“System Update” journalist Glenn Greenwald marvels at the hypocrisy of political elites, who spent years prosecuting Donald Trump, are now saying it is a threat to our democracy to prosecute high-level political officials like those identified as part of the “Russiagate” conspiracy.

GLENN GREENWALD: So often in American politics, this ethos emerges among mainstream media outlets, among mainstream journalists, among the Washington political class in both parties-that when it comes to political elites, we have to let bygones be bygones. When it comes to financial elites, we have to let bygones be bygones. It’s too disruptive, it’s too inappropriate, it’s too distracting to go and prosecute Wall Street barons just because they caused a global economic meltdown. They’re too important for our economy. We can’t be suing Wall Street tycoons and investment banks. These are not the people who belong in a criminal court. And the same thing happens every time there are political elites who seem to have engaged in potential criminality, and all of Washington unites to say: we’re not a country that prosecutes our political elites and former government officials. That’s only what banana republics do. And I think it’s a very real question: is a country more of a banana republic if they announce or basically effectively decide that high-level political elites and high-level financial elites are going to be immunized from crimes on the grounds that looking backward is too disruptive? We only have to look forward. I mean-looking backward is what’s required for prosecution of every crime. Or is it more of a banana republic to hold people accountable in high levels of government when they commit crimes? I would argue the latter. Obviously, you don’t want an endless array of lawfare and abuse of the legal process to imprison people. And it’s, of course, ironic-probably should go without saying-but the very people now who are expressing such indignation, like How dare the Trump administration even talk about prosecuting former government officials and the other party? This is the stuff of banana republics-all these same people were so devoted to prosecuting Donald Trump once he left the White House and trying to imprison him so he couldn’t run again in 2024. They first tried to get him kicked off the ballot. When that didn’t work, they brought felony prosecutions in four different jurisdictions: two in state courts (one in Atlanta, one in Manhattan), and then two federal prosecutions (one in Miami, one in Washington). So to watch these people say, Oh, it’s a threat to our democracy to prosecute high-level political officials, it’s the kind of thing banana republics do,-it’s enough to make you want to vomit. Like, you choke on their insincerity and hypocrisy. But I was never opposed to prosecuting Trump because I believe that former presidents should be immune. I was opposed to prosecuting President Trump because I didn’t think that any of those four cases have any legal validity of any kind. Lots of people who believe that will say, Oh, I think the classified documents case in South Florida-the one that alleges that he took classified documents without authorization to his Mar-a-Lago home and then refused to turn them over-that was the strongest case. I just am so unsympathetic to this idea that, of all people, a president-who is the sole and exclusive arbiter of what is and isn’t classified-can somehow commit a crime by taking with him documents that he obviously thinks are safe for him to take, when he has the absolute power to declassify them. That is preposterous. On top of which, every day-literally-there are official leaks, official disclosures of classified information. All of Russiagate was that: whispering classified information to the Washington Post and The New York Times. That’s how the Iraq War was sold: Oh, we have top secret intelligence that shows Iraq is getting weapons of mass destruction. This is the stuff that drives Washington every day. No one ever gets prosecuted for it unless you’re like a low-level leaker who’s not trying to advance official narratives, the way most leaks are in Washington with their media serving. But like Edward Snowden, or Daniel Ellsberg, or Chelsea Manning, or Thomas Drake, or William Binney-who leak not to serve the government’s agenda but to expose the wrongdoing-those are the only people who ever get prosecuted for mishandling or taking classified documents. The idea that a president would be guilty of that is preposterous. The case in Manhattan we’ve gone over many times-like an accounting error that they turned into a felony to cover up payments to a porn star that Trump had an affair with. Like, who cares? And then the claim that he somehow incited an attempted coup on January 6th because of a speech that he gave-which was not only filled with at least one major sentence telling them to go to the Capitol and march peacefully-but even if he adds that I think it’s justified to be very aggressive at the Capitol, that would still be protected speech. You can’t be held responsible for the acts of people who hear your speech under the First Amendment. So none of those cases have any merit. But if they had merit, I would have absolutely been in favor of prosecuting Trump. I don’t think government officials like John Brennan or James Clapper or Hillary Clinton deserve immunity. Why would they deserve immunity? I didn’t believe after the 2008 financial crisis that Wall Street barons deserved immunity. I didn’t believe after the Bush-Cheney administration that people who spied on American citizens without the warrants required by law-because Bush and Cheney ordered them to do so at the NSA-or people who engaged in torture, setting up black sites all over the world… It wasn’t just waterboarding. It was sleep deprivation, stress positions, manipulation of diet to break people. People get prosecuted for that all the time. I didn’t think that deserved immunity either. And yet, that’s when I first began encountering this argument. It was back in 2008. Barack Obama was repeatedly asked during the campaign-which he won against John McCain-If you get into office, would you consider having your Justice Department and your Attorney General investigate whether or not people at the CIA, whether or not George Bush and Dick Cheney, whether or not people at the NSA committed crimes by spying on Americans without the warrants required by law? By implementing torture regimes, which are crimes under American law? And Obama always said, Yes, absolutely. He said he would let his Justice Department investigate whether there were crimes and whether folks should be held accountable. He said nobody’s above the law. Why would they get immunity? And Obama wins. He gets into office, and within two weeks Rahm Emanuel is going on Sunday shows saying, Don’t even ask me about prosecutions. Those aren’t happening. We’re not intending to prosecute anybody for past crimes. I mean, we’re intending to prosecute huge numbers of ordinary American citizens. Obviously, we’re going to look back and put them in prison-but not anyone in the Bush administration. Perish the thought. And then in March of 2009, just two months after he was inaugurated, President Obama announced, I’m immunizing basically everybody at the CIA, at the Bush administration. No prosecutions of any kind. And none were ever permitted, despite him promising to do so. And the debate at the time-basically everyone in the media, everyone in the corporate media (which in 2008 was the only game in town; there wasn’t really thriving independent media yet, just blogs)-they were urging him: Don’t do prosecutions. We’re not a banana republic. We don’t prosecute past crimes by high-level officials. That was the ethos of Washington. Full-scale immunity. And it drove me mad. I couldn’t even understand the argument. Why would we have a more permissive legal framework just because someone is a high-level, powerful government official? Every American is subject to prosecution. We imprison more people, on a raw basis and as a proportion of our population, than any country on the planet. It’s not like we have a lenient criminal justice policy. We imprison millions of Americans for non-violent drug offenses, for all sorts of things. And then at the same time, while we’re imprisoning ordinary Americans en masse, we’re going to immunize high-level government officials? And remember, it was also Obama who basically said, We’re not prosecuting any Wall Street firms or tycoons that caused the meltdown in the economic and financial crisis. They engaged in massive fraud with derivatives and other instruments. Warren Buffett had been warning about them for years. Ron Paul had said it was all just scams and invisible, imaginary money that was going to crash. Everyone knew it. They just pulled as much money out as they could, got extremely rich, and caused a financial collapse. And Obama had people like Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary-loyal to Wall Street. Larry Summers. Hank Paulson under Bush. All of them came from Wall Street and engineered the bailout. Both parties got together and bailed out the criminals. They gave them billions in taxpayer money. Remember the argument? Too big to fail. And Obama had a huge fund Congress gave him to save middle-class families from foreclosure-and he let millions of Americans lose their homes. So you see this two-tier justice system. I actually wrote a book in 2011-With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. It’s about how we’ve had this ethos in Washington going back to Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon. Watch Ford’s speech justifying that pardon. He said: It’s more important to look forward than to look backward. Prosecuting high-level officials is too distracting. That became the prevailing ethos of Washington for political and financial elites. Occasionally, if someone’s sloppy or their victim is another powerful person, they get caught. But for most, they’re immunized-unless, of course, they’re exposing wrongdoing. Then they go to prison. And that’s why when the Supreme Court granted Trump broad immunity, people were shocked. But that wasn’t a break from the system-it was a codification of what we’ve already been doing for decades.

RealClearPolitics Videos