Who Started the Lawfare Era? – by Matt Taibbi – Racket News

How one feels about any of this likely begins with how one views various cases and investigations. Were the 1,500 people imprisoned after January 6th terrorists, or political casualties? Was the movement to use the Insurrection Act to keep Trump off the ballot legitimate, or abusive? How about jailing people like Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro on contempt of Congress charges for the first time since the McCarthy era? Would the 100-plus criminal counts against Trump have been filed against anyone, or were they political (or are both partly true)? Was there nothing untoward in the role major law firms played in Russiagate, or did such episodes show the dangers of keeping private corporate defense firms and intelligence/law enforcement so intertwined? Is that ODC case against Martin just good regulation, or is it itself lawfare and retaliation?

If you don t think any of those pre-2025 actions were lawfare, you ll clearly object to the current administration s high-handed tactics. If like me you had hopes this presidency might somehow break the cycle, you re likely also unnerved.

Months into the new presidency, however, it s clear officials in a White House led by a man who d likely be in jail if he didn t just win an election feel they re still at war. We didn t make these rules, they did, is how one voice close to the administration put it.

If politics has transformed into a ruleless rock fight, the development likely pre-dated Trump. Even though it s now clearly part of the Trump/anti-Trump battle, the Peruvian toll road case that escalated this week started off as an early window into the chicken-egg conundrum of the lawfare era. If a whole system is crooked, to what extremes may an institutionally outmanned player, like a South American city, resort to in fighting back?

via www.racket.news