this ongoing pattern of botched justice, it’s no wonder the Right has finally started to revolt and ask for equal protection under the law.

Carrie Sheffield is the Tony Blankley Fellow for American Exceptionalism at The Steamboat Institute.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.