U.S. Marshals Were Banned From Arresting Leftist Supreme Court Protesters
U.S. Marshals Were Banned From Arresting Leftist Supreme Court Protesters
This is what a tyranny looks like.
By Daniel Greenfield
A culture of authoritarian lawlessness is one in which there are two very different standards.
Everyone has probably seen the videos of gun control activists and transurrectionists storming legislatures. But even well before Jan 6, massive BLM riots, including a direct attack on the White House, had politicians and the media denouncing the use of force against the mostly peaceful rioters. Gen. Milley has spent the rest of his career atoning for walking with Trump to the Church of Presidents which BLM had tried to burn down.
Since then, Jan 6 rioters have been tracked down and locked up while BLM rioters are getting multi-million dollar payouts from cities like New York and Philly.
More recently, the FBI was sent in to bust non-violent pro-life activists even as it ignored dozens of arsons and attacks on pregnancy centers by Jane’s Revenge, a pro-abortion group, until the GOP took the House when it began making a handful of arrests.
Now there’s direct evidence that the Biden administration not only refused to protect Supreme Court justices in the wake of the Dobbs decision pro-abortion protests at their homes, but specific orders were given not to arrest the leftists.
Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) unveiled a series of training slides used to prepare Marshals for their assignments as she grilled Attorney General Merrick Garland at a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing Tuesday.
The slides instructed the Marshals to “avoid, unless absolutely necessary, any criminal enforcement” involving protesters and that “making arrests and initiating prosecutions was not the goal” of their being stationed outside the residences of the court’s six conservative jurists.
Just in case there was any ambiguity…
Another slide directed Marshals not to “engage [in] protest-related enforcement” and to allow the protesters to exercise their First Amendment rights except to protect the justices and their families.
Britt said the slides were obtained from a Justice Department whistleblower who objected to Garland’s March 1 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
At that hearing, Garland insisted that Marshals were empowered to decide in the field whether to make arrests.
However, another slide cited by Britt directed Marshals to clear any “enforcement action” with the local US Attorney’s office “in advance” and warned: “It is counter-productive to make [probable cause] arrests on cases that the USAO will not charge and prosecute.”
Garland, of course, insisted that he knew nothing about it, and that may even be true. Garland and a lot of other Biden cabinet members and top officials, strike me as the equivalent of ‘Biden’, old white guys with lots of career experience whose role is to serve as the shields and fall guys for the younger radicals who are actually running their departments, divisions and agencies.
The policy however is painfully clear.
The Marshals were aggressively warned not to interfere with the leftist protesters and to allow them to engage in their illegal harassment, and to do nothing short of an actual terrorist attack.
These were the orders for BLM and Antifa as well.
This is what a two-tier system looks like. There’s zero tolerance for actions taken by your political opponents but maximum tolerance and zero enforcement for actions taken by your side that are even worse.
We’ve seen plenty of this with violations of the law with the Clintons and Trump, but we’ve also seen plenty of it with protest activity, domestic terrorism and riots.
A two-tier system may operate under the pretense of the law, but it’s still a tyranny. A lawful system objectively and even-handledly enforces the law.
What we have is the old Cold War joke about an American and Russian arguing.
The American says that he can go to the White House and shout that Reagan is a war criminal and the Russian replies that he can also go to the White House and shout that Reagan is a war criminal. In China, you can protest in support of Xi, but not against him. In America, you can protest for the Left, but not against it.
That’s tyranny.