June 17, 2025
Dear Friends and Family,
As an introduction to this segment, I am going to use an excerpt from the inside flap of Matthew Whitaker’s book Above the Law.
Matthew Whitaker came to Washington to serve as chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and following Session’s resignations, he was appointed Acting Attorney General of the United States. Whitaker was devoted to the ideals of public service and the rule of law. But what he found when he led the Department of Justice on behalf of President Trump were bureaucratic elites with an agenda all their own.
The Department of Justice had been steered off course by a Deep State made up of Washington insiders who saw themselves as above the law. Recklessly inverting, bending, and breaking the law to achieve their own political goals, they relentlessly undermined the Constitution by flaunting the rightful authority of a President they despised. Whitaker was an outsider with a desire to see justice done and democracy work. In his new book he provides a stunning account of what he found in the swamp that is Washington. He reveals:
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
As an introduction to this segment, I am going to use an excerpt from the inside flap of Matthew Whitaker’s book Above the Law.
Matthew Whitaker came to Washington to serve as chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and following Session’s resignations, he was appointed Acting Attorney General of the United States. Whitaker was devoted to the ideals of public service and the rule of law. But what he found when he led the Department of Justice on behalf of President Trump were bureaucratic elites with an agenda all their own.
The Department of Justice had been steered off course by a Deep State made up of Washington insiders who saw themselves as above the law. Recklessly inverting, bending, and breaking the law to achieve their own political goals, they relentlessly undermined the Constitution by flaunting the rightful authority of a President they despised. Whitaker was an outsider with a desire to see justice done and democracy work. In his new book he provides a stunning account of what he found in the swamp that is Washington. He reveals:
- How former FBI Director James Comey and top figures in the Justice Department openly worked against President Trump.
- The Deep State relies on the complicity of the mainstream media to achieve its ends.
- The Deep State – drawing on elite universities and corporate law firms – perpetuates itself, keeping a small clique of people in power to ensure that nothing ever changes.
- How Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged Russian collusion quickly concluded there was no evidence of wrongdoing by the President but nevertheless produced a massive report that was intended as an act of political subversion.
Happy Learning,
Harley
THE GOVERNMENT OF THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH – Segment 14
THE DEEP STATE in the DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE – EXCERPTS
ABUSE OF POWER: Every American, regardless of personal politics, should be concerned by what I saw happen to President Donald Trump inside the Department of Justice between 2017 and 2019. No one – no private citizen, no public figure, not even an accused criminal (and I’ve prosecuted thousands) – should be subjected to such an arrogant abuse of power by federal law enforcement leaders and bureaucrats. The American people and all honest public servants deserve better. Top officials at the Department of Justice (DOJ) felt so strongly that Donald Trump’s election in 2016 was unacceptable that they decided that they could put themselves above the law and above the Constitution. They overturned bedrock standards of American justice, flouted normal prosecutorial procedures, violated federal rules and policies, and even committed crimes.
Department of Justice officials like former FBI Director James Comey appear to have openly meddled in the 2016 election. They spied on American citizens without proper justification and revealed investigative details about presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as though the Justice Department was tasked with voter education instead of charging and prosecuting criminals. After the election, Comey and his colleagues at the Justice Department continued their extracurricular activities – this time to convince voters the man they elected President was “morally unfit” and ought to be removed from office. The appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team, whose behavior was totally above the law, was meant to ensure Trump’s impeachment.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who was appointed by President Obama in 2012, found “the implication that senior FBI employees would be willing to take official action to impact a presidential candidate’s electoral prospects to be deeply troubling and antithetical to the core values of the FBI and DOJ.” Horwitz’s August 2019 report blasted former FBI Director Comey for setting a “dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees – and the many thousands more former FBI employees” with access to classified information. The report concluded that “Comey’s retention, handling, and dissemination of certain memos violated DOJ and FBI policies, and his FBI Employment Agreement. These violations were made in order to bring direct political harm to the President of the United States. What I saw happen inside the DOJ, and what is now documented record, should never happen to another President again. There’s no doubt that Russia tried to influence the 2016 presidential election. That’s business as usual for the Kremlin. But the political meddling within our own government, within the DOJ, and within the intelligence community poses a far greater threat to Americans than any Russian internet troll farm. Without the rule of law, without respect for the Constitution, without honest administration in the DOJ, we don’t have a republic.
What bothered me the most were those members of the executive branch who put their own interests above those of the President and sought to subvert him and subvert the rule of law. These people, who attended some of the nation’s best schools, were so blinded by arrogance that they either didn’t see or didn’t care about their own hypocrisy in abandoning legal and constitutional norms in order to undercut a President they found offensive. Personally, I am offended by a Washington swamp that provides cover for the unethical and potentially illegal actions of a few bureaucratic elites.
Arrogant disregard for the executive branch is already the hallmark of the Southern District of New York, or the “Sovereign district,” as other U.S. Attorneys refer to New York City’s seat of federal judicial power, which dreamed up new ways to torment President Trump throughout my tenure at the DOJ. As long as the Special Counsel regulation remains on the books, I am convinced that people like James Comey, Andy McCabe, and then – CIA Director John Brennan, people who know how to manipulate the system, will do so to achieve their own political ends.
DOUBLE STANDARDS: Of course, everyone should be held to the same standard, and government departments need to follow their legally defined roles and procedures very carefully. But, as longtime professional staff of the Justice Department privately acknowledged to me, the arrogance characteristic of the Obama administration, personified by his first Attorney General Eric Holder, created an above-the-law culture inside the DOJ. Senior officials began to flout the rules and were not held accountable if it served the ends of the administration. Leaking to the media became rampant. Politics seeped into everything. As is usually the case, the problem started at the top: Attorney General Eric Holder felt the rules didn’t apply to him because he was President Obama’s “wingman” with a mission greater than following regular order at the Justice Department.
The Obama administration refused to prosecute crimes that the administration committed. When the Inspector General for the Obama Treasury Department reported in 2013 that, as summarized by CNN, “the Internal Revenue Service deliberately targeted some conservative groups applying for federal tax-exempt states, delayed processing their applications, and requested unnecessary information.” Holder’s Justice Department declined to prosecute anyone, not even for obstruction of justice after former IRS Commissioner Lois Lerner’s official emails went “missing” while under investigation (just as Hillary Clinton’s would three years later while she was under FBI investigation).
Washington’s double standards go beyond hypocrisy; they can corrupt the rule of law, with Republicans sent to jail, and Democrats let off scot-free with media providing their cover. President Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn allegedly lied when he told the FBI he had had no contact with Russian Ambassador Kislyak during the transition between administrations. Incoming President Trump expressed his hope that then-FBI director Jim Comey could “let this go,” and the DOJ investigated the request as an attempt to obstruct justice. As of this writing Flynn could face incarceration. It is concerning that Andy McCabe won’t be charged for lying to the FBI and Jim Comey won’t be punished for leaking.
PRESUMPTION OF GUILT: The Mueller Investigation: No one affiliated with the Trump campaign was charged with colluding with the Russians, despite the presumption of guilt by nonstop media scrutiny and investigation by the Justice Department. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team did everything they could to cast a shadow of guilt over President Trump though they had no evidence that he was guilty of anything. It is not a prosecutor’s job to “exonerate” anyone. It is a prosecutor’s job to determine whether there is sufficient evidence of a crime to make a legal case and therefore pursue charges. The Mueller team found no evidence but maintained a presumption, shared by the Deep State and the Resistance, that Trump had to be guilty of something simply because they hated him and thought he shouldn’t be President. The presumption of innocence is a bedrock Anglo-American legal principle dating back to the Middle Ages. But we can’t take that legal principle for granted. It’s not only totalitarian regimes that conduct investigations or hearings with a presumption of guilt. It can happen whenever partisan passions overwhelm respect for the rule of law.
Burisma: Biden’s comments at a Council of Foreign Relations event in Washington, D.C., where he bragged about getting Ukraine’s Prosecutor General fired were notorious. As BuzzFeed reported, “Even those who worked closely with Joe Biden cringed when he said those words.” The story continued.
Recounting a trip to Kyiv in late 2015, Biden described telling the then-president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, that he had to fire the prosecutor general who was investigating Burisma, or the U.S. would not release $1 billion in loan guarantees. “I looked at them and said, “I’m leaving in six hours,” Biden told the crowd, taking a long look at his watch for effect. “If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch.” Here the audience laughed. “He got fired.”
Most U.S. media asserted there was no connection between Joe Biden’s wanting the prosecutor fired and his son’s $50,000-a-month job as a board member of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma which was under investigation. But if you were Donald Trump, and the FBI has spied on your campaign, withheld briefings on potential Russian threats to your campaign, and doctored emails to obtain court permission to wiretap your campaign advisor, and you discovered that the intelligence community had been out to get you from day one, wouldn’t you want your administration to review these things?
The Perfect Phone Call: When it comes to the Democrats and their assertion that President Trump’s phone call with President Zelensky of Ukraine amounted to an impeachable offense, they had no actual evidence to back up their articles of impeachment. There is no evidence that he committed any crime.
In Sum: Very quickly, I learned that if you are a political appointee in President Trump’s administration, the media and congressional Democrats, among others, immediately presume you must be guilty of something and will stop at nothing to tear you down. If you are a “career official,” on the other hand, with no evidence of support for the President, then you are regarded as someone free of malice, a modestly paid civil servant toiling with the nation’s best intentions at heart. In the press, “career official” is practically a synonym for “innocent,” even, or especially, if that career official is revealed to be part of the “Resistance.”
THE SOVEREIGN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK: In the December 7, 2018, memorandum filed in federal court, the Southern District of New York’s Attorneys suggested that their boss, the President, was an unindicted co-conspirator with Michael Cohen, his former personal attorney, who had pleaded guilty in court ten days earlier to charges of tax evasion, making false statements to financial institutions, and, as the Southern District coyly revealed on its website, “to making unlawful, excessive contributions to the 2016 presidential campaign in the form of payments to two women to secure their silence regarding the then-presidential candidate in order to prevent those stories from influencing the election.
This toxic narrative – that the Southern District of New York was ready to indict the President would be investigating his family members and businesses – circulated in the media the entire winter. But not only were there no official charges to answer, there was no evidence for the President’s personal lawyers to examine – because from February until July 2019, the Southern District of New York fought the public’s First Amendment and common law rights to read the warrants used to search Michael Cohen’s business and hotel. Finally, on July 17, U.S. District Court Judge William Pauley ordered the Southern District of New York to file a status report and release the requested documents on the public docket by the next day. The result of that court order: the whole world learned that the Southern District of New York had closed the case, and no charges against the President or anyone else would be forthcoming. What an extraordinary smear tactic – and what an extraordinary abuse of power: misusing the authority of the Justice Department in an attempt to cause political damage to the President of the United States.
THE MUELLER INVESTIGATION: William Barr was confirmed as the Attorney General on February 14. On March 5 when he learned what the Special Counsel’s office had in store, he came up with the perfect strategy. On March 24, Barr sent to Congress his four-page summary of the 448-page report’s “principal conclusions.” The Special Counsel had found no evidence of criminal activity by President Trump or his campaign. Barr brought the Special Counsel investigation back to the legal facts. Mueller’s response to Barr verges on the hysterical. This letter was an attempt by Robert Mueller and his team to spin their own report – the legal substance of which Attorney General Barr had accurately summarized in four pages. What Barr hadn’t done – and what the Mueller team wanted to do – was go beyond the law and assert that even though they had no evidence of criminal activity, they could not exonerate the President of wrong-doing (as if it is a prosecutor’s job to exonerate anyone). The report (and Mueller’s letter) exposed the whole of the Special Counsel investigation: it was a political act against the President, not a disinterested legal investigation.
CRIMINALIZING THE POLITICAL: The Constitution allows a Speaker like Nancy Pelosi to choose to impeach a President for almost anything, whether it’s a crime (like bribery) or not (like abuse of power). A simple House majority could impeach a President for cursing, using a plastic straw, or authorizing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and call it “abuse of power.” But previous House Speakers did not lower the bar. The House Democrats’ votes for impeaching Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress … were unprecedented in that they were not based on a crime. The prior two impeachments, President Johnson in 1868 and President Clinton in 1998, both included criminal charges, violating a federal statute and perjury, respectively. Pelosi’s House Democrats essentially impeached President Trump for his hardball personality and politics.
I am gravely concerned that “the Resistance,” including some high-ranking leaders at the Justice Department, have set a new standard of criminalizing political actions and beliefs with which they disagree. It troubles me that Justice Department resisters quietly slipped into the ranks of congressional impeachers. If the law writers in Congress and the law enforcers in the Justice Department are going to conspire against politicians they don’t like, honest people offering themselves up for public service don’t stand a chance. Only those approved by the Washington establishment and bureaucratic elites will govern us if impeachment becomes the new normal. Had Speaker Pelosi put actual crimes before the House for a vote, she would have failed. So, House Democrats did what Robert Mueller’s team did: they blurred the distinction between the criminal and the political.
THE DEEP STATE IS ALIVE AND WELL: What I encountered inside the Department of Justice was government bureaucrats inflating their importance and presumed authority. Certainly, anyone following the 2019 impeachment proceedings against President Trump saw unelected experts serving in government appear convinced that they, rather than the elected President of the United States with whom they happened to disagree, should determine the country’s foreign or military policy.
Longtime career civil servants can easily get it into their heads that they, the “experts,” need to protect the American people from their populist ignorance and from the policies of a President whom they “experts” deem unsavory. The mentality is that an executive branch agency’s work “should never be political” coupled with admiration for bureaucrats who ignore their elected boss. Political is synonymous with accountability to the people, but defenders of the Deep State fail to realize that.
Trump’s opponents have gone to dangerous and extreme lengths to prevent him from acting on his mandate and his agenda. Impeachment was the natural conclusion of the Democrats’ and the Deep State’s effort to delegitimize an election they never accepted. Now that the somber process of has been so cheapened by Jerry Nadler, Adam Schiff, and Chuck Schumer, will it be readily weaponized against the next “unacceptable” administration by partisan opponents in Congress, fueled by Special Counsel investigations and a Justice Department whose leaders hold themselves above the law?
This cannot be the new normal. Realizing that it protects us from the tyranny of kings and unduly empowered bureaucracies, we need to appreciate the elegance of the Framer’s architecture. Both monarchies and oligarchies are unresponsive to the will of voters. Americans should reject both. My fervent wish as a battle-scarred veteran of the Justice Department who served two tours and reentered the private sector each time, is that people like myself, who have not carefully curated their entire professional lives for sainthood or stardom, but who care deeply about serving our country, get into politics despite the very real risks to our personal reputations.
Washington, unfortunately, is home to many careerists who have little private sector experience and little tolerance for those who think outside the box (and differently from them). Some have held an elected office for so long that they can’t remember how to earn a living any other way. Some are in civil servant positions, going with the flow for the promise of a pension one day and a good salary in the here and now. There is a frightening degree of groupthink in Washington, D.C., and frankly, bigotry against outsiders. We need a free-flowing exchange of ideas and policy experiments in this country, balanced and checked by the Constitution – not a permanent standing bureaucratic class.
Source: Above the Law by Matthew Whitaker (2020).
WHEN POLITICS OBSTRUCTS JUSTICE: Under President Biden, the Justice Department targeted parents who are pushing back against programs to teach their children vile and hateful critical race theory. The DOJ justified its threatening campaign against parents in a memo that labelled these law-abiding citizens as “domestic terrorists.” I literally used to prosecute actual domestic terrorists, and now they put parents in the same category because they disagreed with the education platform the Biden administration was forcing on our youth. It’s increasingly clear that while leadership at the Department of Justice had no problem letting al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists off the hook, they consider American citizens the real terrorists and enemies.
The DOJ has covered for its political allies by either hiding or leaking the existence of important investigations into public figures. For example, during the 2020 campaign the Department of Justice was investigating Hunter Biden’s corrupt multimillion-dollar deals in places like Ukraine and China – deals that enriched the Biden family and even implicate President Biden himself. Yet the existence of those investigations was hidden until after the election so that it wouldn’t hurt Joe Biden’s electoral chances. Not only that, but the Deep State in the FBI was leveraging their relationships with their allies in Big Tech to squelch the Biden laptop story before it broke. Years after the election, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the FBI approached Facebook to warn them to be wary of Russian disinformation that would soon drop, a clear effort to sway Facebook’s judgment against the bombshell story. Altogether, this was a monumental rig job, especially considering that at the time the Biden campaign and the media were running a coordinated smear campaign trying to discredit the Hunter Biden accusations. It didn’t matter that the primary source proving Biden family corruption wasn’t some anonymous source of selective government leak but that it was Hunter’s own laptop.
In 2016 the Obama Justice Department along with the Department of Education said that in their opinion, civil rights law demanded that schools allow men to access and use girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms. It didn’t matter that civil rights law says no such thing, that Congress never passed a law to allow men to enter women’s restrooms, or that there are many schools opposed to this policy. All that mattered was that unelected DOJ lawyers said they thought the law should be applied to force schools to let men into girls’ bathrooms, and that was that. As a result, schools started changing their bathroom policies because they feared getting prosecuted by the DOJ. Effectively, the DOJ changed the law by threatening public schools with lawsuits if they didn’t do what they were told. This is completely undemocratic and un-American way to enforce the law. Laws are supposed to be passed by a vote, not by the threat of lawsuits over interpretations from left-wing Deep State lawyers.
PROSECUTING THE BENGHAZI TERRORISTS: At the DOJ, I was part of the team conducting the criminal investigation into the Benghazi attack. This was a real-deal national security investigation created to assemble mountains of evidence in order to prosecute the terrorists who murdered four Americans. Despite the fact that we had reams of evidence against dozens of terrorists in the Benghazi attack, Eric Holder’s Justice Department decided to only prosecute one of the attackers. Rank and file lawyers in the DOJ, like myself, told our leadership that we had the evidence to win against all of those terrorists, but they ignored us and only brought the cases that they deemed “fit.”
But it wasn’t just DOJ leadership making bad decisions. It was also the FBI, a sub-agency under the authority of the DOJ. Within a few short years Comey would go on national television and tell the world that he recommended no charges be brought against then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for her unlawful mishandling of classified information on her private email servers. His actions totally hijacked the role of the DOJ – which has sole discretion to make the decision whether or not to press charges – and politicized the Clinton investigation in an election year. It was not his call to make, but he didn’t seem to care.
Hillary Clinton was preparing her run to succeed Obama and become the next president. A high-profile court case that revied all the details of the Benghazi fiasco would hinder Hillary’s political chances, so the Obama administration and their FBI allies beat it all back. Ultimately, when it came to Benghazi, the Obama administration, the FBI, and the DOJ wanted to be seen tough on terrorism, so they kept minimal prosecutions open and brought up big sounding charges that we couldn’t support. But what they wanted most of all wasn’t justice. It was political power. And in an attempt to keep political power, they threw out American justice and terrorists went free on their watch.
Source: Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy by Kash Pramod Patel (2023).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
THE DEEP STATE in the DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE – EXCERPTS
ABUSE OF POWER: Every American, regardless of personal politics, should be concerned by what I saw happen to President Donald Trump inside the Department of Justice between 2017 and 2019. No one – no private citizen, no public figure, not even an accused criminal (and I’ve prosecuted thousands) – should be subjected to such an arrogant abuse of power by federal law enforcement leaders and bureaucrats. The American people and all honest public servants deserve better. Top officials at the Department of Justice (DOJ) felt so strongly that Donald Trump’s election in 2016 was unacceptable that they decided that they could put themselves above the law and above the Constitution. They overturned bedrock standards of American justice, flouted normal prosecutorial procedures, violated federal rules and policies, and even committed crimes.
Department of Justice officials like former FBI Director James Comey appear to have openly meddled in the 2016 election. They spied on American citizens without proper justification and revealed investigative details about presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as though the Justice Department was tasked with voter education instead of charging and prosecuting criminals. After the election, Comey and his colleagues at the Justice Department continued their extracurricular activities – this time to convince voters the man they elected President was “morally unfit” and ought to be removed from office. The appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team, whose behavior was totally above the law, was meant to ensure Trump’s impeachment.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who was appointed by President Obama in 2012, found “the implication that senior FBI employees would be willing to take official action to impact a presidential candidate’s electoral prospects to be deeply troubling and antithetical to the core values of the FBI and DOJ.” Horwitz’s August 2019 report blasted former FBI Director Comey for setting a “dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees – and the many thousands more former FBI employees” with access to classified information. The report concluded that “Comey’s retention, handling, and dissemination of certain memos violated DOJ and FBI policies, and his FBI Employment Agreement. These violations were made in order to bring direct political harm to the President of the United States. What I saw happen inside the DOJ, and what is now documented record, should never happen to another President again. There’s no doubt that Russia tried to influence the 2016 presidential election. That’s business as usual for the Kremlin. But the political meddling within our own government, within the DOJ, and within the intelligence community poses a far greater threat to Americans than any Russian internet troll farm. Without the rule of law, without respect for the Constitution, without honest administration in the DOJ, we don’t have a republic.
What bothered me the most were those members of the executive branch who put their own interests above those of the President and sought to subvert him and subvert the rule of law. These people, who attended some of the nation’s best schools, were so blinded by arrogance that they either didn’t see or didn’t care about their own hypocrisy in abandoning legal and constitutional norms in order to undercut a President they found offensive. Personally, I am offended by a Washington swamp that provides cover for the unethical and potentially illegal actions of a few bureaucratic elites.
Arrogant disregard for the executive branch is already the hallmark of the Southern District of New York, or the “Sovereign district,” as other U.S. Attorneys refer to New York City’s seat of federal judicial power, which dreamed up new ways to torment President Trump throughout my tenure at the DOJ. As long as the Special Counsel regulation remains on the books, I am convinced that people like James Comey, Andy McCabe, and then – CIA Director John Brennan, people who know how to manipulate the system, will do so to achieve their own political ends.
DOUBLE STANDARDS: Of course, everyone should be held to the same standard, and government departments need to follow their legally defined roles and procedures very carefully. But, as longtime professional staff of the Justice Department privately acknowledged to me, the arrogance characteristic of the Obama administration, personified by his first Attorney General Eric Holder, created an above-the-law culture inside the DOJ. Senior officials began to flout the rules and were not held accountable if it served the ends of the administration. Leaking to the media became rampant. Politics seeped into everything. As is usually the case, the problem started at the top: Attorney General Eric Holder felt the rules didn’t apply to him because he was President Obama’s “wingman” with a mission greater than following regular order at the Justice Department.
The Obama administration refused to prosecute crimes that the administration committed. When the Inspector General for the Obama Treasury Department reported in 2013 that, as summarized by CNN, “the Internal Revenue Service deliberately targeted some conservative groups applying for federal tax-exempt states, delayed processing their applications, and requested unnecessary information.” Holder’s Justice Department declined to prosecute anyone, not even for obstruction of justice after former IRS Commissioner Lois Lerner’s official emails went “missing” while under investigation (just as Hillary Clinton’s would three years later while she was under FBI investigation).
Washington’s double standards go beyond hypocrisy; they can corrupt the rule of law, with Republicans sent to jail, and Democrats let off scot-free with media providing their cover. President Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn allegedly lied when he told the FBI he had had no contact with Russian Ambassador Kislyak during the transition between administrations. Incoming President Trump expressed his hope that then-FBI director Jim Comey could “let this go,” and the DOJ investigated the request as an attempt to obstruct justice. As of this writing Flynn could face incarceration. It is concerning that Andy McCabe won’t be charged for lying to the FBI and Jim Comey won’t be punished for leaking.
PRESUMPTION OF GUILT: The Mueller Investigation: No one affiliated with the Trump campaign was charged with colluding with the Russians, despite the presumption of guilt by nonstop media scrutiny and investigation by the Justice Department. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team did everything they could to cast a shadow of guilt over President Trump though they had no evidence that he was guilty of anything. It is not a prosecutor’s job to “exonerate” anyone. It is a prosecutor’s job to determine whether there is sufficient evidence of a crime to make a legal case and therefore pursue charges. The Mueller team found no evidence but maintained a presumption, shared by the Deep State and the Resistance, that Trump had to be guilty of something simply because they hated him and thought he shouldn’t be President. The presumption of innocence is a bedrock Anglo-American legal principle dating back to the Middle Ages. But we can’t take that legal principle for granted. It’s not only totalitarian regimes that conduct investigations or hearings with a presumption of guilt. It can happen whenever partisan passions overwhelm respect for the rule of law.
Burisma: Biden’s comments at a Council of Foreign Relations event in Washington, D.C., where he bragged about getting Ukraine’s Prosecutor General fired were notorious. As BuzzFeed reported, “Even those who worked closely with Joe Biden cringed when he said those words.” The story continued.
Recounting a trip to Kyiv in late 2015, Biden described telling the then-president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, that he had to fire the prosecutor general who was investigating Burisma, or the U.S. would not release $1 billion in loan guarantees. “I looked at them and said, “I’m leaving in six hours,” Biden told the crowd, taking a long look at his watch for effect. “If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch.” Here the audience laughed. “He got fired.”
Most U.S. media asserted there was no connection between Joe Biden’s wanting the prosecutor fired and his son’s $50,000-a-month job as a board member of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma which was under investigation. But if you were Donald Trump, and the FBI has spied on your campaign, withheld briefings on potential Russian threats to your campaign, and doctored emails to obtain court permission to wiretap your campaign advisor, and you discovered that the intelligence community had been out to get you from day one, wouldn’t you want your administration to review these things?
The Perfect Phone Call: When it comes to the Democrats and their assertion that President Trump’s phone call with President Zelensky of Ukraine amounted to an impeachable offense, they had no actual evidence to back up their articles of impeachment. There is no evidence that he committed any crime.
In Sum: Very quickly, I learned that if you are a political appointee in President Trump’s administration, the media and congressional Democrats, among others, immediately presume you must be guilty of something and will stop at nothing to tear you down. If you are a “career official,” on the other hand, with no evidence of support for the President, then you are regarded as someone free of malice, a modestly paid civil servant toiling with the nation’s best intentions at heart. In the press, “career official” is practically a synonym for “innocent,” even, or especially, if that career official is revealed to be part of the “Resistance.”
THE SOVEREIGN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK: In the December 7, 2018, memorandum filed in federal court, the Southern District of New York’s Attorneys suggested that their boss, the President, was an unindicted co-conspirator with Michael Cohen, his former personal attorney, who had pleaded guilty in court ten days earlier to charges of tax evasion, making false statements to financial institutions, and, as the Southern District coyly revealed on its website, “to making unlawful, excessive contributions to the 2016 presidential campaign in the form of payments to two women to secure their silence regarding the then-presidential candidate in order to prevent those stories from influencing the election.
This toxic narrative – that the Southern District of New York was ready to indict the President would be investigating his family members and businesses – circulated in the media the entire winter. But not only were there no official charges to answer, there was no evidence for the President’s personal lawyers to examine – because from February until July 2019, the Southern District of New York fought the public’s First Amendment and common law rights to read the warrants used to search Michael Cohen’s business and hotel. Finally, on July 17, U.S. District Court Judge William Pauley ordered the Southern District of New York to file a status report and release the requested documents on the public docket by the next day. The result of that court order: the whole world learned that the Southern District of New York had closed the case, and no charges against the President or anyone else would be forthcoming. What an extraordinary smear tactic – and what an extraordinary abuse of power: misusing the authority of the Justice Department in an attempt to cause political damage to the President of the United States.
THE MUELLER INVESTIGATION: William Barr was confirmed as the Attorney General on February 14. On March 5 when he learned what the Special Counsel’s office had in store, he came up with the perfect strategy. On March 24, Barr sent to Congress his four-page summary of the 448-page report’s “principal conclusions.” The Special Counsel had found no evidence of criminal activity by President Trump or his campaign. Barr brought the Special Counsel investigation back to the legal facts. Mueller’s response to Barr verges on the hysterical. This letter was an attempt by Robert Mueller and his team to spin their own report – the legal substance of which Attorney General Barr had accurately summarized in four pages. What Barr hadn’t done – and what the Mueller team wanted to do – was go beyond the law and assert that even though they had no evidence of criminal activity, they could not exonerate the President of wrong-doing (as if it is a prosecutor’s job to exonerate anyone). The report (and Mueller’s letter) exposed the whole of the Special Counsel investigation: it was a political act against the President, not a disinterested legal investigation.
CRIMINALIZING THE POLITICAL: The Constitution allows a Speaker like Nancy Pelosi to choose to impeach a President for almost anything, whether it’s a crime (like bribery) or not (like abuse of power). A simple House majority could impeach a President for cursing, using a plastic straw, or authorizing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and call it “abuse of power.” But previous House Speakers did not lower the bar. The House Democrats’ votes for impeaching Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress … were unprecedented in that they were not based on a crime. The prior two impeachments, President Johnson in 1868 and President Clinton in 1998, both included criminal charges, violating a federal statute and perjury, respectively. Pelosi’s House Democrats essentially impeached President Trump for his hardball personality and politics.
I am gravely concerned that “the Resistance,” including some high-ranking leaders at the Justice Department, have set a new standard of criminalizing political actions and beliefs with which they disagree. It troubles me that Justice Department resisters quietly slipped into the ranks of congressional impeachers. If the law writers in Congress and the law enforcers in the Justice Department are going to conspire against politicians they don’t like, honest people offering themselves up for public service don’t stand a chance. Only those approved by the Washington establishment and bureaucratic elites will govern us if impeachment becomes the new normal. Had Speaker Pelosi put actual crimes before the House for a vote, she would have failed. So, House Democrats did what Robert Mueller’s team did: they blurred the distinction between the criminal and the political.
THE DEEP STATE IS ALIVE AND WELL: What I encountered inside the Department of Justice was government bureaucrats inflating their importance and presumed authority. Certainly, anyone following the 2019 impeachment proceedings against President Trump saw unelected experts serving in government appear convinced that they, rather than the elected President of the United States with whom they happened to disagree, should determine the country’s foreign or military policy.
Longtime career civil servants can easily get it into their heads that they, the “experts,” need to protect the American people from their populist ignorance and from the policies of a President whom they “experts” deem unsavory. The mentality is that an executive branch agency’s work “should never be political” coupled with admiration for bureaucrats who ignore their elected boss. Political is synonymous with accountability to the people, but defenders of the Deep State fail to realize that.
Trump’s opponents have gone to dangerous and extreme lengths to prevent him from acting on his mandate and his agenda. Impeachment was the natural conclusion of the Democrats’ and the Deep State’s effort to delegitimize an election they never accepted. Now that the somber process of has been so cheapened by Jerry Nadler, Adam Schiff, and Chuck Schumer, will it be readily weaponized against the next “unacceptable” administration by partisan opponents in Congress, fueled by Special Counsel investigations and a Justice Department whose leaders hold themselves above the law?
This cannot be the new normal. Realizing that it protects us from the tyranny of kings and unduly empowered bureaucracies, we need to appreciate the elegance of the Framer’s architecture. Both monarchies and oligarchies are unresponsive to the will of voters. Americans should reject both. My fervent wish as a battle-scarred veteran of the Justice Department who served two tours and reentered the private sector each time, is that people like myself, who have not carefully curated their entire professional lives for sainthood or stardom, but who care deeply about serving our country, get into politics despite the very real risks to our personal reputations.
Washington, unfortunately, is home to many careerists who have little private sector experience and little tolerance for those who think outside the box (and differently from them). Some have held an elected office for so long that they can’t remember how to earn a living any other way. Some are in civil servant positions, going with the flow for the promise of a pension one day and a good salary in the here and now. There is a frightening degree of groupthink in Washington, D.C., and frankly, bigotry against outsiders. We need a free-flowing exchange of ideas and policy experiments in this country, balanced and checked by the Constitution – not a permanent standing bureaucratic class.
Source: Above the Law by Matthew Whitaker (2020).
WHEN POLITICS OBSTRUCTS JUSTICE: Under President Biden, the Justice Department targeted parents who are pushing back against programs to teach their children vile and hateful critical race theory. The DOJ justified its threatening campaign against parents in a memo that labelled these law-abiding citizens as “domestic terrorists.” I literally used to prosecute actual domestic terrorists, and now they put parents in the same category because they disagreed with the education platform the Biden administration was forcing on our youth. It’s increasingly clear that while leadership at the Department of Justice had no problem letting al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists off the hook, they consider American citizens the real terrorists and enemies.
The DOJ has covered for its political allies by either hiding or leaking the existence of important investigations into public figures. For example, during the 2020 campaign the Department of Justice was investigating Hunter Biden’s corrupt multimillion-dollar deals in places like Ukraine and China – deals that enriched the Biden family and even implicate President Biden himself. Yet the existence of those investigations was hidden until after the election so that it wouldn’t hurt Joe Biden’s electoral chances. Not only that, but the Deep State in the FBI was leveraging their relationships with their allies in Big Tech to squelch the Biden laptop story before it broke. Years after the election, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the FBI approached Facebook to warn them to be wary of Russian disinformation that would soon drop, a clear effort to sway Facebook’s judgment against the bombshell story. Altogether, this was a monumental rig job, especially considering that at the time the Biden campaign and the media were running a coordinated smear campaign trying to discredit the Hunter Biden accusations. It didn’t matter that the primary source proving Biden family corruption wasn’t some anonymous source of selective government leak but that it was Hunter’s own laptop.
In 2016 the Obama Justice Department along with the Department of Education said that in their opinion, civil rights law demanded that schools allow men to access and use girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms. It didn’t matter that civil rights law says no such thing, that Congress never passed a law to allow men to enter women’s restrooms, or that there are many schools opposed to this policy. All that mattered was that unelected DOJ lawyers said they thought the law should be applied to force schools to let men into girls’ bathrooms, and that was that. As a result, schools started changing their bathroom policies because they feared getting prosecuted by the DOJ. Effectively, the DOJ changed the law by threatening public schools with lawsuits if they didn’t do what they were told. This is completely undemocratic and un-American way to enforce the law. Laws are supposed to be passed by a vote, not by the threat of lawsuits over interpretations from left-wing Deep State lawyers.
PROSECUTING THE BENGHAZI TERRORISTS: At the DOJ, I was part of the team conducting the criminal investigation into the Benghazi attack. This was a real-deal national security investigation created to assemble mountains of evidence in order to prosecute the terrorists who murdered four Americans. Despite the fact that we had reams of evidence against dozens of terrorists in the Benghazi attack, Eric Holder’s Justice Department decided to only prosecute one of the attackers. Rank and file lawyers in the DOJ, like myself, told our leadership that we had the evidence to win against all of those terrorists, but they ignored us and only brought the cases that they deemed “fit.”
But it wasn’t just DOJ leadership making bad decisions. It was also the FBI, a sub-agency under the authority of the DOJ. Within a few short years Comey would go on national television and tell the world that he recommended no charges be brought against then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for her unlawful mishandling of classified information on her private email servers. His actions totally hijacked the role of the DOJ – which has sole discretion to make the decision whether or not to press charges – and politicized the Clinton investigation in an election year. It was not his call to make, but he didn’t seem to care.
Hillary Clinton was preparing her run to succeed Obama and become the next president. A high-profile court case that revied all the details of the Benghazi fiasco would hinder Hillary’s political chances, so the Obama administration and their FBI allies beat it all back. Ultimately, when it came to Benghazi, the Obama administration, the FBI, and the DOJ wanted to be seen tough on terrorism, so they kept minimal prosecutions open and brought up big sounding charges that we couldn’t support. But what they wanted most of all wasn’t justice. It was political power. And in an attempt to keep political power, they threw out American justice and terrorists went free on their watch.
Source: Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy by Kash Pramod Patel (2023).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
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