Still wonder why Dr. Anthony Fauci took the Fifth Amendment rather than make comments to the Senate Homeland Security Committee this past week? Look no further than the revelations now public thinks to a court filing by James Comey’s lawyers asking that an indictment against him be thrown out.
Comey, you may recall, has been a primary target in Donald Trump revenge campaign. It all started when, as director of the FBI, Comey oversaw an FBI into alleged connections between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. This investigation was a significant point of contention for Trump who fired Comey. Since his firing Comey has been a vocal critic of Trump.
Trump ordered his first AG of his second term, Pam Bondi, to find ways to indict Comey. After her departure Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was ordered to find some way to indict Comey on…well, whatever they could cook up. Naturally Blanche, who formerly was Trump’s personal defense attorney and apparently still is, found a way.
On a beach vacation Comey arranged some seashells in the sand to spell out “8647” then took a picture of it and posted it to social media. Trump’s goons immediately took that to be a call for the assassination of the president.
Rather than do an investigation that could be tied more directly to DOJ and by extension, Trump, the Secret Service was asked to investigate it and come up with evidence that would warrant a criminal indictment. The Secret Service, long considered elite and beyond reproach, agreed.
The SS (fitting initials in this case) put Comey under warrantless surveillance, including physically tailing of Comey and his wife in their car and phone monitoring. The tracking included a stop the Comeys made in at the grave of one of their two children. Hardly the actions of man hell-bent on killing a president.
As a part of this the SS made a request to Verizon for phone access, citing an “emergency” that could involve injury or death of the president. Court filings show that at least one SS agent said in an email included in Comey’s court filing that “At the time we did not believe anyone’s life was in danger and legally it was a bad idea.” But, believing that, a higher-up official ordered the service to do it anyway.
This should scare the living crap out every single person in this country. It’s not just that the government has suspected the rule of law, it’s also that it’s so absurd that no ethical agent would have investigated and no ethical prosecutor would have brought the charges.
The government is claiming “86” means to kill. No. The phrase goes back as far as the 1930s when famed newspaper columnist Walter Winchell wrote about soda jerks and included codes they used.
“The code 13 meant that a boss was around, 81 was a glass of water and 86 meant an item had run out.”
While there has been some use of 86 as a code for killing, it not common usage. Mirriam Webster, in its dictionary entry to the number, said some “We do not enter this sense, due to its relative recency and sparseness of use.”
That the Department of Justice and the Secret Service used illegal surveillance methods to concoct an absurd indictment against Comey, alleging he was calling for the death of a president, shows us where we are today.
Mark Elias, lawyer and founder of Democracy Docket who has won dozens of lawsuits against Trump over his assaults on democracy, said the other day that people need to stop talking about how far down “the slippery slope” we are in terms of losing the rule of law and potentially democracy itself.
“We are the bottom,” he told MSNOW’s Nicole Wallace this past week. He added that people also need to quit saying that what Trump and his goons are doing is “not normal.”
“This is normal,” Elias said. “It may not have been normal a couple of years ago, but it is now.”
Elias said saving democracy requires people quit whistling past the graveyard and denying reality.
The Comey case and Dr. Fauci feeling his he needed to plead the Fifth to prevent feeding the monster makes that clear.
Our government is lawless. Can we take it back? Only if each and every person eligible to vote registers and goes to the polls to drive these thugs back into the dark.
Jordan Jackson is a pseudonym for a writer who has spent a career writing about politics and being involved in business and politics at several levels. To protect those who have been associated with him he uses the pseudonym.