Double Standard Of Left-Wing Lawyers

By John J. Duncan Jr.

duncanj@knoxfocus.com

Last week, I wrote about the double standard we seem to have in our very unfair legal system today.

This is seen most clearly in the way Hillary Clinton was treated for false reports by her campaign for funds spent on the infamous Steele dossier and the way Donald Trump has been treated for misreporting funds spent in regard to the infamous "Stormy Daniels."

Only a person blinded by partisan hatred for Mr. Trump could not see the unfairness in the ways these two cases were handled. About the only similarity is that both arose out of the 2016 presidential campaign.

In 2022, the Federal Election Commission fined Hillary Clinton $113,000, which was probably paid by her campaign.

Donald Trump, who was found by the FEC not to have violated any campaign finance law, was arrested and had to spend millions, and had to go through a lengthy trial to fight charges which most lawyers said were not crimes.

Another blatant double standard is especially disappointing to me because of my connection to the Duncan School of Law at Lincoln Memorial University. I am proud of this law school and its very high bar passage rate.

But I thought it was terrible when over 6,000 law professors and law students signed a petition requesting (or demanding) that Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley be disbarred simply because they questioned the results of the 2020 election.

Sen. Cruz is a graduate of both Princeton and Harvard, served as solicitor general of Texas, and was described by longtime Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz as "one of the best students I ever had."

Sen. Hawley is a graduate of Stanford and Yale Law School, was a law professor, and served as the attorney general of Missouri before being elected to the Senate.

Both men are obviously brilliant and were very well-respected lawyers before they had the audacity to raise legitimate questions about the 2020 election.

Former President Jimmy Carter chaired a committee in 2012 which said we could never have totally secure elections "with widespread use of mail-in ballots." No election has ever had anywhere close to the number of mail-in ballots as what floated around in the 2020 election.

Another example of the double standard is the way Democrats were able to question the 2016 election with no criticism while Republicans who questioned the 2020 election were roundly condemned

I was still in Congress in 2017 and was on the floor of the U.S. House when the formal counting of the ballots and announcement of the vote from each state was made for the 2016 election.

Many Democrats from several states rose to object as the vote from their state was announced. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were very public in their questioning of that election, yet neither they nor any of the Congressional objectors were ever criticized.

Now some leading Democrats want Donald Trump – and even some Republican electors – to go to prison for activities they made in sincere questioning of illegal ballots in 2020.

Another double standard was close to being carried out when Hunter Biden was about to be given the sweetheart deal of the century until a courageous judge in Delaware refused to accept it. It is a very rare thing for any judge to refuse to accept a guilty plea.

Finally, in two very high crime areas – Atlanta and New York City – all kinds of very serious crimes are not being prosecuted while two district attorneys in those cities and the state attorney general of New York continue to prosecute Donald Trump in cases where no crime has been committed.

It is a horrible misuse of the legal system when candidates get elected on promises to "Get Trump" and then follow through by creating victimless crimes never even heard of before.

Trump was wrong to have his affairs, and liberals have salivated over and loved every sexual detail, almost all of which had nothing to do with the charges against him.

And while it is not a legal double standard, it is certainly a political one to condemn Donald Trump for his very brief time with "Stormy Daniels" and never mention the many affairs of liberal heroes like John Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Lyndon Johnson.