No. of Recommendations: 9
Will you at least admit that the DOJ aggressively nailing every Republican they can find while simultaneously going out of their way to not charge any democrats with anything - or giving dems caught dead to rights barely any slaps on the wrist - looks bad?
I might be missing it. Can you point me to where DOJ filed charges against any single Republican member of the Executive - let alone every one they can find - for failure to comply with a Congressional subpoena?
If you're a private citizen and don't even bother showing up for your Congressional testimony, with absolutely no legally defensible reason why, you're likely going to jail. If you're the sitting Attorney General, and your refusal to comply with a subpoena implicates complicated and legitimate disputes over the balance of power between the two branches and the limits of Executive Privilege (which tied up the F&F documents case in federal court for years, BTW), you're probably not going to jail.
It only "looks bad" if you don't pay attention to the fact that those two cases are very different - not just in the political affiliations of the individuals, but in critical legal matters that affect the very power of the federal courts to even adjudicate these disputes.
If you only look at these instances at a very high level of abstraction ("Classified information where it shouldn't be" "Failed to respond to subpoena"), you miss the very legitimate and determinative reasons why they result in different outcomes. Both Clinton and Trump mishandled classified information - but Trump did it in a way that violates criminal law, and Clinton did not. Both Bannon and Holder failed to respond to a Congressional subpoena - but Bannon did so for no articulable reason, and Holder did so on instruction from the President exercising a claim of Executive Privilege.
L'Affaire Clinton is not an example of "Rules are for Other People." It's an example of "If You Pay Close Attention to What the Rules Don't Cover, You Can Get Away With A Lot Without Breaking Them." I think Trump made the mistake of believing the line that Clinton committed a crime and was able to get away with it because of who she was, rather than recognizing the reality that Clinton got away with no charges because she didn't violate the letter of the law, even as she trod all over the spirit of it.
