New scandal for Donald Trump and Bill Barr
In the seven months since Donald Trump has been out of office, we’ve continued to learn about the countless atrocities and effronteries he committed as America’s purported leader. While some new information has been surprising, other revelations confirm disturbing developments that we intuitively knew were happening.
One such revelation just surfaced thanks to a report issued Wednesday by the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), entitled “Struggle For Power: The Ongoing Persecution of Black Movement By The U.S. Government.” The findings reveal that the Department of Justice (DOJ) under former Attorney General Bill Barr and Trump intentionally targeted Black Lives Matter protesters with prosecutions to disrupt the movement.
After studying 326 protest-related criminal cases filed in 2020 by federal prosecutors in the wake of George Floyd’s depraved murder, M4BL concluded that there was an enormous use of “top-down directives” that led to the “unprecedented federalization” of such cases. The Trump-Barr DOJ’s directives “painted an image of protestors as ‘violent radicals’” while claiming state and local law enforcement could not do their job in light of such a “‘violent assault.’”
The Trump-Barr DOJ even asserted federal jurisdiction in cases where no federal interest existed. The report found that similar state charges could have been brought against protestors in 92.6% of cases. Moreover, in 88% of those cases, the federal charges offered stricter punishments than their state counterparts.
The report goes on to list even more sneaky ways in which the Trump-Barr DOJ, fueled by brazen corruption and ugly racism, “stretched its authority beyond the customary assertions of federal jurisdiction in the name of disruption, justified legally after the fact.” It’s now clear that the Trump-Barr DOJ did all it could last year to deter decent people from standing up for racial justice and police accountability. In other words, Trump and Barr are the over-the-top shameless bigots we always knew them to be.
Ron Leshnower is a lawyer and the author of several books, including President Trump’s Month