Obama Says His Job Is Assuring Equal Protection Under the Law … Really? By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2014/12/04/obama-says-his-job/?print=1
Continuing to politicize tragedy, our community organizer-in-chief reacted to the grand jury’s refusal to indict a New York City police officer in the killing of Eric Garner by complaining that this decision and the one in Ferguson, Mo., “highlighted the frustrations that many African-Americans have harbored about a legal system that has a long history of discrimination against black people.” Obama is quoted by the New York Times proclaiming:
“When anybody in this country is not being treated equally under the law, that is a problem, and it’s my job as president to help solve it.”
Really?
Perhaps the president could start with Dinesh D’Souza. He should be able to get up to speed on it quickly since, unlike the state cases he is bloviating about, the D’Souza case was prosecuted by Obama’s own Justice Department. Even though his offense involved a comparatively trifling among of money ($15,000), D’Souza, unlike the overwhelming majority of people who violate the campaign finance laws, was not permitted to settle his case by paying an administrative fine. Instead, Obama’s Justice Department not only prosecuted him for a campaign finance felony, but gratuitously threw in an additional felony false-statements charge that turned Congress’s two-year maximum into a seven-year potential sentence.
By comparison, the Obama 2008 campaign, which committed over $2 million in campaign finance infractions, was permitted to pay a fine — indeed, a fine that was substantially less than the $500,000 bond D’Souza was forced to post just to get out on bail. Fortunately, a federal judge declined the Obama Justice Department’s push to send D’Souza to jail for 16 months. But he is absurdly being forced to spend six months in a halfway house — which is supposed to be the transition stage back into the community after a long prison sentence.
D’Souza is a conservative writer and film producer who has portrayed the president in an unflattering light.
Or maybe Obama could look into the matter of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, another prosecution by the president’s own Justice Department. In a blatant departure from equal protection principles, Nakoula was imprisoned for a violation of supervised release (the federal version of parole) that experienced probation officers and prosecutors would not even have brought to court, much less sought re-imprisonment over. Turns out Nakoula was the producer of a video that portrayed Islam in a very unflattering light. Having falsely claimed to have defeated al Qaeda, Obama needed a scapegoat when al Qaeda-affiliated jihadists attacked a U.S. compound in Benghazi, killing our ambassador to Libya and three other Americans. So Nakoula was singled out and prosecuted, even though his production of the video was protected by the First Amendment. He spent many months in prison.
Nakoula’s incarceration enabled the president and his underlings to pretend that the video, not the terrorists, caused the Benghazi Massacre.
Then there is matter of conservative non-profit groups. They’ve been harassed and intimidated by Obama’s Internal Revenue Service, which subjected them to outrageously unequal treatment — denying them tax-exempt status and putting them through highly intrusive investigations that shredded their First Amendment rights, even though progressive organizations that support the president’s agenda got swift, favorable IRS treatment.
The conservative groups oppose President Obama’s policies.
Notice a pattern here?
Before he was president, Barack Obama once famously declared that there was no black American or white America but a United States of America. Many of us doubted his sincerity, and we have been proven right as he and his subordinates — especially his Justice Department — have governed in a way designed to divide and alienate minority groups against the country.
When it comes to the great constitutional principle of equal protection under the law in the age of Obama, it is not that there is a black America and a white America. It is that there are political supporters of the president who get one quality of justice, and political opponents and convenient political scapegoats for whom “justice” is a weapon their government has turned against them.
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