This morning, Leslie McAdoo Gordon published her first article here at RedState, drawing on her decades of legal expertise to compare and contrast the prosecutions stemming from January 6th to how the DOJ has handled nearly identical cases in the past. To put it lightly, the dual system of justice in this country is alive and well, and regardless of how hysterical one might be about January 6th, arbitrary enforcement of “justice” is objectively a terrible thing that is both dangerous and crushes confidence in our institutions.
After going through several specific cases, McAdoo Gordon came to this conclusion.
It is difficult to see the disparity in the treatment of comparable non-violent misdemeanor cases with similar facts as anything other than a gross abuse of prosecutorial power. The public, the media, and Republican lawmakers should demand that the flagrant disparity in the treatment of these January 6 protestors cease immediately. Scores of lives will be seriously and unnecessarily damaged if this abusive process is allowed to continue, to say nothing of the destruction of the public’s faith in the neutrality of the criminal justice system.
Yet, no sooner than that piece had gone live, news of more left-wing activists being treated differently emerged. The climate change group showed up in Washington D.C. and then blocked all ten entrances to the White House, sitting in roads and taking over guard shacks. This was done as part of a demand to include a “civilian climate corps” in the recent infrastructure deal, which is a favorite pet project of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Now, I’m no expert, but I’ve been assured that this kind of trespassing in an attempt to stop the machinations of government is called an “insurrection,” though, I personally believe that descriptor is ludicrous in all these cases (which is why I put the word in quotes in the headline). Regardless, the Secret Service did start to arrest and remove these people.
But it was what happened next that has people asking exactly how compromised the DOJ is.
Did you get that? If you are a left-wing activist trespassing on federal property in order to make demands of Congress, you not only don’t go to jail, you get let free the same day without so much as a ticket for your troubles (or if they were ticketed, they aren’t saying). And yes, despite a lot of the media’s framing, almost everyone arrested on January 6th only committed the grand crime of misdemeanor trespassing according to the DOJ itself.
Further, these people were clearly prompted by Ocasio-Cortez given they were trespassing to promote her legislative baby. Will the press investigate her and accuse her of fomenting unrest? I think we know the answer to that.
And sure, there are differences between this and January 6th, but those differences are purely symbolic when talking about the trespassing cases. If a grandmother breaks the law by walking around the Capitol Rotunda after others open the doors, is that somehow magnitudes more serious than these left-wing activists trespassing? I’d posit that the answer is obviously no. Yet, the DOJ is a political arm at this point, and their disparate treatment of cases that just so happens to track along partisan lines is apparent.
This kind of thing is dangerous because it means the DOJ can arbitrarily decide to come down on whomever they want based on their politics. We saw plenty of examples of that during the Trump era. But it’s also harmful to every other institution in our government. No open-minded individual can see this stuff and trust that any bureaucracy is going to operate fairly if they have the “wrong views.”