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I don't presume to know exactly what happened regarding Trump & Russia, but I had a very good reason for not following every twist and turn of the Mueller investigation- our justice system is incapable of challenging real power
Nine years ago I did follow an investigation of an entire industry caught filing false documents in foreclosure cases. There were millions of pieces of documentary evidence. Nothing happened.
Fast forward to today and I just couldn't get up the energy to follow another investigation of powerful people and what crimes they might have committed, mediated through a justice system tilted in favor of letting powerful people go free
Even the indictments the system managed to produce here were for a) lying to investigators, b) matters that have gone unprosecuted for decades, which would have continued but for being tied up with this case
Lying to investigators happened to be what tripped up Lorraine O'Reilly Brown, the CEO of DocX and the only person jailed for the filing of millions of false documents in foreclosure cases. salon.com/2013/02/24/she…
The lesson is that the justice system isn't currently able to perform against power, as one of the prime critics of this entire situation explored in a book called With Liberty and Justice for Some, which you'd think would be a bigger part of his analysis.
The policy lesson is that the Justice Department needs a top-to-bottom overhaul, from how it gathers evidence to the institutional culture to congressionally mandated changes to the public corruption statute, if we're ever going to have equal justice under law.
And that could just as easily mean building in the same mechanisms to frustrate against long sentences for low-level offenses like drug possession or missing court payments.
Without this overhaul, more hopes of Deus ex Machinae in future cases of corruption or white-collar crime will hit the wall of a set of institutions that simply disallow such flights of imagination.
For the immediate future, the public will need to decide at the ballot box if the rule of law is a priority.
