As the Trump team awaits its latest indictment from a politicized Department of Justice, a judge throws out Hunter Biden’s laughably lenient plea deal from the same corrupt bureaucracy.

If you’re troubled by what’s happening to ‘blind’ justice, you’re not alone. After all, the path to tyranny doesn’t really begin with shutting down a free press. As we’ve seen, journalists are more than willing to do that themselves.

Nor does it begin (though it may end) with confiscating firearms in an attempt to ward off any future uprising. No, the first thing every petty potentate does before anything else is weaponize law enforcement and the military. Without doing that, ruling with an iron fist is nearly impossible. (RELATED: FORMER REP. JASON LEWIS: House Republicans Circle The Wagons And Target Their Own — Once Again)

That’s why ‘military coups’ are so prevalent in the most unstable and despotic regimes that are so fond of imprisoning their opponents for the crimes they commit. And if that sounds eerily familiar, read on.

Taking a cue from the Democrats’ failed 2021 impeachment, ‘special counsel’ Jack Smith (the latest in a series) apparently wants to indict Trump for his speech. Specifically, inciting the Jan. 6th chaos at the Capital by boldly declaring what it’s going to take for America to prevail.

“We fight like hell,” said the former President, “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

One can easily point to what he said in the same speech that day, urging supporters to march “…over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” But I won’t, because if routine hyperbole can be used as fodder for political persecution there is little chance of surviving the Orwellian hellscape anyway.

For a Democrat/Media complex intent on destroying its enemies and exonerating its friends, it all “depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” They use language the way Humpty Dumpty did, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

So CNN continues its litany of lies starting with ‘Russian collusion’ and reporters at the Wall Street Journal castigate anyone who doesn’t equate the Jan. 6 “insurrection” with the Confederacy.

In fact, the partisan press has deliberately distorted so many comments from its political opponents that we have reached a point where metaphorical, analogous or even obviously absurd language is mere tool for a dystopian ‘cancel culture.’

War is peace; speech is violence.

Elon Musk’s Twitter dump made it clear how the real ‘collusion’ worked between the deep state and what became ‘state-run’ social media. At least for everyone (including a federal judge) except those journalists who’ve tried to censor a story about how they censored so many other stories—from COVID to Hunter’s laptop to Ukraine.

One high-ranking member of Twitter’s pre-Musk Strategic Response Team (SRT) responsible for shadow-banning conservatives was formerly employed at, wait for it…the FBI and CIA.

The same CIA whose top officials, like John Brennan, had briefed the Obama-Biden White House on Hillary Clinton’s secret plan to “vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.”

James Comey’s FBI ran with her fabricated ‘dossier’ as the pretext to entrap Gen. Michael Flynn and obtain secret FISA surveillance warrants to eavesdrop on Trump officials. He ignored the Clinton machinations, at least until he felt Hillary’s emails were about to go public along with Anthony Weiner’s.

The crux of the Durham report can be summed up like this: the Kremlin discovered a plan by Trump’s opponents to tie him to the hacking of the infamous DNC emails. Pinning classified leaks on him would work out far better for Clinton, whose constant denials about her ‘classified’ conversations with aides on a private email server opened her up to charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Not to mention Mar-A-Lago raid-type charges if we had one standard of justice. But we don’t.

In 2022, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) belatedly sent a letter fining Hillary’s 2016 presidential campaign and the DNC for failing to accurately report the funding of the infamous ‘Steele dossier’ as “legal services.” Her campaign had instead listed it as opposition research. 

Trump got a bizarre New York indictment over far less campaign finance nonsense.

Even after all this went down, by the time 2020 rolled around, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and his buddies were busy covering up for the Bidens Burisma bribery and pay-to-play schemes in China.

In one of the more disgraceful episodes in American history, 51 U.S. intelligence officials released a false statement on the eve of the election claiming the Hunter Biden laptop story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

In the wake of IRS whistleblowers and FBI documents clearly showing the opposite, Christopher Wray and his boss, AG Merrick Garland, are tying themselves in knots trying to explain how Hunter got the softest plea deal possible while the ‘QAnon Shaman’ with the funny coyote-tail hat and 330 of his cohorts got prison time for, among other things, ‘seditious conspiracy.’

But permanently banishing their adversaries to the political wilderness (if not, jail) was always the ultimate goal.

Democrat ‘dirty trickster’ Marc Elias (up to his neck in bankrolling the ‘dossier’ and vote-by-mail schemes) had already suggested that a North Carolina representative was ineligible to run for re-election because his comments about Jan. 6th made him an ‘insurrectionist’ ineligible under the 14th Amendment.

A federal judge saw through it, but that’s no obstacle for Garland’s DOJ who now wants to jail Trump for giving “aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” Contemplating such action against an opposing candidate for exercising his right to free speech isn’t just wrongheaded, it’s the motherlode of election interference.

Under Garland, the Justice Department has targeted the parents of school children as well as “sifted through the National Security Agency’s massive troves of foreign communications” for info on ‘domestic extremists,’ which has now morphed into a convenient euphemism for an enemies list.

The melding of federal law enforcement with the national security apparatus is precisely what the founders feared and entirely predictable without the guardrails necessary for a constitutional Republic. It’s high time Congress exercises one of those guardrails and defunds the FBI and the CIA. (RELATED: DAVID BOSSIE: We’ve Seen Enough — It’s Time To Impeach Joe Biden)

When the consolidation of federal power was starting to emerge, a few notable skeptics took notice. In 1940, future Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson warned U.S. attorneys about “the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get rather that pick cases that need to be prosecuted.”

Fast forward to the electronic age and we find that the Feds are amassing reams of personal information on its own citizens from their daily transactions, according to a recent report delivered to the DNI.

None of it is necessary to keep us safe.

Before the FBI, there were Treasury agents; before the CIA, we had the OSS. They were smaller, accountable and apolitical. All of which made them far less likely to forfeit the one thing necessary to govern in a free society—trust.

Former Congressman Jason Lewis is the author of Party Animal, The Truth About President Trump, Power Politics and the Partisan Press. He also writes at jasonlewis.substack.com.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

This article was originally published on the author’s Substack page, which can be viewed here.

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