An Update on the Legal Jeopardy of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump –
Sunday Reader –
By Glynn Wilson –
Now that the nation is finally beginning to turn the corner on the coronavirus pandemic and on this first day of spring begin to reemerge from the economic downturn caused by it, there is a question worth pondering for the future of American democracy here. What will it take for the people and the institutions of this country to move beyond Trump’s brand of crazy fascism?
That’s what it was and has nothing to do with partisanship.
If there’s any truth to the saying that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” today may be the day to ask the worthy question: Where are we on the arc and which way is it bending?
As it turns out there’s some breaking news on this point involving legal cases against Donald Trump himself and his former tea party firebrand “Sloppy” Steve Bannon, who you may recall we took on as a nemesis back in 2017 down in Alabama and beat him like a drum.
Steve Bannon of Breitbart News speaks on behalf of Judge Roy Moore at Oak Hollow Farm in Fairhope , Alabama, with one week to go in U.S Senate race, Dec. 5, 2017: Photo by Glynn Wilson
Fighting against fascism and for democracy is a critical role of the press in this country, a right guaranteed by the First Amendment, and it has nothing to do with simply taking sides or reporting “both sides” in the politically partisan wars of street level politics whether or not the mainstream media is willing to admit that in the pages of newspapers or on radio or television. They can play their pretentious “fair and balanced” games to maximize profits and fool the people into believing they are “objective.” We perfect the term by simply telling it like it is and letting the chips fall where they may.
This is not a dance you can succeed at by living in fear. You may not make a fortune at it because the corporations will not support it. That will be up to “the people.”
Bannon Back in the News
It seems the arc of the universe is turning towards justice and about to spin out against Donald Trump and Bannon.
Bannon was back in the legal news this week fighting to get his federal fraud case formally dismissed for pocketing a million bucks from a fake fund raising scam and allegedly defrauding supporters in the name of augmenting Trump’s signature campaign promise of building a wall on the southern border.
Trump pardoned him in the federal case against him right before leaving office — before Bannon could ever be tried and convicted or exonerated for any crime. He had pleaded not guilty.
Of course his president who he helped get elected with fake news and key words and phrases on television and on social media in 2016 — as his campaign manager in the final months — had promised the country and his followers that Mexico would pay for the wall. Of course that never happened. Instead, Trump moved federal money around and away from the Pentagon to pay for some segments of a wall, all the while brutally separating children from their families and locking them up in harsh detention centers.
Bannon and his cohorts, who are still under indictment and could face charges in a courthouse soon, did make a show of paying for a few pieces of a portion of a wall. But according to federal prosecutors, they pocketed most of the money.
In a bit of an unusual legal twist, federal prosecutors now in the Biden administration’s Department of Justice are not objecting technically to dropping Bannon from the case and releasing him from his bail. But since state charges are not subject to the orders of a federal pardon and Bannon was never actually tried for any crimes, U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss and his legal team are objecting to releasing Bannon completely from the indictment itself.
In a letter filed in federal court in New York, in response to Bannon’s attorney’s motion to dismiss his case, the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan says the government has no objection to the clerk of the court administratively terminating Bannon from the case “on the basis of the docketing of the pardon” and “has no objection to the court entering an order exonerating Bannon’s bail.”
“However, the government respectfully submits that the pardon granted to Bannon is not a basis to dismiss the indictment against him,” prosecutors argue, since a pardon “is an executive action that mitigates or sets aside punishment for a crime” and Bannon has not yet been tried for any crime.
“But the granting of a pardon,” in cases where a defendant has been convicted, “is in no sense an overturning of a judgment of conviction by some other tribunal,” prosecutors argue in the letter, such as a state court.
And for the same reason, “because a pardon does not blot out guilt or expunge a judgment of conviction … a pardon does not blot out probable cause of guilt or expunge an indictment.” A presidential pardon is not a basis for expungement of charges, in other words, and a pardon “involves forgiveness, not forgetfulness.”
“The fact that Bannon was pardoned does not extinguish the fact that a grand jury found probable cause to believe that he committed the offenses set forth in the indictment, nor does it undercut the evidence of his involvement therein which the government expects to elicit as part of its presentation at trial. Were the court to dismiss the indictment against Bannon, it could have a broader effect than the pardon itself, among other things potentially relieving Bannon of certain consequences not covered by the pardon.”
Background
Bannon helped orchestrate Trump’s 2016 election victory in the final months as his campaign manager and then served briefly as a White House adviser before being fired by Trump and banished to Eastern Europe for roping Trump into endorsing pedophile Judge Roy Moore in the U.S. Senate race against Democrat Doug Jones in Alabama, a race he lost in such an embarrassment to Trump and his sponsors at Breitbart News, Robert and Rebecca Mercer, that they also fired him.
Related: Trump Campaigns for Roy Moore in Pensacola?
Discredited former judge Roy Moore.
Back in November, 2017, we broke the story about Moore being banned from the Gadsden Mall after The Washington Post #MeToo investigative team revealed the first sexual allegations against Moore. The New American Journal was featured as a screen shot on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on CBS after The New Yorker picked up our story on Twitter and reported it out.
Related: The Final Breach of Judge Roy Moore is At Hand
Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows, but Jesus. Not this.
Doug Jones Wins Historic Senate Election Over Defiant Judge Roy Moore
Bannon rumbled around in Eastern Europe after that for a time trying to find right-wing nationalist dictators to support, only returning to Washington early last year just in time to set up a war room to battle against Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate.
Related: Jump on the Truth Opportunity Bus to Counter Steve Bannon’s Trump Impeachment War Room
Legalities
In a letter dated Feb. 25, just made public Thursday, Bannon’s attorney Robert Costello asked U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres to drop the case against him because of the pardon.
To support this position, Costello cited the post-pardon dismissals of Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser accused of lying to the F.B.I. and Congress about his contacts with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign, and rapper Lil’ Wayne, who faced gun charges in Florida.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan is preparing for a trial against three of Bannon’s co-defendants in the border wall fundraising scam, including organization founder and Air Force veteran Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea, who are still expected to stand trial. They all pleaded not guilty.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office began its own investigation of the scam so Bannon and the others could face state fraud charges, which are not subject to dismissal by a presidential pardon at the federal level.
A response to Bannon’s motion to dismiss the charges is expected in a couple of weeks, although it’s unclear when the judge will rule in the case.
Costello argued that the U.S. attorney’s office is already treating the case as if Bannon were no longer part of it, although prosecutors reminded Costello of his obligation not to destroy evidence still subject to discovery.
In the case of Michael Flynn, the federal judge had no choice but to drop the charges because Trump issued a clemency order. The federal court in Florida dismissed a gun case against rapper Lil’ Wayne, whose real name is Dwayne Carter, after Trump pardoned him for unknown reasons.
Trump Faces Multiple Lawsuits and Charges
Meanwhile, state prosecutors in New York are sifting through millions of pages of Trump’s tax records — which a judge recently ruled he must turn over — and considering filing charges for tax fraud and campaign finance violations. The state attorney general in New York has issued subpoenas to Trump’s lawyers, bankers, his chief financial officer and one of his sons.
Trump is also facing criminal investigations in Georgia and the District of Columbia related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and he is faced with having to defend himself in at least 29 cases pending against him, including some seeking damages for his actions on Jan. 6 when he incited an insurrection in Washington that resulted in a violent breach of the U.S. Capitol building.
No charges have been filed yet in any of these cases, and the outcomes remain uncertain, yet Trump has managed to raise more than $31 million for his post-presidential political action committee, which he could tap to pay legal fees, according to The Washington Post.
“But the sheer volume of these legal problems indicates that — after a moment of maximum invincibility in the White House — Trump has fallen to a point of historic vulnerability before the law. He has lost the formal immunities of the presidency and the legal firepower of the Justice Department, but he is also without some of the informal shields that protected him even before he was president: his reputation for endless wealth and his clout as a political donor in New York.
“Now, prosecutors roam free in his financial records. New lawsuits keep arriving,” the story continues. “Some of his key lawyers have quit. A man who once used the law to swamp his enemies, overwhelming them with claims and legal bills, is finding himself on the other side of the wave, unable to control what comes next.”
Related: House Impeachment Manager Sues Trump In Federal Court for Inciting Capitol Insurrection
Mississippi Congressman and NAACP Sue Trump and Giuliani for Inciting Violent Capitol Insurrection
The Arc of the Moral Universe
The arc of the moral universe quote is one that Dr. Martin Luther King used many times, including during the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. He was answering the question: How long will it take to see social justice? President Barack Obama picked it up as one of his favorite quotes too.
“How long? Not long because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. How long? Not long,” King said on more than one occasion.
But how long is not long? Dr. King has been dead for 53 years, assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968.
He borrowed the quote and philosophy from a sermon by Theodore Parker delivered in 1853. He was involved in the 19th century anti-slavery movement. King used it in the 20th-century civil rights struggle, “one of the great social movements in American history,” according to interviews with a historian once on NPR.
“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe,” Parker said. “The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”
In American democracy, especially in the justice system, we have long operated under the assumptions that truth will come out in the end, and that justice will ultimately prevail.
But the events of the past two centuries, and especially the past four years, have challenged these assumptions. Truth and justice have been on the run — although just enough people got involved in the 2020 election and worked altruistically together to save American democracy from total destruction.
If the vigilance can be maintained — and we can continue to find the support we need to build a better press online and get the word out on social media — then we might be able to keep bending the arc of the moral universe in the right direction and a little more towards justice every day.
But there are still dark forces at work who would undermine this progress — for their own greedy economic interests and selfish political ends.
We may sound like a broken record on this point, but we continue to believe it is important to put this out there for more and more people to see, consider and come to understand. We realize that it takes the ability to engage in abstract thinking to get this message. But if more people would help us get it out there over time, this fundamental message that is critical to human evolution and survival on planet Earth could reach enough of an audience to turn the tide.
“Everyone must decide whether they will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.” – MLK
If that means helping good guys in one party beat bad guys who happen to be in another party, so be it. If you happen to be one of those bad guys in the other party, look out.
Don’t forget what Robert Penn Warren once wrote in the classic Southern political novel All The King’s Men.
“Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.”
If you never read it or forget, that was The Boss (Huey Long) telling Jack Burden (the reporter turned campaign aide) to investigate the judge, come hell or high water. It did not go well in the end.
But the arc of the moral universe did bend towards justice in a mind-bending way. It’s not clear that’s always the case. Surely it takes vigilance to make it so — and maybe the bludgeon of a free press to bring the truth to light.
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Excellent reporting! Great points. Media must change. We must all remain vigilant to preservation of democracy and the American way of life, broken as it may be!
Thanks for saying so. Not sure the MSM will change any. They are already out to prove they are fair and balanced by going after Biden before his 100 day honeymoon is up. Give this government a chance to get on its feet and fix and change some things, like what just happened at EPA. Nobody else even bothered to cover that. For the past week it’s been all about the shootings in Atlanta. That’s all anyone else is talking about.
Far too long the mass media has enabled the vulture capitalistic, colonialist policies of the government-during the Vietnam era, they were the lap dogs of both Republicans and Democrats demonizing honest dissent as “traitors”-just look at what happened to patriots as Daniel Ellsberg. Sadly, it took the Trump administration and fascist Fox “news” to uncloud the eyes of many. But I don’t think we have learned as many stories that should be reported just aren’t and those that should never see the light of day are still “headliners.” For real news, we now YouTube “France 24”-how tragic is that!
Well, there is the New American Journal, LOL 😎