Over at the Cato institute [1] we find:
HARVEY SILVERGLATE: An average, busy professional gets up in the morning, gets the kids to school, goes to work, uses the telephone or e-mail, has meetings, works on a prospectus or bank loan, goes home, puts the kids to bed, has dinner, reads the newspaper, goes to sleep, and has no idea that, in the course of that day, he or she has very likely committed three felonies. Three felonies that some ambitious, creative prosecutor can pick out from that day’s activities and put into an indictment.
In his foreword to my book, Alan Dershowitz discusses his time litigating cases in the old Soviet Union. He was always taken by the fact that they could prosecute anybody they wanted because some of the statutes were so vague. Dershowitz points out that this was a technique developed by Beria, the infamous sidekick of Stalin, who said, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” That really is something that has survived the Soviet Union and has arrived in the good old USA. “Show me the man,” says any federal prosecutor, “and I can show you the crime.” This is not an exaggeration.
Silvergate is of course talking about crime in general, and the way prosecutors today can jail you on a whim because our laws are so vague and yet complex.
In listening to the Democrats talking about the new round [2] of investigations they’re putting up against the president, I can’t help but think of Beria, and his tactics.
Limbaugh on his show today:
Jerry Nadler says, “We have to get the facts. We’ll see where the facts lead. Maybe that will lead to impeachment; maybe it won’t.” Wait a minute. If there aren’t any facts, then why are you doing this? Just like with Mueller. He wasn’t given a crime, and so this special counsel investigation became a counterintelligence investigation, and counterintelligence investigations do not seek out crimes, which is why this whole thing has been a gigantic hoax. But when did it start that just because you don’t like somebody, you can begin mass subpoena requests to “get the facts”?
Nadler
After all of this — after everything that’s gone on the past two, 2-1/2 years — Nadler admits he doesn’t have the facts? They are so ticked off that Mueller apparently hasn’t come up with anything that they’re now saying, “Well, Mueller’s scope was much narrower than ours.” In one sense, that’s true. But Mueller’s investigation would have a little bit more leeway than theirs will, except (sigh) 81 — and he’s just getting started. He’s promising to go after Ivanka down the road and others.
But this is crazy. We’ve gone through two years of investigation, and a campaign where everybody and their brother was out to find dirt on Donald Trump — and all they came up with was that Access Hollywood tape. Two years, folks, and there’s nothing. They haven’t found a thing on Donald Trump, and they’re gonna keep looking, precisely because they don’t have anything? This is not the way things happen in a representative republic or a democracy. This is not at all… You at least have to have some indication that wrongdoing has taken place before you start pursuing it.
Indeed… We used to have a presumption of innocence. But here, we have somebody sworn to uphold the Constitution searching for a crime for which there is no evidence whatsoever. So much for the presumption of innocence.
I will point out to you that every single Republican president since Eisenhower has had to put up with attempts to remove them from office yes, all of them, every one of them started by Democrats.
So go ahead and tell me about how this is not a purely political vendetta.
My friends, I consider it no accident that the tactics being used by the Democrats here in the US are so very similar to what was used in Stalin’s time in the Soviet Union. I can’t help but believe that somewhere, Beria is smiling.
Related [3]