The prosecution of Michael Flynn was just a subset of a pattern
Days after the U.S. Justice Department moved to dismiss all charges, with prejudice, against former National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn, former president Barack Obama sharply criticized the Justice Department’s action in a conference call with 3,000 Obama administration alumni.
“There is no precedent anyone can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free,” Obama asserted. “That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic — not just institutional norms — but our basic understanding of the rule of law is at risk,” he said.
As an example of kol haposel b’mumo posel, the former president’s critique would be hard to beat. If there are two institutions that must be seen as above political considerations for the rule of law to be preserved, they would be the IRS and the Justice Department/FBI. Both were thoroughly compromised during the Obama presidency.
From 2009 until at least 2011, the IRS turned a jaundiced eye on applications for tax exempt status by conservative and Tea Party groups, as Lois Lerner, the official in charge of tax-exempt organizations, admitted at an American Bar Association conference in 2013. She then contrived to have the hard drive of her computer destroyed, as did six other colleagues, and to plead the Fifth before a congressional committee.
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