In the States, an investigation is presently under way into the possibly criminal behavior of Hunter Biden and ultimately, perhaps, the corruption of his entire family. Here in Canada, both the legality of Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act as well as his party’s cooperation with certain resident Chinese Communists who reputedly contributed to the victories of various Liberal candidates in the last two federal elections, are also under investigation. The problem is that in each case the judicial figures assigned to conduct these inquiries appear to be decidedly biased towards those who so cynically appointed them.
Recently, Attorney General Merrick Garland named David Weiss “special counsel” in the investigation of Hunter Biden’s financial dealings. Nominated by Trump in 2017, U.S. attorney for Delaware since 2018 where he had already been investigating Hunter, his selection by Garland was nevertheless ridiculed as a “joke” by various Republicans. You see in June, just a couple of months ago, Weiss had granted a plea deal to Hunter which basically let him off the hook for income tax irregularities as well as a gun related felony. While apparently a Republican, he clearly did not seem eager to pursue the issue of Hunter’s multitude of other suspicious dealings. Significantly, District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika refused to validate the plea deal he had engineered.
Ironically, in 2022, 30 or so Republican Senators had implored Garland to appoint Weiss as special counsel in the case at hand. A New Yorker piece of Aug. 14 accused them of hypocrisy, asking why they were now complaining about the special counsel that they asked for in the first place. The answer, of course, is obvious, Weiss’ plea deal suggesting, perhaps as a result of a personal loathing for Donald Trump, that he wasn’t really interested in demonizing the Bidens. Astoundingly, however, various media outlets generally sympathetic to every Leftist bias imaginable, suggested they fully understood the Republican outrage!
On Fri., Aug 11, CNN’s Jake Tapper said Garland’s appointment of Weiss was “very suspicious.” In an effort to assure an appropriate level of objectivity, he asserted, such counsels are generally culled from those outside the political realm. Given that Garland has stated Weiss actively sought the position, Tapper wondered why the latter was seeking to oversee a prosecution he had already shown himself to be reluctant to pursue. CBS reporter Catherine Herridge made the very same points. These “mainstream” media figures were in fact validating the narrative of the decidedly “conservative” Judicial Watch which was appalled that an individual who, according to several IRS informants, had done his best to stifle the Justice Department’s earlier investigations of the Biden family’s finances, should now be allowed to oversee the latest phase of that very same investigation. It is not outlandish to suggest that the mindless self-righteousness of the Left has now made the fair ministration of Justice impossible in Biden’s America.
The assignment of District of Columbia Judge Tanya S. Chutkan to preside over the latest charges against Donald Trump is politically motivated and utterly disgusting. A vocal Trump hater, her sentences against various Jan. 6 “insurrectionists” actually exceeded those requested by the DOJ. In one case she gave 5 years to an individual who, precisely because he was unarmed, had dared attack the Capital police with a fire extinguisher. So while thousands across Canada and the States guilty of multiple acts of violence are customarily released on bail by “compassionate” Leftist judges, a Trump Republican is going away for 5 years for one unconscionably dumb bur relatively harmless expression of political dissent. But is not the bias evident in Chutkan, who is a Jamaican woman of color, just another aspect of the widespread Cultural Bias that led the “insurrectionists” to suspect that the election had actually been stolen from Trump? Moreover how utterly corrupt is a political regime which puts a “Justice” who clearly hates the former president in charge of his ultimate fate?
Things are no better in Canada. The Parliamentary Committee assigned to investigate the legality of Justine Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act in 2022 was loaded with Liberals and headed by a Justice clearly sympathetic to the Prime Minister. I need hardly point out the committee ruled in Trudeau’s favor. Yet the Canadian Civil Liberties Association deemed the ruling a travesty, suggesting the inconveniences caused by the trucker convoy were nowhere near the dire threat to Canada’s Democracy for which the Act had originally been designed. Called The War Measure’s Act in 1970 when it was last invoked, it was then used to suppress the FLQ [Front de liberation du Quebec] whose very name suggests its intent to break up the Canadian federation. Were the inconveniences to the citizens of Ottawa caused by an invasion of truckers which included public barbeques, children playing on trampolines and even the feeding of the poor, the sort of revolutionary threat which the Act was designed to suppress? No one is suggesting arrests were not in order, but Trudeau’s stratagem allowed the authorities to commit such otherwise illegal acts as the confiscation of people’s personal bank accounts! To those of us convinced that respect for the Rule of Law is essential to the health of any functioning Democracy [i.e., “conservatives”], the Emergencies Act was simply the most obvious example of the Left’s arrogant assumption that, inasmuch as it is right about everything, it need not be bound by the Rule of Law.
Trudeau showed the same lack of respect for that principle in March when he appointed former Governor General David Johnston to head a committee charged with investigating the possibility that various individuals with Chinese Communist affiliations had interfered in Canadian elections in both 2019 and 2021. A Global News report, for example, suggested at least 11 candidates, 9 of them Liberal, had been thrust to victory by such interference in the Federal Election of 2019! Conservatives critical of China, apparently, were specifically targeted for failure.
Skeptical, or at least pretending to be skeptical that he had been abetted by such interference, Justine Trudeau defended the purity of the Canadian electoral process. What enraged many Conservatives, however, was that the man he had chosen to investigate the issue had been a friend of the Trudeau family from the days of Justine’s youth. While admitting that relationship, David Johnston swore he had had no significant social interaction with the Trudeaus for the past 40 years. His conclusion, however, that no inquiry was necessary, was predictably greeted with skepticism. In June, in response to the furor caused by that ruling, he resigned from his position, saying he was appalled that his seeming “conflict of interest” had been interpreted as a violation of the Rule of Law. It was an honorable decision based upon a genuine concern for the Integrity of Canada’s Democracy. What I found most interesting, however, was the effort of the “intellectual” Left to impugn the very notion of a “conflict of interest.”
On May 26, the CBC published an article on its website citing U. of Toronto’s Hugh Gunz and other “experts” who maintain that a conflict of interest “isn’t entirely a matter of fact” but rather is highly dependent on “public perception.” The article is a masterpiece of Postmodern B.S., its ultimate implication being that no one really ever knows the Truth though the “sophisticates” given to that belief insist you accept their “truth” without reservation! It is the arrogant, duplicitous ploy used daily by the political Left, a stratagem which in effect says your belief that both Biden and Trudeau have little respect for the Rule of Law and the integrity of their respective Democracies, has little to do with Fact, but is simply a product of your uninformed, “populist” ignorance.
It is the ploy which allows the Left to ignore Empirical Facts with daily regularity: the Facts of History, the Facts of Human Biology, indeed the very Facts of what it means to be a Thinking, Intelligent, Moral Being!