Left’s Leniency on Its Political Violence Demonstrates Its Devotion to Injustice

Protesters gather in front of a liquor store in flames near the Third Police Precinct in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 28, 2020. Kerem Yucel/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

The deafening silence over the alleged plot to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, combined with the left’s lenient prosecutions of Black Lives Matter (BLM) rioters, while Capitol breachers are treated like terrorists, provides yet another crystal-clear illustration of the bad faith with which the left operates, and the devotion to injustice to which it adheres.

The likes of The New York Times and the Sunday shows don’t want to talk about the very real murder plot that put a man armed with a Glock, two magazines and ammo, a “black tactical chest rig and tactical knife, ... pepper spray, zip ties, a hammer, screwdriver, nail punch, crow bar, pistol light, [and] duct tape” on his person a stone’s throw from Kavanaugh’s house for more than a half an hour before his surrender to police and indictment on charges of attempted murder of a U.S. judge.

The president won’t talk about it either.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is shockingly mum.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is dismissive of it, after she and her colleagues for weeks held up legislation to beef up security for judges.

Why?

Is this not a hugely consequential story?

Is it not incredibly disturbing?

Is this plot not the stuff of insurrections—going far beyond an attempt to obstruct the deliberations—the proceedings—of the Supreme Court, to an effort to alter the Dobbs opinion through murder?

Why isn’t the Justice Department, so deeply concerned with “threats to democracy,” prosecuting the people breaking the law weekly by menacing Supreme Court judges outside their homes?

The answer lies in the fact that to focus on this plot, and put an end to the progressive mob’s attempts to intimidate judges, isn’t politically useful, particularly when, in 2022 and in the midst of the Jan. 6 Soviet-style show trial, the sole narrative these forces want to drum into the American mind is that it’s their political opponents who are domestic terrorists.

They can’t be distracted by plots to kill judges who might rule in ways they don’t like on matters like abortion, and that send a message to other judges as to the fate they might face should they rule “wrongly.”

They can’t be troubled by the fact their pro-abortion allies are firebombing and otherwise attacking pro-life centers across the country and threatening more, and perhaps worse.

The Jan. 6 Committee itself clams up when asked if it would probe the vastly more deathly and destructive political violence that exploded on U.S. streets for months by like-minded Antifa/BLM-and-adjacent rioters during the summer of 2020.

It’s remarkable in fact to contrast Democratic leaders’ heated and hostile rhetoric, correlating with these acts, with former President Donald Trump instructing protesters on Jan. 6 to “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard at the Capitol—a statement made after the breach had already begun.

Leftist political violence in America—which has persisted for decades, exploding particularly from the 1960s onwards—is to be ignored if not treated as acceptable.

And that holds not just in the court of public opinion but in the court of law.

Consider some of the sweetheart deals the Biden Justice Department has inked with perpetrators of some of the most violent acts of the summer 2020 riots.

During those riots, two New York lawyers, Urooj Rahman and Colinford Mattis, allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail into a New York Police Department vehicle. They faced domestic terrorism charges and up to 30 years in jail. Yet, earlier this month, the Biden administration and the accused consummated a plea agreement that, as constitutional lawyer and professor Jonathan Turley details, resulted in a massive reduction in charges likely to only result in two years of jail time.

The pair had initially pleaded guilty to one count of possessing and making an explosive device, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

Now, Turley writes: “They will be allowed to withdraw the earlier plea and instead plead guilty to conspiring to assemble the Molotov cocktail and damage the New York Police Department patrol car. That is a nosebleed of a drop in the severity and punishment for this violent attack.

“It is a sharp contrast to the harsh position taken by the Biden Justice Department on many of those accused of rioting on January 6th. Attorney General Merrick Garland cited the threat to police officers in pledging an unprecedented effort to charge and convict those involved ‘on any level’ in the riot.

“Conspiring to assemble the Molotov cocktail and damage the New York Police Department patrol car does not quite capture what these two attorneys did during the violent riot in New York. Rahman was caught on video throwing the firebomb and then fleeing the scene. Colinford Mattis was accused of having a store of firebombs in his vehicle and was videotaped as he attempted to hand them out to other rioters to fuel further violence. Rahman later was unapologetic and declared to reporters that ’the only way they hear us is through violence.'”

These weren’t the only rioters let off the hook.

As Republican Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) highlighted in a letter (pdf) to Garland, his Justice Department breathtakingly dropped an arson charge against a man accused of attempting to ignite another NYPD vehicle after allegedly lighting a cloth glove on fire and putting it under said vehicle. The NYPD claims this was all caught on video. The perp, Victor A. Sanchez-Santa, faced a minimum mandatory sentence of five years in prison and up to 20 years on the high end.

Yet after deferring his prosecution for nine months, and after Sanchez-Santa completed anger-management courses, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for New York’s Southern District concluded that “further prosecution ... would not be in the interests of justice.”

These cases follow those of the likes of Montez Lee, who burned down a Minneapolis pawn shop, killing a father of five during the riots, yet was solely charged with arson, and, at the Biden DOJ’s request, only sentenced to 10 years in prison when sentencing guidelines called for a prison stint two times as long—with the DOJ invoking Martin Luther King Jr.’s words in so making their case for leniency. The same Justice Department had previously supported mass dismissals and deferred prosecutions in federal cases against Portland, Oregon’s summer 2020 rioters.

While these individuals walk free, there are dozens of Capitol breachers who have been held in pretrial detention in horrid conditions in Washington for months, some of whom won’t go to trial for well over a year, many facing non-violent trumped-up trespassing charges.

As Banks summarizes it: “The Department of Justice is operating under a two-tiered system of justice. Violent rioters who are likely to vote Democrats are often released with a slap on the wrist, or less, while January 6th defendants are prosecuted to the harshest extent possible. The unequal application of justice is an injustice, and your politicization of federal law-enforcement is an attack on the basic American principle of equal justice before the law.”

There is parallelism in blue cities, where leftist district attorneys too have treated criminality as acceptable.

In the former instance, the left justifies its political violence by claiming the perpetrators are righteously angry about societal injustice. In the latter, the left justifies leniency by claiming that society is at fault for criminal behavior and that legal punishment only victimizes the criminals further.

Thankfully, as can be seen in the recall of Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, and the fact his Los Angeles counterpart, George Gascon, might face a similar fate, there’s a brewing backlash against progressives for being soft on crime.

But there ought to be an equivalent backlash against progressives who are hard on thought crimes—that is who criminalize political dissent and punish dissenters more harshly than their partisans.

Actual justice demands it.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.