Judge's Nearly $1 Million Dollar Sanction Order Against Trump Is An Attack On All Americans.
Left once again is using Trump as a vehicle to deprive us of some of our most basic rights.
The Left’s march towards shifting this Country from a Constitutional Republic to an oligarchy continues unimpeded. Once again, the vehicle by which those in favor of top down governmental control advance, despite being a minority in the United States, is Donald Trump.
A few days ago, Trump was sanctioned almost $1 million dollars for his Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (“RICO”) Act case against Hillary Clinton and other “deep state” actors such as former FBI Director James Comey. The sanctions followed the judge’s decision to dismiss the case several months back. You can read the entire order here.
The decision has been widely cheered by those on the left:
You can see the glee here:
And here:
As you can see, George Takei thinks the ruling exceeds “sex.” It is hard to understand how someone can take such pleasure from something as serious as an American being sanctioned by a court of law, especially a Federal court. Until the recent past, both Left, Right, and Center respected the rule of law. Not any more.
Of course, the Left long ago tossed aside any notion that politics is not personal. Whether that happened before Trump is open for debate. What is clear after Trump is that for the Left, all of politics is personal. Detailing that dangers of this philosophy is beyond the scope of this article. For our current purposes, it is important to note the technique the Left is using to distract Americans from what is happening—the systemic withdrawal of our Constitutional rights. In this instance, it is our right of access to the courts for a redress of grievances.
Among the reasons that access to the courts is so fundamental is that tyrannical regimes shut down courts to prevent them from acting as a check on power. For example, it was one of the fundamental grievances leveled against King George in our Declaration of Independence.
A right so precious could not be taken from Americans quickly. Instead, like the other rights we are losing daily, it is be surrendered slowly. One of the Left’s favorite tactics to accomplish this is to first encourage us to accept that someone controversial should forfeit the same right and expand outward to the rest of us thereafter. This is what is happening now, and has been happening for some time, with Trump.
One could argue that it started with the election-related lawsuits, but there is no doubting that it began with the January 6 Committee. During its “investigation,” the Committee requested various communications between Trump and his attorney, John Eastman. The Committee knew that such communications were protected from disclosure by the attorney-client privilege. One of the few exceptions to this privilege is the “crime-fraud” exception. Thus, the January 6 Committee argued to a Federal court that Trump and his attorney were engaged in a crime. This is not to write this such an allegation had not been used in the past to intrude upon the attorney-client privilege, but the January 6 Committee’s argument that the “crime” or “fraud” that permitted it to pierce Trump’s privilege was the very thing it was investigating to determine if it occurred was a novel theory. Regardless, the judge accepted the January 6 Committee’s theory and ordered that Trump’s attorney would have to surrender the documents to the Committee because Trump had committed a crime on January 6, and his attorney was part of the crime. You can read the decision here. We wrote about whether the judge was correct in his ruling here if you are interested in that element of the ruling. Suffice it to write that this was one of the early stages of the erosion of every Americans’ access to the courts using Trump.
From there, it has gone to limiting his exercise of the attorney-client privilege to obtain legal advise, to attacking his attorneys and sanctions. While attacking the attorney-client privilege was not incredibly unusual, it certainly was not common. Attacking attorneys and awarding sanctions are tremendously unusual. For example, in December of last year, the District of Columbia bar recommended that Rudy Giuliani be disbarred in Washington, DC, after a local bar association panel’s preliminary finding that he likely committed misconduct in pressing Donald Trump’s failed legal challenge to President Joe Biden’s 2020 win in Pennsylvania. While non-attorneys may think that attorneys deserve sanction, this is an attack on everyone’s ability to have an advocate. Moreover, one must understand that attorneys have a safe harbor that protects them for advocating for controversial positions or theories if they are advanced in a good faith attempt to establish a new theory of law.
Were the law otherwise, attorneys such as the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall could (and most assuredly would) have been sanctioned and disbarred for claiming equal rights for Black Americans in the Jim Crow South. The claim that Black children had the right to attend white schools was no less frivolous that any claim that Giuliani could have advanced for Trump in light of the fact that Plessy v. Ferguson had established “separate but equal” as the law of the land for over 50 years before Marshall litigated Brown v. Board of Education. This did not happen because Americans inherently understood the value of Constitutional rights and that an attack on one citizen’s right likely would lead to an attack on everyone’s rights. Today, the Left celebrates the erosion of access to the courts. This will not end with Giuliani.
The latest sanction ruling is nothing more than the continued attack on access to the courts. Sanctions are more common than attempting to suspend or disbar attorneys, but still something that is sufficiently severe and overreaching that should occur rarely and certainly should not be celebrated by anyone.
A careful analysis of Judge Middlebrook’s opinion sanctioning Trump reveals that it is improper and done primarily for political purposes. Initially, Federal courts have found that a party should only be sanctioned for advancing a claim in the rare and exceptional circumstances that the claim is frivolous, and, so frivolous that the party or attorney has no good faith basis to attempt to change existing precedent. One does not need legal training to appreciate that Trump’s claims against the Deep State over the Russia Hoax did not meet that high bar. Of course, there are other obvious indicia that the decision to sanction Trump was not based on law, but on politics.
The most telling evidence that the ruling is political is the judge’s plentiful political declarations about Trump’s behavior and motives; things wholly irrelevant to whether the lawsuit was frivolous. If the ruling were truly based on the rule of law, he would not need to spend time besmirching Trump’s name. For example, in his ruling the judge declared:
“Mr. Trump is a prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries. He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process, and he cannot be seen as a litigant blindly following the advice of a lawyer. He knew full well the impact of his actions.”
Similarly, the judge claimed Trump’s claims were:
“a hodgepodge of disconnected, often immaterial events, followed by an implausible conclusion. . . . This is a deliberate attempt to harass; to tell a story without regard to facts.”
This language is unnecessary for his ruling. It is included clearly for the Media to embrace and amplify it. The judicial branch is supposed to be the least political of the branches. Unfortunately, we are seeing increasingly that judges, especially Democrats, now routinely include hyperbolic political language in their opinions, something that in the past that would have been left to partisan commentators. Given the tenor of the opinion, it likely will not surprise anyone that Judge Middlebrook was nominated to the bench by Bill Clinton.
Additional evidence that the ruling is partisan is found in the sheer amount of the sanctions. If the lawsuit were as frivolous as the judge claims, it should not take almost a million dollars to defeat it. There was no trial or even any discovery because the case was shut down at the dismissal stage. Under the Federal system, a party is not entitled to discovery while a motion to dismiss is being considered. Thus, we are expected to believe it took almost a million dollars to brief why Trump’s supposedly baseless lawsuit was frivolous. Only in today’s Media environment would such a nonsensical notion not only be accepted, but celebrated.
Plainly this ruling is designed to deter Trump and others from seeking help from the courts for what they plainly believe is inappropriate political conduct. Setting aside whether that belief is correct, they should be permitted to advance their theories under existing laws, or request that the courts develop new ones to face the changing political landscape. This once was considered a sacred right available to all Americans. No longer.
The Elites know that the properly functioning courts could impede their plans, so they are out to limit our access to them. Trump is one of first persons that they have used to get citizens to accept the idea that they do not have an unfettered right to redress their grievances. He will not be the last.
You're delusional. But the best part is you get to see Drumpf either in prison in Georgia or exiled in Dubai, enjoy.