Something is seriously wrong with our legal system.
If a felon is charged in court with a new crime, his or her record is certainly an issue. Previous illegal behavior is a factor in the kinds of evidence entered and in the outcome of the new trial. A defendant’s history matters (as it should). He or she could be a three-time loser and go away for life.
But in civil cases, court history means little or nothing.
The President was involved in about 4,000 lawsuits related to 100 different businesses and was even found civilly liable for sexual assault. About half of the suits were him suing someone and half were him being sued.
Now any judge seeing the President’s 4001st law case should be extremely wary of the quality of the case. Historically, the chances of bringing nuisance or frivolous suits to punish someone who did not give him what he demanded are high. The chances that he did not pay investors or workers, or used bankruptcy laws to fraudulently avoid paying his bills are also high.
Yet the courts seemed to view him as if he were a newborn baby and completely innocent. How was this possible? Only a thoroughly corrupt system could explain this.
In fact, in a rational and just world, having brought many frivolous cases and using the justice system to manipulate and threaten weaker parties in a variety of courts should be a red flag. But it is not.
One explanation: The legal world is part of a deeply entrenched oligarchy that protects wealth and power and allows them to harass those they dislike and cheat those who cannot afford to fight back.
The attorneys serve the wealthy, who use the courts as a battleground. In the President’s case, he seeks to manipulate and threaten anyone who stands in the way of his ambitious goals.
The threat: “I’ll sue.”
If you are not wealthy, you can be sued and easily lose, because you cannot afford a high-powered attorney. If you are wealthy, you can threaten to sue anyone for the most absurd reasons and there seems to be little downside to dropping the suit when you lose interest, or if you are forced to pay court costs, or if there is a (rare) threat of censure by the judge.
There are also endless appeals, where you can keep the case going and a defendant on the hook for years until he or she goes bankrupt.
The President is able to do most of what he wants using legally questionable and sometimes obviously unconstitutional Executive Orders while appeals stretch on for months and years. The legal system thus passively sanctions a host of illegal presidential actions by stretching out the appeals process making the law appear to be badly dysfunctional and often powerless.
Fines for frivolous suits are rare and easily paid by the wealthy. Perjury charges are also rarely brought, which means clever liars are everywhere in the system and usually go unpunished.
One wonders if the current crop of right-wing legislators learned how to lie and expect or ignore lies by those in their party by first working as attorneys in a justice system where lying is endemic.
It has been a great shock to watch how virtually none of these “loyal” right-wing legislators criticized lies or misleading statements by the President that reached almost 4.000 in a single month (November 2020) according to a substack article.
How is it possible that any political party could support (or not object to) its member’s tendency to lie repeatably and to accept its leadership telling literally thousands of lies?
The glacial pace of the courts allows guilty defendants to avoid punishment for years and sometimes forever.
And look at the string of lying lawyers that were perpetually on Fox News repeatedly claiming the election was stolen. Did Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and John Eastman even consider being held accountable for corrupting the Presidential election process and misinforming tens of millions?
As far as I could see, they all believed that a dysfunctional legal system would fail to punish them either by disbarment or convicting them of crimes. In some ways, they were correct. Amazingly, though some were eventually disbarred, the President pardoned them and seventy-seven others for crimes related to trying to overturn the 2020 election. However, this pardon only applies to federal crimes and not state ones.
It seems to me that the legal profession had become so degraded and the courts so timid that these attorneys were enabled and willing to take the risk for their illegal behavior, assuming they would not be held to account.
The process of disbarment took years for Eastman, with numerous appeals filed and rejected. In 2024, lawyers Sidney Powell, Lin Wood and five others appealed to the Supreme Court to overture legal sanctions put in place at the state level and failed. They were fined $150,000 and referred to their state bar associations for punishment. Giuliani was also disbarred in New York.
But Sidney Powell was not disbarred in Texas after a protracted legal fight although she pleaded guilty to five misdemeanors brought by the Fulton County district attorney for the election subversion plots in Georgia.
But I know of no one who went to jail for a huge presidentially orchestrated conspiracy and one of the most extreme crimes of election fraud perpetrated against the United States and its voters in history.
Does that sound like justice to anyone?
There may be a reason. Basically, the system was created for the wealthy by the wealthy, and judges and attorneys know it. They both have full job security in a terribly litigious world if they do not rule too harshly against the wealthy.
The President is a poster boy for a slow, bureaucratic, expensive system of “justice” with its arcane rules that are easily manipulated by the wealthy and those with contempt for the rule of law.
If the system was even a little less dysfunctional, the President would have been relieved of his wealth by large fines and put behind bars long ago.
But alas, he turned the system to his advantage time after time, and dodged accountability to become the most powerful person in the world.
He continues to use the system and now has the entire Justice Department along with numerous compliant “volunteer” laws firms to back up and finance his lawsuits. The system he manipulated will now be effective in increasing his power by defending often illegal or unconstitutional Executive Orders which will be affirmed by partisan judges who were appointed by him.
The current Supreme Court makes the term “judicial independence” seem like a bad joke.
If the democratic system fails utterly, it will be the courts and their complex, self-serving rules and snail-paced processes that are largely responsible for letting a criminal (34 felony counts but without a shread of punishment) evade justice for his entire life.
But there is much blame to go around. All the shady attorneys who worked for the President over the years and looked the other way or aided him as he lied and manipulated the system are partly to blame. All the judges that let him off with a warning or failed to disbar or censure his attorneys when they broke ethics rules have some responsibility.
All the New York, Florida, and other state and federal district attorneys who knew of his crimes and malfeasance but declined to charge him over the years (as Letitia James finally did to her great credit) are also partly to blame.
All the right-wing legislators (most of them attorneys) who care so little about the Constitution that they swore to uphold who sought power for their wealthy donors as they failed to vote for the President’s impeachment are also to blame There may be a special place in hell reserved for them as they sold their souls to the Republican Party and their wealthy sponsors.
And for the Coup de grace, we have the most hapless and pathetic attorney general in the Biden administration, Merrick Garland. This slow-motion foot- dragger managed to stretch the investigation into the President’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election over four years making it worthless, and impossible to any get justice.
Sometimes it is not corruption that allows evil to flourish. It is timidity, fear, and following the rules so closely that the goal of justice gets lost in a forest of details and concerns about some ideal world of “fairness.” Garland was frightened to death of the President’s false claims of being picked on by partisan enemies in government, including those in the Justice Department.
His fear of being drawn into politics made him hypersensitive to the President’s false criticisms.
His reaction was not fight or flight but “freeze.” He was swamped by politics in his effort to avoid them, and the slow-motion result was justice delayed and therefore justice denied.
He led us to the mess we have today, where the Justice Department is a weapon wielded by a thoroughly corrupt president. I think his defense that he was an institutionalist, and that he played by the rules, will not excuse the disaster that followed him which his administration of justice allowed to happen.
History will judge yet another former judge and attorney harshly.
