U.S. Government Now Confiscating Private Legal Fund Donations to Jan. 6 Defendants By Ben Bartee
Via the Associated Press (emphasis added):
Less than two months after he pleaded guilty to storming the U.S. Capitol, Texas resident Daniel Goodwyn appeared on Tucker Carlson’s then-Fox News show and promoted a website where supporters could donate money to Goodwyn and other rioters whom the site called “political prisoners.”
The Justice Department now wants Goodwyn to give up more than $25,000 he raised — a clawback that is part of a growing effort by the government to prevent rioters from being able to personally profit from participating in the attack that shook the foundations of American democracy.
An Associated Press review of court records shows that prosecutors in the more than 1,000 criminal cases from Jan. 6, 2021, are increasingly asking judges to impose fines on top of prison sentences to offset donations from supporters of the Capitol rioters.
The U.S. legal system is now transparently weaponized against what the DHS has alternatively described as “domestic terrorists” and “white supremacists” — according to the Department, the #1 terror threat in the country.
Markus Maly, a Virginia man scheduled to be sentenced next month for assaulting police at the Capitol, raised more than $16,000 from an online campaign that described him as a “January 6 P.O.W.” and asked for money for his family. Prosecutors have requested a $16,000-plus fine, noting that Maly had a public defender and did not owe any legal fees.
“He should not be able to use his own notoriety gained in the commission of his crimes to ‘capitalize’ on his participation in the Capitol breach in this way,” a prosecutor wrote in court papers.
How in any way is it within a prosecutor’s purview — whose job is to prosecute particular, defined crimes based on legitimate suspicion guilt — to wade into the private financial donations collected by private citizens, which are fully legal? If there were a plaintiff who donated to one of these defendants who claims he or she was misled about the use of the money, that would be a different story. But that’s not what’s going on here.
I hesitate to turn this into a whole Trump-bashing thing because, frankly, he gets enough criticism in conservative media at the moment (which is fair enough), but where the hell has he been all these years on the Jan. 6 political prisoner thing?
I watched via live stream as Trump explicitly encouraged them to march on the Capitol. While he may not have encouraged them to riot, he did say that the only way to take the country back was through strength (paraphrasing), which is a statement open to interpretation by a crowd of people already angry (not without cause) at the outcome of the recent election they felt was rigged.
Then, after the fact, while he reportedly watched the chaos unfold on live TV, he basically left them in the lurch — most unforgivably, in my view, the nonviolent offenders who got swept up in the Deep State’s nonstop campaign to make an example of them. He recently promised to take a look at pardoning some of them if and when he gets into office, which is a laudable development, but, outside of that, he has not been as forthcoming with his moral or financial support as he should.
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