Trump Commuted Philip Esformes' Sentence. Now the DOJ Will Prosecute Him Again.

submitted by Drewski from reason.com

all 4 comments
sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun

[–]hfxB0oyA 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

These are dark times for sure, but let's not pretend that they just appeared out of nowhere. Decades of progressively bad behaviour by both sides jacked up corruption in the legal system to the point where today, all pretense of fairness or impartiality is thrown out of the window.

[–]Drewski[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

archive.today mirror

[–]Drewski[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

"When somebody gets sentenced [at the federal level]…they get sentenced on all charges, even the ones they're acquitted on, [as long as] they get convicted on one count," says Brett Tolman, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Utah who is now the executive director of Right on Crime. It is a little-known, jaw-dropping part of the legal system: Federal judges are, in effect, not obligated to abide by a jury's verdict at sentencing. They can, and do, sentence defendants for conduct on which they were not convicted. In this case, Esformes was already sentenced—and had that sentence commuted—for the crimes that the DOJ now wants to retry.

Department of justice my ass, they are a worthless excuse of a kangaroo court which have no regard for the citizens whose rights they're meant to uphold.

[–]AmandaHuginkiss 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

NO

It's Trump family corruption:

$1.3 billion worth of fraud ...

the Chabad-Lubavitch group of Hasidic Jews, whose leader at the time was involved in the creation of the Aleph Institute in the early 1980s. His father is a rabbi in Florida. His family has also donated for years to the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, to which Mr. Kushner has longstanding ties.

In the announcement of the commutation, the White House said Mr. Esformes had been “devoted to prayer and repentance” while in prison and is in “declining health.”

Alan M. Dershowitz, a longtime supporter of clemency who works with the Aleph Institute on a volunteer basis, said the group “played a significant role” in Mr. Esformes’s clemency effort and “put together the papers” for the petition.

Mr. Trump has largely overridden a highly bureaucratic process overseen by pardon lawyers for the Justice Department and handed considerable control to his closest White House aides, including Mr. Kushner. They, in turn, have outsourced much of the vetting process to political and personal allies, allowing private parties to play an outsize role in influencing the application of one of the most unchecked powers of the presidency.

Among those allies is the Aleph Institute, a well-known force in criminal justice issues which beyond Mr. Esformes’s case has also weighed in on less high-profile clemency requests to Mr. Trump.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/us/politics/trump-pardon-clemency-access.html