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🏛️👎 Ex-Trump White House attorney calls Comey’s indictment ‘un-American and despicable’

🤖 AI Summary

  • ⚖️ The process of the Comey indictment was worse than unusual, wholly un-American, and really despicable [00:32].
  • 🇺🇸 Evenhanded justice has long been the country’s standard and goal, and that has been abandoned under this president and his willing assistant attorney general [00:46].
  • 🚫 Career prosecutors, including a U.S. attorney appointed by Trump, had concluded there was insufficient evidence to proceed against the former FBI director [01:06].
  • 🔥 The president fired that prosecutor and ordered his attorney general to punish his enemies [01:33].
  • 🚨 This is not the way America works; historically, it is the way Allende’s Chile, Stalin’s Russia, and Hitler’s Germany worked [02:12].
  • 🛡️ The role of an attorney general is not to do what the president orders in criminal matters [02:26].
  • 🏛️ Previous attorney generals with character, such as Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus, honored their oath to the Constitution by resigning rather than carrying out a presidential order [02:34].
  • 🤯 The situation is a wholesale 180 from the norms that made America different from Third World dictatorships and authoritarian regimes [03:16].
  • 👨‍⚖️ The case could well be dismissed because of vindictive prosecution, selective prosecution, or prosecutorial misconduct standards [03:34].
  • 🤝 Second-term appointees were clearly slavishly devoted and willing to break any ethical or legal barriers to do the president’s bidding [03:55].
  • 👑 The president’s crippling narcissism dictates every whim, including this vengeance tirade [04:42].
  • 🛑 When the president wanted to take inappropriate action in the first term, strong and capable people acted as an inappropriate restraint and would say no [05:41].
  • ✅ Now, whatever the narcissistic whim may be—vengeance, power, war crimes—people just say yes [06:01].
  • 🚨 The attacks on the rule of law have so diminished it that it is a danger to all citizens [07:07].
  • 💰 An example of unequal justice is a person presumably spending cash received as a bribe with no consequences, while James Comey is preparing for arraignment [07:30].
  • 📜 The red line for loyalists is established by the oath they take to defend and protect or preserve and defend the Constitution [08:07].

🤔 Evaluation

  • ⚖️ The central perspective of this interview is that the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey is a political act of vengeance that represents a severe breach of American constitutional norms and the independence of the Justice Department.
  • Contrasting ⚔️ perspectives would argue that the indictment is a necessary step for accountability and equal application of the law, regardless of the President’s personal motives.
  • Supporters of the indictment would reject the claim of “vindictive prosecution,” asserting that the charges are based on legitimate evidence of misconduct by a high-ranking official who was previously shielded from scrutiny.
  • To gain a better understanding, it would be useful to explore 🔍 the specific legal and factual basis of the Comey indictment and the formal Department of Justice guidelines for prosecuting high-level former officials.
  • Further research is needed on the judicial history of vindictive and selective prosecution claims to understand the high legal bar for getting a case dismissed on those grounds.

📚 Book Recommendations

  • ⬆️🤥🏛️ A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey: 📖 Provides the direct perspective of the former FBI Director who is at the center of the indictment discussed in the interview.
  • A Warning by Anonymous: 🖋️ Offers a similar insider critique of the Trump administration’s temperament, governing style, and impact on ethical norms from a former senior official.
  • Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court by Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino: ⚖️ Presents a contrasting conservative critique of political attacks and perceived misconduct against the judiciary and justice system.
  • 🇺🇸📜 The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay: 🏛️ Essential reading on the structure of the U.S. government and the separation of powers, the core principles Cobb argues have been violated.
  • The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: ⛓️ A creatively related classic study of a totalitarian state’s use of the justice system for political repression, paralleling Cobb’s historical comparisons.

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