Democrats, under the leadership of Joe Biden, have succeeded where the vaunted presidency of Jimmy Carter couldn’t. Richard Nixon was unable to succeed. Where Barack Obama appeared to be headed, but his term ended before success.
They’ve made the United States a “banana republic.”
That’s the verdict from Shawn Fleetwood, who wrote at the Federalist, “Not a week goes by without Democrats weaponizing the federal government to silence their political opponents — and Monday’s court-mandated gag order on former President Donald Trump is no different.”
“Banana republic: Corrupt left-wing judges now decide what Republicans can say while campaigning,” the report was headlined.
The report said, “At the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) request, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan — an Obama appointee — partially granted the department’s motion to institute a gag order on Trump ahead of the 2024 election.”
The ruling from the leftist judge, who openly has unleashed harsh criticism of President Trump not just once but many times, is to ban Trump, the leading contender for the GOP presidential nomination, from issuing statements about Special Counsel Jack Smith, his staff, witnesses and court employees.
Fleetwood explained, “Smith — who indicted Trump in August over the latter’s Jan. 6, 2021, statements contesting the 2020 election — filed the motion in question last month. In his motion, Smith baselessly claimed Trump’s right to speak freely about the government’s crusade to throw him in prison ‘threatens to undermine the integrity of these proceedings’ and defended the request as ‘modest’ and ‘permissible.'”
It also raises huge First Amendment questions, and it’s possible that a higher court may sound off on the censorship scheme hatched by Smith and Chutkan.
The report noted it’s now judges, and leftist judges, judges who have openly taken one side in the dispute by expressing a long history of claiming President Trump should be jailed, who are “deciding what political speech is permissible for candidates to use on the campaign trail.”
The report noted, “Should Trump become the 2024 GOP presidential nominee, his ability to call out the DOJ’s blatant corruption during the election would be severely curtailed. Chutkan’s order allowing Trump to criticize the DOJ while barring him from lamenting Smith and his team is a joke because Smith’s investigation is a part of the Biden administration’s greater attempt to throw their top political opponent in prison during the middle of an election.”
Chutkan has, in fact, opened “the floodgates for the judicial system to restrict a political candidate’s constitutional right to speak freely during an election. What’s to stop Democrat attorneys general or prosecutors from filing flimsy charges against other Republican candidates who (rightly) lament America’s two-tiered justice system and then flocking to leftist judges to institute similar gag orders to bar such criticisms?”
A report at The Gateway Pundit described the situation: “This is complete lawlessness and is meant to silence President Trump as Jack Smith continues to leak to the press on a weekly basis. …”
The report explained, “Chutkan clashed repeatedly with Trump defense lawyer John Lauro, who argued that the effort to limit his client’s out-of-court statements would violate Trump’s First Amendment rights. Lauro also argued that a gag order would adversely impact Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.”
Also at The Federalist, columnist Tristan Justice explained that Chutkan claimed her decision was about language “that presents a danger to the administration of justice.”
Justice noted, however, “The order itself … presents a danger to American democracy. Democrats are already trying to prevent Americans from being given the chance to vote on the former president. Now, far-left activists are wielding the judiciary to prevent Trump from leading an effective campaign. With a more than 45-point lead in the Republican primary, Trump isn’t running against the other candidates attempting to challenge him. He’s running against the Department of Justice, and the Department of Justice under President Joe Biden is running against him with 44 federal indictments to thwart the GOP frontrunner’s triumphant return.”
Chutkan, incidentally, has refused to comply with requests that she remove herself from the case because of her open bias.
The report said Chutkan is “an activist judge with an obvious animus against the former president and his supporters.”
Jordan Boyd wrote at The Federalist that Chutkan’s ruling was “one of the most egregious examples of sweeping state abuse.”
Boyd’s report noted, “Chutkan did not dispute the allegation that she is aiding the Biden administration’s attempts to ‘squelch political speech.’ Instead, she declared that Trump should not have ‘unfettered First Amendment rights.'”
Trump’s team already has committed to an appeal of Chutkan’s political decision.
“Today’s decision is an absolute abomination and another partisan knife stuck in the heart of our Democracy by Crooked Joe Biden, who was granted the right to muzzle his political opponent, the leading candidate for the Presidency in 2024, and the most popular political leader in America, President Donald J. Trump,” a Trump spokesman said in a statement following Chutkan’s order. “President Trump will continue to fight for our Constitution, the American people’s right to support him, and to keep our country free of the chains of weaponized and targeted law enforcement.”
via wnd
