I still have a problem with the “Epstein files.”
I’m watching a story about Texas Parks and Wildlife employees recovering alligator snapping turtles (dinosaurs with a nasty bite, basically) bringing rescued from a farm in Louisiana. The turtles were taken from Tate as to the farm, and there’s photographic evidence of the thieves with the turtles. So, at a minimum, these people knew what they had.
But I presume they have yet to be convicted for their crimes; at least not at the time this story was prepared to air. (TPWD prepares a 30 minute TV show about what the Department is doing, and about Texas parks. It’s made up of stories told like this.). So the suspects in the pictures aren’t identified by name, and their faces are blurred. I suppose if you know them you can guess who they are, but they enjoy the same presumption of innocence Trump did in all his civil and criminal trials.
Those people in the pictures are probably guilty; but until they are proven so in a court of law, it is unfair to vilify them and make them guilty by association with photographs of them holding alligator snapping turtles.
So, too, with people in the Epstein files. If that’s what the files reveal, to be honest. Guilt by association is a terrible thing, and even if there are pictures of coitus with a minor, the person is entitled to a presumption of innocence. Especially if there is insufficient evidence to prosecute.
That’s why prosecutors don’t accuse individuals of crimes when they decide they can’t prosecute (and why James Comey was so out of line to discuss the investigation of Hillary Clinton at all, much less just before the election). So should the government release information regarding possible criminal conduct when they have no intention of prosecuting? Biden’s DOJ didn’t bring any charges from the information in those files. That’s actually why Trump never should have promised to release the files.
So now we all seem to be caught in Trump’s web of lies. He made promises he shouldn’t have made or ever tried to keep. Even if there was a “client list,” it shouldn’t be released to expose people to calumny who can’t defend themselves in the court of public opinion. I mean, how do you prove yourself innocent? That’s the whole reason for the burden of proof being on the accuser.
And the Democrats, as politicians do, want to see Trump twist in the wind. Hell! I do, too. But that doesn’t mean we have to release the files and tar people with guilt by association because it gives us a political win over Trump. It not even a question of “being better than MAGA,” it’s a question of upholding one of the fundamental tenets of our legal system. All for the sake of possible, very short term, political gain.
And it has to be said: that’s what Trump would do.
If we protect the identities of people accused of illegally possessing turtles, we really can’t make an exception for persons whose names may be connected to Jeffrey Epstein. Not unless we think the best way to oppose Trump is to demolish the legal system as much as he would.
William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”It really does come down to that.
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
Feed them to the turtles.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with that passage from A Man For All Seasons doesn't mention is that 'the law' is not reliably a force for anything good, it is a product of human creation and, especially during the Tudor period, that human creation was massively corrupt even by English historical standards. That was the law that Thomas More served, that was the law that lawyers served and politicians and judges. The law of the United States may be somewhat less corrupt, it serves up something like mercy, especially if you are rich, white, male, straight, a Republican, etc. but not anything like reliably if you are none of the above.
U.S. law is and was flawed from the start by a. the illegitimate process under which the Constitution was drafted and adopted (especially the elections rigging in the several states to make sure that nothing like a majority of voters were involved in those decisions), that the interests of slavers, both those who held People in slavery and those who trafficked in them were the main body of writers of it and they did, in fact, embed not only slavery but the anti-democratic provisions in the very structure of the government that they knew they could depend on to preserve the power of the wealthy and corrupt over something like egalitarian democracy arising is inescapably the overarching edifice of "the law" of the United States. It is the planned and successfully carried out intention of entities like the Federalist Society, the other Lewis Powell inspired stink tanks, the older bastions of lawyers in service to the richest and most corrupt to newly weaponize every provision, either explicit (such as the anti-democratic structure of the judge confirming Senate) or implied or, to not forget, installed by Supreme Court fiat to destroy the piddling progress towards legitimate governance, egalitarian democracy which has been made. Just as the Supreme Court started to overturn the Civil War Amendments almost as soon as the ink was dry on them. America's history has been a struggle of those without wealth and power against ' the law' as embodied in the Constitution and as handed down by the anti-democratic parts of the government which have been most dependably a bulwark against equality and the most basic rights and good to those left out of that. Pretty much the same as the effect of the rule of the Tudors and Stuarts in setting up what would become the British class system and the seediest and sleaziest aspects of the "mother country." There's a reason someone like Alito goes back to them when the Constitutional system here doesn't provide him and his law clerks something depraved enough. It was something that Thomas More served before that one thing he couldn't tolerate, the break with Rome. I've long had a very dim view of Thomas More, despite his Utopia. Maybe the scandal of the modern "Red Mass" phenomenon of some of the hugest sinners among Catholics making a show of going to mass on his feast day and rubbing elbows with bishops and cardinals has something to do with it, too. In the end, that show was just a show, it wasn't history.
The play was hardly history, and Robert Bolt wrote those words. But the argument is the key, not the historical figure.
ReplyDeleteShakespeare’s line, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” is a recipe for anarchy, not for justice. Tearing down the laws to get justice, is simply injustice. Trump wants to do that to have power, although it’s law that has protected him his entire life. SS it protects all of us, to greater or lesser degrees. You may be imprisoned unjustly, but you are never “outlaw,” beyond the law’s protection. (Although Trump tried that in El Salvador. Even he had to release those prisoners.)
Gunn, everybody looks to Nazi Germany for the historical lesson. Nobody looks to the Reign of Terror, though. The Nazis had laws. The Reign of Terror, was lawless, and only about who had the whip hand.
I don’t think we’re he’ll-bound for either, but one extreme is as possible; and yet we never consider that.
That “Gunn” should be “Funny.” It is funny, but not the way I meant.
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