Criminalizing Political Opposition

This article is about the strange case of Paul Manafort. Yesterday The New York Post reported that President Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort will be moved from a federal lockup in Pennsylvania to Rikers Island later this week. The request was made by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr.’s office.

The article reports:

…a New York grand jury charged Manafort with a number of crimes, including residential mortgage fraud and falsifying business records…

Normally those crimes don’t result in a transfer to Rikers Island. In May 2013, Rikers Island ranked as one of the ten worst correctional facilities in the United States, based on reporting in Mother Jones magazine.

It gets even more strange.

In May 2018, a website called abovetopsecret reported:

So the special counsel is going after Manafort for financial crimes dating all the way back to 2005. Rosenstein issued a secret memo authorizing the special counsel to expand their jurisdiction to part B to make it appear legal.

The judge questions the jurisdiction and demands an unredacted version of the secret memo.

News coming out tonight and discussed by Judge Napolitano is not only was Manafort investigated for all of these crimes by the FBI/DOJ, and not only did the DOJ decline to prosecute, Rod Rosenstein actually was the prosecutor who not only declined prosecution, he signed off on the exoneration letter for Manafort.

Now more than a decade later Rosenstein authorizes Mueller to go after Manafort for crimes he himself already cleared him of.

In Jun 2018, a website called News Punch reported:

A Democrat judge who put Paul Manafort in jail this week previously cleared Hillary Clinton of all criminal wrongdoing over the deaths of four American servicemen in Benghazi in 2012. 

Amy Berman Jackson, a past Bill Clinton donor and federal judge, threw out a lawsuit against Hillary Clinton filed by Sean Smith’s mother Patricia Smith and Tyrone Woods’ father Charles Woods. The lawsuit claimed that Hillary Clinton revealing the location of Ambassador Stevens on her non-secure private email server prior to Stevens’ murder put their dead children in harm’s way.

Politico reported in 2017: “Jackson dismissed the wrongful death portion of the suit on technical grounds after granting the State Department’s motion to step in as the defendant on those claims. The Obama-appointed judge concluded Clinton used her email in the course of her official duties.”

Paul Manafort may or may not be the biggest sleaze in the country. However, he does not belong in Rikers Island for the crimes he may have committed. He is being sent there because he was part of President Trump’s campaign for a short period of time. The political left is hoping that he will die in prison. That is frightening.,

If this doesn’t bother you, think about the future. Do you want to live in a country where working on a political campaign that is not in line with the powers that be will put you in jail for crimes you were already cleared of? America right now is a relatively free country, but if we keep electing the type of people who use the justice system for the purpose of settling personal vendettas, we will no longer be free.