OPINION | Ken Pittman: DC Justice Is Anything But Even Right Now
It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity, yada yada yada - Charles Dickens
It was the best of times...
Imagine if you will, the FBI is investigating you. You have defied a Congressional subpoena and destroyed tens of thousands of emails and documents on your computer which you were ordered to preserve under the pains and penalties of law. You set up a secret private server and communicated top secret national information through this server's email that was unprotected from hacking by foreign agents. You did this despite the President of the United States ordering you exactly not to do just that.
Well into the investigation but months before the case was closed, the Director of the FBI has prepared a letter exonerating you. In fact, he didn't write the letter himself but a deputy director of the FBI, who was in charge of your investigation did. This deputy director was also the husband of a woman who was running for office, and who received almost a million dollars in campaign money from you while her husband was investigating you. This deputy director, to put it politely, took some leaps of faith in finding "no criminal intent" in your destruction of subpoenaed materials. The FBI, the entity responsible for prosecuting you inexplicably became your defense attorneys.
It was the worst of times...
Now imagine that you've been elected to a position that no one expected you to win, in a city where your apparent powers and ideas are being challenged by as many assumed allies as politically known adversaries. There are even others who look to undermine you with various powers of their own, from the shadows and in secrecy. Strange alliances have formed to eject you from your position.
Soon after being elected, you've been accused of helping your nation's biggest foe in winning the office to which you hold. An independent counsel has been appointed to investigate this alleged collusion, and the chief counsel has hired many of the same FBI agents who over saw your opponent's investigation and who've excused her actions, even though they were not judges but working for the nation's top prosecutor.
They were successful in finding a few of your former campaign workers possibly involved in illegal financial crimes involved with the rival nation and ones nearby it. Those crimes were mostly committed years before you met them.
However, after scores of agents have exhausted thousands of hours investigating you personally, while leaving next to nothing upturned and unexposed, there appears to be no evidence of you colluding with the rival nation. The mission of the investigators has now changed into finding out anything you've ever done in your past, in order to meet with the same result: your expulsion from office.
It is hard to imagine that these two cases took place under very same government, and that many of the same individuals charged to find the facts in each case, can properly represent America's sacred "even justice" mantra, given the contrast of how the two cases here are treated.
Yes, I feel strongly that Hillary Rodham Clinton intentionally destroyed the emails to avoid certain prosecution and disgrace. Yes, I feel certain that President Donald Trump had a consensual tryst with a prostitute, who is paid to be filmed during sex, 10 years before he took the oath of office.
I do not think the FBI should be in the business of presuming the best of the subjects of their investigation with no evidence to back it up, and while accepting money from them. Particularly when the act to break the law isn't even in question!
I also feel equally as strong that clearly biased investigators should not be allowed to work the file after provably being caught stating hatred for the subject.
I don't think American law ought to resemble totalitarian regimes who investigate a targeted citizen and usurp civil rights to stumble on to a crime they weren't looking into and until they do find one.
The Rule of Law is dead.
Ken Pittman is the host of The Ken Pittman Show on 1420 WBSM New Bedford. He can be heard Saturdays from 9 a.m. to noon. Contact him at talkerkenpittman@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @RadioKenPittman. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.