There are some stories appearing in the past week which have deeply puzzled, and mildly alarmed, your humble Veritaspac ‘staff’.
As alleged by those geniuses who write for the totally discredited liberal media, we are however, uniquely ill-equipped intellectually to understand all of this, because:
1) of our support for the Trump presidency and most of the things Mr. Trump seeks to accomplish. As a voting bloc we are invariably described as under-educated, simple folk, and,
2) we are the curious inhabitants of the mysterious “flyover country” where quaint ideas like those embedded in the Constitution are cherished and respected…and, we believe, are meant to be interpreted as they were intended and written.
Obviously, either or both of these two things is disqualifying as far as having a valid political view these days, according to the left. Heck with that. Here are the story items we found troubling:
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Item 1: “Attorneys for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl… (according to news reports last week)… want to ask potential jurors in a court-martial for their views on President Trump and whether they voted for him…”. They also suggest, knowing you would not be authorized to leave your post, leaving it anyway is not intentional.
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Item 2: After relinquishing the House Oversight Committee gavel this month, Rep.Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said he thinks the Trump administration isn’t any better about government transparency than the Obama administration.
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Item 3: On Monday, Judicial Watch announced that it hit a dead end in its effort to dig out information about why White House advisor Susan Rice ordered an “unmasking” of Trump campaign officials in classified reports. In response to Judicial Watch’s April 4 request for materials related to these unmasking requests — to determine whether they were politically motivated
— the National Security Council said it had sent all those records to Obama’s presidential library, where they can’t be released for five years (italics ours).
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Let’s take the first ‘item’: Without benefit of deep knowledge of the arcane logic of the legal community, we think this is an easy one.
Bergdahl’s lawyers want to ask prospective jurors if they voted for Trump?!
Of course we know why they’d want to do that…to exclude such weird beings as Trump voters from serving on the jury. Trump, as a candidate, had more or less opined what most Americans already knew…Bowe Bergdahl was a deserter, who walked away from his ‘brothers in the field’ to join the enemy.
Thus, in the minds of Bowe’s lawyers, such a person who would vote for Mr. Trump is automatically prejudging their client. Can’t have that!
Okay, so whatever happened to the “sanctity” of the secret ballot?
Now obviously we know there are all kinds of “legal experts” out there who can argue eloquently that it is not unprecedented to ask who a prospective juror voted for (I don’t actually know if that’s true, but what has truth got to do with anything in the current “justice system”?).
So…again, okay. Were I a prospective juror, this would be no problem for me. I would simply employ the ever popular “Clinton Gambit”.
Everybody knows that one. Ask me who I voted for in November 2016: “I’m sorry. I don’t recall.” (At the last unofficial count, this worked 18,000 times for Hillary.)
But there’s another aspect of this that puzzles me.
Why should candidate Trump’s “pre-judgement” of Sgt. Bergdahl be any more relevant to this question of the latter’s guilt to the charge of desertion than President (at the time) Obama’s* Rose Garden judgment, which was later bolstered by Susan “truth and nuthin’ but the truth” Rice, both of whom attested to Bergdahl’s service with “honor and distinction” and his priceless value to our national security that 5 leaders of the Taliban could be traded for Bowe’s freedom?
“Did you vote for President Obama in 2012 and/or 2016? And what are your views on Mr. Obama’s assessment* of Sgt. Bergdahl’s military service?”
That would be my followup question to Mr. Bergdahl’s lawyers’ interrogatories.
It should be noted here that a judge has refused to allow Bergdahl’s attorneys to ask who prospective jurors voted for in their written interrogatories. He did, however, say that he’d “allow wide latitude” in verbal questioning. That seems to us like a distinction without a difference.
What else seems to us ‘simple folk’ is that in trying Sgt. Bergdahl for desertion and aid to the enemy, judgement should be based on the facts and evidence…not on the opinions of the last two guys who were elected president.
But, of course, in this era of “Susan Rice in Wonderland”, when deceit and disgrace is described as “honor and distinction”, and given the former FBI director’s curious understanding of his role, the verdict is apt to come down something like, “while Sgt. Bergdahl did, indeed, desert and give aid to the enemy, we could find no evidence that he intended to. Thus, no responsible Court Martial could ever deliver a conviction based on our ‘non-findings’.”
(Yes, we are being facetious in speculating that overwhelming evidence will find that Bergdahl did “desert” and “misbehave” before the enemy, but could not be convicted because he “didn’t intend to”.)
We believe, though, this isn’t perhaps as outlandish an outcome as we might think. The actual charge, we understand is that Bergdahl is charged with “desertion with intent to shirk important or hazardous duty…”.
(Would somebody on the court-martial panel like a Jim Comey need anything more than that? )
{*Obama: “Bob and Jani, today families across America share in the joy that I know you feel. As a parent, I can’t imagine the hardship that you guys have gone through. As President, I know that I speak for all Americans when I say we cannot wait for the moment when you are reunited and your son, Bowe, is back in your arms.”}
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Hey it’s a swamp. Don’t despair of not having more to despair about. We’ll deal with items 2 and 3 later this week. We’ve just worn ourselves out with this one. Feel free, though, to comment on any of these stories in the meantime.
DLH
