The stench from the Sussmann verdict

“…Democracies cannot survive without public trust. Citizens must be confident that their elected officials represent their interests, at least in broad terms, and are not corrupt, self-dealing con men. They must believe the courts dispense justice fairly and equally, that there’s not one set of rules for insiders and another for everyone else. They understand that complex societies require bureaucracies and that bureaucracies are inherently non-democratic, but they want the bureaucracies’ rules and procedures to be subject to laws, passed by elected officials, overseen by them, and applied evenly. For transparency, they depend on newspapers and television and, in recent years, on websites and social media.

These essential elements of stable democracy are encompassed by two words: “trust” and “fairness.” For democracies to thrive, citizens must trust the four core elements of their government: the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and the bureaucracies which pass and implement most of the day-to-day rules. A crucial element of that trust is the belief that each individual gets a fair shake. That means he won’t be arrested or fined because of the color of his skin or his religion. If he has to go to court, it means he’ll get a fair trial, with an even-handed judge and a jury of his peers. He won’t be pilloried by a biased judge who doesn’t like his politics. His case will be decided by a jury that weighs the evidence without prejudice. The public also has a right to see that trials are handled fairly, without bias.

Every one of those basic tenets was violated in Michael Sussmann’s trial for lying to the FBI. We know now that a Washington, DC jury has found him not guilty, though it is still unclear whether they believed he didn’t lie, or the government didn’t prove it, or it didn’t matter to a politically biased FBI, which was determined to investigate anything connected to Donald Trump. We also know something more: the whole case is drenched in the sulfurous smell of the Washington Swamp…”