Feds Spy On Bannon's Attorney?
Did Biden's politicized DOJ violate attorney-client privilege to do Nancy Pelosi's dirty work?
In America, the sanctity of attorney-client privilege has been protected for centuries as a minimum prerequisite for any citizen to mount a defense against the awesome power of government law enforcement and prosecution. But in recent years, the highly politicized Department of Justice increasingly attacks all kinds of long-established Constitutional safeguards, legal precedents, and just plain standards of decency.
Why? To use the law to pursue political enemies – to exploit the vast resources of federal jurisprudence to intimidate and punish those who oppose the prerogatives of the political ruling class.
Other than President Trump himself, no citizen has done more to expose the corruption of that ruling class than Stephen K. Bannon, which is why he faces a capricious and unprecedented prosecution right now. Adding to that injustice, the bombshell court motion just filed by Bannon’s legal team reveals that the Biden DOJ secretly scoured the phone and email records of Bannon’s attorney. As reported by the left-leaning Politico: “prosecutors appear to have obtained court orders to access phone and email records of a prominent attorney for Steve Bannon, who is fighting criminal charges for defying a subpoena from the Jan. 6 select committee.”
As Bannon’s filing makes clear, his attorney Robert Costello was effectively spied upon by the very DOJ that now prosecutes Bannon: “many of Costello’s email logs were provided to prosecutors on Dec. 7 under the auspices of a so-called 2703 order, which doesn’t always require notice to the customer. The letters reference a 2703 order dated Nov. 11, a day before Bannon was indicted.”
Not surprisingly, Bannon’s motion assails these DOJ actions as “outrageous and inappropriate government conduct.” With characteristic Bannon flair, his 155-page motion also describes the DOJ’s initial reaction to his request for full discovery into the government’s spying. Prosecutors sought to simply avoid the whole issue with a dismissive and curt response that “mirrors a scene from John Huston’s film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, where an American character played by Humphrey Bogart questions the legal authority of a group posing as law enforcement agents, only to get the reply: ‘Badges? . . . We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!’”
But, they actually do have to show their “badges” here, because stringent rules regarding any government surveillance of attorneys involved in prosecutions exist to protect the Sixth Amendment rights of any citizen to efficacious representation. If those rules were violated, which seems highly likely, then a full dismissal of the case becomes the only suitable remedy.
But, regardless of the misconduct of prosecutors in this realm of the case vs. Bannon, much larger questions loom. First, specific to Bannon, why this massive overreaction by the Biden DOJ? Battles over Executive Privilege and over compliance with Congressional inquiries and subpoenas occur regularly and the norm is for such cases to be adjudicated in civil court, not criminal proceedings. After all, when Biden was Vice-President, his own Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress, just like Bannon, and there were zero repercussions for Holder.
It seems clear that this Bannon indictment, and concomitant abuse of attorney-client privilege, form the latest weaponization of prosecutorial power for political means. For years, federal agents illegally and secretly monitored and targeted Donald Trump, both before and after his 2016 election. Now, they continue to attack the foremost strategist of the Trump movement, Steve Bannon.
This same brazen level of bias also explains the DOJ’s targeting of regular citizens, people without the resources of Trump or Bannon. Consider, for example, the DOJ’s incredibly harsh treatment of the January 6th defendants, the vast majority of whom were not violent and, regardless, faced pre-dawn arrest raids, prolonged pre-trial detention, and maximum sentencing. Then, consider alternatively the inexplicably lenient DOJ approach to Mohamed Hussein Abdi. During the height of the viciously violent Minneapolis riots of 2020, he set fire to a school, as a supposed protest over the George Floyd killing. For this crime, the DOJ recommended a minimum sentence, and this convicted arsonist received only probation.
So, the Bannon charges reflect the larger issue, the clear existence of two sets of rules in an era of politicized federal law enforcement. In addition, the DOJ’s total abuse of power related to spying on Bannon’s attorney should worry anyone concerned with the erosion of civil liberties in America, regardless of any ideological agreement with Bannon or the movement he represents.
The Truckers protest is an inspiration to all who embrace freedom.
Thank you for exposing, once again, the egregious, unlawful conduct of the DOJ. We only have the courts, on an interim basis, to hold them at bay, until a massive purge is taken by the next POTUS, DJT.