Bill Barr's double standard: What about the Bundys?

While I am pleased that the prosecution of Gen. Michael Flynn may be over – it's not a done deal until federal Judge Emmet Sullivan signs off on the U.S. Department of Justice's motion to dismiss the indictment, and this is no certainty given the Sullivan's prior reaction toward Flynn, effectively branding him a traitor – the double standard of our so-called attorney general, Bill Barr, is breathtaking and frankly disgusting. What I am saying is that if one is part of the Republican establishment club in Washington, D.C., then an injustice might get the AG's attention, but if you are an ordinary citizen such as my clients Cliven Bundy and his sons, Ryan, Ammon, Mel and Dave, then you can go to hell.

So the "miraculous" turnaround by the DOJ, after exculpatory documents came to light recently that Flynn was set up to lie by then-director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a host of others at my once proud alma mater, was "peachy keen" when a Washington insider's fate is on the line, but when persons like the Bundys are at issue, where Barr's DOJ also withheld exculpatory evidence and engaged in gross prosecutorial abuse during their case, that is OK.

Let me give you the back story of what I am talking about to show why I am outraged that the political prosecution of the Bundys and their supporters still continues. These are people who came to the Bundy Ranch to peacefully protest the use of tyrannical government force to seize the Bundys' cattle and put them out of business over their refusal to pay illegally assessed grazing fees (which were not really grazing fees at all).

After being indicted for standing up to the feds under the corrupt administration of former President Barack Obama and his equally felonious AG, Loretta Lynch, pressured by former Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the Bundys were imprisoned without bail. Cliven was thrown in solitary confinement and was denied the right of the counsel of his choice and a speedy trial by an Obama-Reid appointed federal judge, Gloria Navarro. The case finally came to trial two years later. All the while the Bundys and the other defendants were kept in a maximum-security prison and their religious rights violated by DOJ's Bureau of Prisons guards.

During the trial, which did not last long thanks to the Grace of God, it came out that the DOJ prosecutors in the U.S. Attorneys Office, Steven Myhre, Daniel Scheiss and Nadia Ahmed, failed to produce exculpatory evidence showing that the Bundys were illegally entrapped, that surveillance footage showing their non-violent actions had been hidden and that there was a kill list on the Bundys' heads, among a number of other crimes. To top it all off, the DOJ prosecutors suborned perjury through government witnesses who were caught lying under oath, and they themselves lied to the court.

Even though Judge Navarro was extremely hostile to the Bundys and the other defendants, to save her own corrupt skin she was forced to first declare a mistrial and then ultimately dismiss the indictment. There you have it; a federal jurist who had herself set a new indoor record for violating the constitutional rights of the Bundys and the other defendants felt compelled, to avoid legal repercussions for her own misconduct, to dismiss the indictment.

All the while during this politically charged prosecution, I had been lobbying then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to have the indictment dismissed. But characteristically, Sessions put his cowardly head in the sand and did nothing. In fact, while he was still AG, he allowed the same prosecutors to appeal Navarro's dismissal of the indictment, obviously to permit them cover for the crimes they had committed along with the federal agents who invaded the Bundy ranch, assaulted Cliven's sister, tased his sons, murdered the bulls in the Bundys' herd, buried them in a secret mass grave and committed other atrocities.

So when Bill Barr later was nominated by President Donald Trump to replace the later-fired Sessions, I wrote to and attempted to communicate with him in many other ways asking that he dismiss the appeal of Navarro's indictment. The response? You guessed it! No response at all. Nor has the Justice Department under Barr taken any action through its Office of Professional Responsibility and Inspector General, as I requested in an ethics grievance I filed there against the prosecutors, to investigate this prosecutorial misconduct, despite lying to a federal appellate court in D.C. that it was looking into the allegations. This appeal arose out of also of another complaint I filed against Sessions to force a bona fide investigation. An Obama-appointed federal judge, Rudolph Cantreras, predictably dismissed it.

As of today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit will be holding an oral argument in Las Vegas, Nevada, on May 29, 2020, by teleconference given the COVID-19 pandemic, and the DOJ's appeal is still going forward. And if the liberal 9th Circuit reverses the lower court's dismissal – and there is no love lost for the conservative-minded Bundys there – Cliven and his sons and the other defendants will be back before Judge Navarro with the recurrent risk of being convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

And this is on top of all the emotional distress caused to my clients and now close friends after all of these years of political persecution begun under the Obama DOJ. Let us not also forget the huge cost of defending the Bundys, as Gen. Flynn also knows all too well.

So there you have it, fellow patriots. If you are a Washington Republican establishment insider like Gen. Michael Flynn, Attorney General Barr might finally act. But if you are ordinary citizens like the Bundys, his Department could care less. BUNDYS, GO ROT IN HELL! And, as far as Barr is concerned, do not expect any prosecutions to flow from the Flynn debacle; not former FBI Director James Comey, not former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, not former special FBI agents the "lovebirds" Strzok and Page, and certainly not former AG Loretta Lynch, much more Obama and Harry Reid themselves. They are part of the swamp's insider establishment club that protects itself at all costs, while leaving the rest of us peasants, like the Bundys, out in the cold.

Such is that state of our justice system today! Corrupt to the core!

Time to man the barricades, fellow patriots!

To read more about this, go to www.clivenbundefensefund.org and support Cliven Bundy and his sons' defense, because AG Barr will not come to their aid and instead allows this injustice to go on and on.