My first experience with law enforcement being sold out to partisan interests arose out of a program, in which, as I recall, New York University Law School was involved, to place anti-fossil fuel lawyers in state attorney generals’ offices to sue oil companies. The effort was funded by left-wing money. So the far left was able to use public authorities to pursue its extremist agenda, courtesy of secret left-wing donors. This happened in Minnesota and a number of other states.
Now the same thing is going on, with left-wing money funding political prosecutions of federal law enforcement. At the Free Beacon, Jessica Costescu has the story:
A coalition of progressive prosecutors promising to target federal immigration agents has amassed a war chest funded by secret donors with the help of left-wing networks. Legal experts said the arrangement is “terribly corrupt”…
Spoiler alert: the legal expert is me.
…and blurs the lines between legitimate law enforcement and politically motivated prosecutions.
This is what is happening:
The Project for the Fight Against Federal Overreach—or FAFO, an acronym that also stands for “fuck around and find out” in internet lingo—was formed by two George Soros-funded prosecutors, Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner and Mary Moriarty of Hennepin County, Minn., after federal officials shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti as they interfered with immigration enforcement operations in Minneapolis. Several elected district attorneys have said Krasner, who pledged to target ICE agents “the way they hunted down Nazis for decades,” personally recruited them.
The group has said it aims to “hold federal officials accountable when they exceed their lawful authority” and regularly meets to strategize. But rather than using taxpayer dollars to carry out its mission, FAFO members say operations are fully funded by outside donors.
One member, Norfolk, Va., commonwealth’s attorney Ramin Fatehi, said during a Feb. 19 interview that the group has “money in a lock box that has been pledged for us … so that we can bring in the top lawyers in the country,” which will be available to “anybody who has a federal official that they’re prosecuting.”
So private, left-wing money is available to fund public prosecutions of ICE agents, but no one else. There is a fundamental reason why only the state can bring criminal prosecutions. Private organizations and individuals can do many things, but they can’t put each other in prison. Attorneys general and prosecuting attorneys are elected by voters not to pursue partisan vendettas, but to use public resources to pursue public law enforcement priorities. Private funding of particular prosecutions is antithetical to the most basic principles of fairness in law enforcement.
John Hinderaker, president of the Minnesota-based think tank Center of the American Experiment, called it “a terribly corrupt arrangement.”
“That is not a situation that you want, where law enforcement is available to the highest bidder in any direction,” he said. “It’s something that should be exposed and should be fought.”
More at the link.
Some people assume that government corruption means bribe-taking, but that is only one form of corruption. There are others. I have sometimes said that Minnesota has the most corrupt government of any state, not because its officials take bribes, but because they pervert the tools of government power to pursue partisan interests and to enable crime by favored constituencies. And what could be more corrupt than the funding of partisan political prosecutions by left-wing dark money?
