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A politicized, weaponized justice system has replaced the problem of Big Tech censorship as the top threat both to the political prospects of American patriots and to American liberty as such.

The supposedly nonpartisan DOJ is still hunting down January 6 offenders as part of what it proudly called the “most wide-ranging investigation” in department history, then slapping those convicted with decades-long sentences. When it’s not hunting down J6ers, the DOJ is imprisoning 2016 meme-makers and, of course, indicting Trump with the Ku Klux Klan Act. Now, the DOJ has an aggressive Fani Willis acting in concert with it, charging nearly twenty Trump associates not just with Georgia election “crimes” but with a far-reaching national election conspiracy. In Michigan, the AG has targeted Trump’s alternative 2020 electors for using the same legal gambit as JFK’s Hawaii electors 60 years ago.

As we’ve pointed out repeatedly, such utter violations of the letter and spirit of an impartial legal system are the stuff of which banana republics are made. The one-sided nature of such disgraceful legal attacks is almost as offensive as the attacks themselves. The Democrats and their allies bury their hated political enemies in sham criminal indictments, and the Republicans respond so far with nothing but impotent indignation. Some wiser conservatives are voicing the uncomfortable reality that the problem will only get worse unless and until such retaliation takes place–there must be a tit for tat, a real cost associated with the Democrats’ abuse of the legal system in such an existentially destructive manner.

Charlie Kirk penned an excellent piece to this effect for The Federalist shortly after Fulton County’s Fani Willis dropped the fourth criminal indictment of the year against Donald Trump. There is a rising call for a hero like Texas AG Ken Paxton, who recently fended off an attempted coup d’etat by the Bush Dynasty in Texas, to start hammering the criminal Democrats with retaliatory indictments of his own.

To be sure, Democrats control the White House and, by extension, the DOJ. But America is a union of 50 states, and 23 of them have unified Republican control. America has three thousand counties, and the overwhelming majority of them vote Republican and are thus likely to have conservative prosecutors.

So where are our criminal cases? American patriots see Donald Trump assailed from every side and wonder, “Where is our Jack Smith? Where is our Fani Willis?” Some are so desperate that they sigh and wonder if the GOP could at least have its own Alvin Bragg.

Maybe if I wear glasses, they’ll think I know how to read…

After all, if Donald Trump can be slapped with four different indictments, including one at the state level and another at the local level, why isn’t there a single non-federal indictment against Hunter Biden when there is direct photographic evidence of many of his misdeeds? If the D.A. of Westchester County, New York, is investigating Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, why does there never seem to be an investigation of the left’s many shady non-profits, from Black Lives Matter to the SPLC?

Even if they don’t know the exact details, Americans can tell there is an imbalance. Sure, there have been plenty of lawsuits against overreach by the Biden Administration. But no shady non-profits are getting scourged into bankruptcy. No Democrats are going to jail.

Well, let’s not just complain. How do we fix it?

While this is by no means an exhaustive exercise, we have taken the liberty of finding a few contenders to take action. Here’s a bonus: We’re going to give you specific names!

Steve Marshall, Attorney General, Alabama

Target: The Southern Poverty Law Center

Over the last couple of years, the Anti-Defamation League has garnered far more attention than its “anti-hate” rival, the Southern Poverty Law Center. But the SPLC remains a powerful and enormously wealthy node of the left, with its pile of available cash exceeding $700 million. The SPLC’s “hate group” designations, instead of being treated as the ideologically motivated trash that they are, have in the past won FBI approval and been used to justify online censorship and more.

In reality, of course, it is the SPLC itself that is the “hate group” for all practical purposes, and its work promoting deplatforming and censorship means that it effectively conspires against the rights of U.S. citizens.

Much like the left dreams of destroying the NRA or the Federalist Society, it would be good to defang the SPLC. And fortunately, this is very reasonable to imagine.

Other liberals have been calling out the SPLC as a highly questionable organization for decades. In 2019, former SPLC staffer Bob Moser described the SPLC as a “con” that was “ripping off donors.” All the way back in 1996, the head of another progressive non-profit described founder Morris Dees as “a fraud and a conman.”

But there’s no reason to stop at the organization’s potentially shady finances. In 2019, the SPLC fired founder Morris Dees and alleged a pattern of both harassment and discrimination. The group promised a sweeping investigation with a full report, and of course, neither happened. Instead, as soon as attention wandered elsewhere, the whole matter was buried. Why not unbury it? Surely Alabama officials don’t want their state to be a haven for harassment and discrimination.

Disgraced Morris Dees was fired from SPLC amid accusations of harassment and discrimination.

There’s more. During the trial of Douglass Mackey for making illegal memes in the 2016 election, the SPLC menaced one of Mackey’s planned character witnesses, Prof. George Hawley of the University of Alabama. Just before Mackey was to testify, the SPLC planned to release a hitpiece against Hawley, threatening his career to keep him from testifying. The gambit worked, and Hawley backed out. In essence, the SPLC engaged in witness tampering. And guess what? That’s a crime!

There is a simple reason the SPLC should not be able to exist in a state of perfect impunity: it’s based in Montgomery, Alabama. In case you weren’t aware, Alabama is a red state with a Republican attorney general, Steve Marshall. Hey, Steve! Would it kill you to shoot some subpoenas their way? Just as a start?

Steve Marshall, Alabama AG

Ken Paxton, Attorney General, Texas, and Suzanne West, District Attorney, Val Verde County

Target: Alejandro Mayorkas

Texas, you may have noticed, is in a battle of wills with the Biden administration over the border. Specifically, Texas would prefer the border be secured, while the Biden regime would prefer the border remain open while pretending via fig leaf to be enforcing it.

But sometimes, the fig leaf slips away.

Governor Abbott formally declared an invasion along the Texas border on September 20. Abbott openly accused Biden of violating the U.S. Constitution. But Biden can safely ignore attacks like that. You know what would get a lot more attention? Accuse his DHS Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, of breaking the law.

Mayorkas, DHS chief, and all around bad hombre.

Title 5, Chapter 20A of the Texas Criminal Code contains the state’s ban on human trafficking. It is, bluntly, rather broadly worded: It covers not just the forcible or coercive transportation of people for forced labor or prostitution, but also anyone who “receives a benefit from participating in a venture” that engages in human trafficking.

America’s deliberately porous borders amount to a 13 billion dollar a year windfall for Mexico’s cartels, and that’s just for human trafficking alone (leave aside drug smuggling, gun running, and who knows what else).

Alejandro Mayorkas is literally ripping down the barriers that prevent human trafficking over the border for the obvious purposes of making sure this movement of people, guns, and drugs continues. How does he benefit? Well, most obviously, his ideology reaps a long-term political gain. Ten years ago, of course, we would have called this evil but not criminal. But now we live in an age where the Republican frontrunner for president can eat a RICO charge for telling people to watch an OANN clip.

So come on, Ken. Celebrate your impeachment victory by taking aim at a cabinet secretary.

Of course, one obstacle exists: due to quirks in the Texas state constitution dating back to Reconstruction, the state AG has a hard time bringing actual criminal indictments unless requested by a county-level DA. But that’s fixable: While most of Texas’s border counties have turned blue under a tidal wave of migrants, Val Verde County does have a Republican DA, Suzanne West. That county is home to the city of Del Rio, where tens of thousands of Haitians flooded into the U.S. in 2021. If any county in the U.S. is ready to slap Mayorkas with a human trafficking charge, it should be that one.

Ken Paxton, ready for justice.

Rachel Mitchell, District Attorney, Maricopa County 

Target: Eric Holder

Fourteen years ago, the Obama Department of Justice perpetrated one of the most sinister projects in DOJ history, Operation Fast and Furious. The nominal objective of the program was to take down top drug cartel figures by deliberately allowing “straw buyers” to illegally purchase guns in Arizona, then tracking the guns back to Mexico until they ended up in the hands of cartel leaders who could then be arrested.

But not a single cartel leader was ever taken down. Instead, thousands of guns simply went missing in the criminal underworld. Credible evidence has emerged suggesting the purpose of the program wasn’t to “track” guns at all, but rather a pretext to secretly arm and empower the Sinaloa Cartel, with which the U.S. Government entered into a strategic alliance.

Business Insider:

A high-ranking member of the Sinaloa drug cartel operative currently in U.S. custody alleges that Operation Fast and Furious was part of an agreement to finance and arm the Sinaloa cartel in exchange for information used to take down rival cartels, according to court documents.

The statement was made by Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, the Sinaloa cartel’s “logistics coordinator” in charge of arranging massive drug shipments from Latin America to the United States as well as the son of cartel leader Ismael “Mayo” Zambada-Garcia and a close associate to kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

Zambada-Niebla was arrested by Mexican authorities in March 2009 and extradited to Chicago to face drug trafficking charges.

In any case, criminals ended up using these guns to commit hundreds of crimes in Mexico, and in late 2020, an illegal Fast and Furious gun ended the life of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. This wave of crimes, directly enabled by the federal government, was then exploited by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to call for an increase in gun control.

The National Review:

In May 2011, he claimed to have known about gun-walking tactics for only a few weeks. But by October, new documents showed that Holder had been briefed about Operation Fast and Furious as early as July 2010. And in January 2010, just months after the ATF had launched Operation Fast and Furious, personnel from the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, a multi-agency network run by the Department of Justice, had been brought in to provide additional manpower.

Furthermore, the operation may have had an explicitly political angle. E-mails obtained by CBS News in late 2011 showed ATF officials corresponding about the possibility of using Fast and Furious to push through a regulation requiring gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or “long guns.” In other words, the ATF permitted certain gun shops to conduct certain, inadvisable sales to dangerous people and then planned to point to those sales to justify the need for new reporting requirements.

It was all quite sinister, but despite being held in contempt of Congress, Holder escaped without ever being charged with a single crime.

Maricopa County’s D.A. could try changing that, though. With many of the illegal gun purchases taking place in Phoenix, there is ample case to be made that Holder and other senior DOJ figures (like Robert Mueller) deliberately aided and abetted illegal gun trafficking, not out of ordinary law enforcement discretion but for the sake of political gain.

But in the likely event that this case goes nowhere (due to the statute of limitations, if nothing else), there is another option for targeting Eric Holder…

Jan Bennetts, County Prosecutor, Ada County

There may be other ways of holding the wretched Mr. Holder at least somewhat accountable. Since leaving the post of Attorney General, Holder has become a partner at Covington and Burling, a top U.S. law firm. One of Holder’s specialties is conducting “civil rights assessments” of major U.S. companies to see if they are in compliance with American civil rights laws. But far from helping to purge discrimination, Holder and his team have signed off on policies that explicitly discriminate against or even totally exclude white men or other disfavored groups.

Now, the most natural response would be to sue the companies engaging in anti-white discrimination, and red states and counties absolutely should. But since we’re dreaming big here, what if a Republican D.A. also took aim at Holder himself for directly endorsing (encouraging?) all manner of discriminatory policies? Ada County, Idaho, the home of Boise, is just one contender. It was chosen because it has a Citi office, and Holder signed off on Citi’s program to give “preferential financing” to minority housing developers. But in theory, if this stunt has any validity at all, it could work in literally any county where Citi does business.

Jason Miyares, Attorney General, Virginia

Target: John Brennan

The utterly preposterous criminal case brought against Douglass Mackey this year rested upon an entirely novel claim that, by posting an untrue meme mocking Democratic stupidity on Twitter, Mackey had “conspired” against the right to vote, thereby violating the 150-year-old Ku Klux Klan Act.

Despite the unprecedented nature of that claim, a New York jury still convicted Mackey. And so, having acquired a proof-of-concept, special prosecutor Jack Smith picked the next target: Donald Trump and all of his 2020 close associates. The central charge of Smith’s January 6 indictment against Trump is that, by “falsely” contesting the 2020 results, Trump and others were “conspiring” to deprive Americans of their right to vote.

It’s gross. It’s odious. But so far, it’s been allowed by the courts.

Well, if that’s the case, then turnabout is fair play.

In Virginia, it is a crime to conspire to hinder, block, or otherwise injure a person’s right to vote. The original intent of these laws was aimed at racial terrorism by groups like the Ku Klux Klan, but the same is true for the law just used against Mackey and Trump.

So, why not bring charges against John Brennan, James Clapper, or any of the other fifty-plus intelligence officials who signed a letter dishonestly claiming the obviously real Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian disinformation ploy? When the standard is simply that lying during an election is an assault on the right to vote, aren’t Democrats far more culpable than any Republican?

Caveat Emptor

Having floated some plausible ideas, we are now obliged to mention the hazards of this proposed strategy. In truth, criminal indictments aren’t something you can just whip up on the spot. Not even the left has been doing that. While political timing was no doubt a major factor, one reason all four lawfare indictments against Trump landed in 2023 rather than 2021 is that Democrats took the time to very cautiously build their cases for maximum effectiveness. Patriots must be open to doing the same.

So here’s the honest truth: the odds of getting criminal indictments to stick on anyone using state AGs or local DAs, without controlling the federal DOJ as well, and without a lot of preparatory work to justify the charges, are pretty slim.

But the fact that something is difficult is no excuse not to do as much as possible to make it possible. Furthermore, working now to make indictments easier will also make them easier to bring when the political environment hopefully becomes more amenable. So before closing this piece, it’s worth having a practical education in how state-level left-wing lawfare works.

Know Your Enemy: The New York Attorney General’s Office

When assessing the left’s long-term lawfare strategy, and especially when looking for tactics to imitate, the place to start isn’t Fulton County or even Jack Smith. Instead, the model to look towards is the New York Attorney General’s office. This is for two reasons. First, state AG offices are where the American right has the most power and the most potential to act both right now and in the future, so it makes far more sense to look to other states for inspiration than to the federal or urban level. Second, the NYAG has been running an explicitly ideological operation for far longer than the Biden DOJ or Fani’s Fulton Funhouse.

If you want a model for how a state law enforcement agency can seamlessly blend enforcing the law with political objectives, New York is the gold standard. Ambitious lawyers have been using the office as a stepping stone to national progressive stardom for nearly three uninterrupted decades. Eliot Spitzer spent two terms as AG before becoming governor and throwing it all away on high-priced hookers. Andrew Cuomo spent one term as AG before becoming governor and losing it all by saying that if he were a dog, he would “mount” a female staffer. Cuomo’s successor, Eric Schneiderman, was such a vocal, aggressive legal foe of Donald Trump that in the first days of Trump’s term, Politico labeled him “the leader of the Trump resistance.” Well, until he too became a sacrificial lamb to MeToo in 2018, opening the door for…

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Letitia James! In the 1990s, Kamala Harris slept her way to the top of California politics. Thirty years later, a black woman can instead MeToo her way to the top. James planned to quickly level up to the governorship by sticking a second MeToo knife into Andrew Cuomo. But James’s bid for New York’s top job in 2022 was a bust, so she’s instead still lurking in Albany, biding her time, and trying to take MAGA scalps in the meantime.

James and her predecessors have amassed a formidable set of wins against Donald Trump and right-of-center America generally, and crucially, they’ve done this damage without getting any electric headline-dominating convictions.

In 2018, under Schneiderman’s temporary replacement, Barbara Underwood, the New York A.G. office successfully dissolved the entire Trump Foundation after suing it for an alleged pattern of illegal behavior. In 2020, after years of preparatory maneuvers, the NYAG brought a lawsuit seeking to dissolve the National Rifle Association and seize its assets. That bid failed, but at the same time, when was the last time you’ve heard about the NRA mattering in national politics? The group’s costly, yearslong legal battles have sapped it of wealth and energy.

Read More: Revolver Analysis: New York AG Plans to Turn NRA’s Assets into “Black Lives Matter” Slush Fund

The NYAG’s most recent major action is a lawsuit against Trump, three of his children, and the Trump Organization, accusing it of systematically inflating Trump’s net worth to deceive investors. That case might get far less press attention than Trump’s four criminal indictments, but if you need proof of how much it’s gotten under Trump’s own skin, just look at how often he complains about it on Truth Social.

 

And of course, who could forget the most ridiculous component of the suit—a judge ruling, ludicrously, that Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate is worth a mere 18 million dollars?

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The demented judge is, of course, loving every minute of his sordid newfound fame.

Perhaps concerned that the farce would receive further exposure, the smiling judge in the case imposed a partial gag order on Trump and his team, prohibiting them from speaking about any member of the judge’s staff (which would include, of course, their political leanings).

The NYAG can be shady in ways that don’t even require bringing a lawsuit. In August 2022, Politico published a list of previously-anonymous donors to Nikki Haley’s non-profit advocacy group, Stand for America. That list of donors, in turn, came from somewhere within the New York AG’s office, which had access to all the same tax filings that go to the IRS. Leaking that list was illegal but also almost impossible to prevent or punish, unless the New York AG’s office treats catching such leaks as a high priority. And, spoiler alert: when the chief victims of such leaks are Republicans, it doesn’t!

In 2022, after a mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket, the NYAG issued an investigative subpoena for the ownership of the anonymous discussion website 4Chan. That subpoena turned up a contract between 4chan and toymaker Good Smile Company, in which Good Smile purchased a 30 percent stake in 4chan. Shortly afterward, technology magazine Wired publicized that contract after filing a FOIA request to the NYAG’s office. It is very likely that the office tipped off Wired about the contract’s existence so that they would know to FOIA for the right thing. Concerns about NYAG leaking go back a long way. After the 2008 financial crisis, for instance, federal investigators were reluctant to share information with the NYAG during their investigation due to concerns that the NYAG would strategically leak it to the press.

So, what are the takeaways from NYAG’s example?

1. Look to the biggest states

Wyoming is one of America’s most conservative states. Donald Trump beat Biden there by more than 40 points.

Nevertheless, if you want to cultivate a criminal case against somebody in the Biden Administration, it’s probably not the best place to look, for a simple reason: Wyoming isn’t very big.

The New York AG’s office includes more than 700 assistant AGs and more than 1,700 investigators, analysts, accountants, and other staff. It is substantially larger than many of the “Biglaw” firms ranked on the Vault 100, including the #1-ranked firm Cravath, Swaine, and Moore. Manpower, it turns out, is a type of power.

In contrast, the typical Republican state has just a few hundred staffers in a state AG office. Tennessee’s AG office has just 363 total staff, less than 1/6 of New York’s total, despite Tennessee having more than 1/3 of New York’s population. Florida, which just passed New York to become America’s third-largest state, has only 1,300 employees in its own AG office.

Want those red states to have more manpower to develop ambitious cases? Then pay for it! A state the size of Florida or Texas can far more easily bankroll an expanded workforce for their attorneys general, for the sake of bringing novel cases against the left’s criminals.

2. It’s about the process, not just the end.

In other words, don’t just think about criminal charges; don’t just think about convictions. Those will hopefully come with time. But the way to make a legal strategy sustainable is to deliver many smaller victories along the way.

This is where the style of the NYAG’s office stands out so much. Said office has been at war with Donald Trump and with the American right for the past decade, and its number of front-page legal victories isn’t large. It hasn’t brought a single criminal indictment against Donald Trump, despite years of hype. It hasn’t indicted any members of his immediate family. Yet NYAG has cost Trump huge amounts of money and inflicted huge amounts of stress.

On the right, there is often an impulse to pooh-pooh civil cases as flimsy and weak compared to beefy criminal prosecutions. This is a mistake. Civil cases may have a lower profile, but they can absolutely inflict real damage. President Trump has spent millions of dollars and huge amounts of attention combating NYAG’s flurry of lawsuits. Trump’s expenses come out of his own coffers, while New York’s are financed by the state’s taxpayers and cost the DNC nothing. Not only that, but these civil cases on their own have immense potential to create criminal cases either by exposing alleged criminal behavior, or by inducing testimony or behavior that can be prosecuted as perjury, false statements, or obstruction of justice.

Civil cases can create turncoats who switch sides, agreeing to offer intelligence or testimony to save their own skins from prosecution. Civil cases also generate reams and reams of information: How do Trump’s organizations work? Who does he trust and communicate with? How does he conduct his communications? An expanded MAGA legal operation can obtain those benefits for itself as well.

3. You can do more by being media-savvy.

This point is very obvious when talking about normal third-party lawsuits. One of the secondary impacts of the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News was getting access to Tucker Carlson’s text messages so that anything embarrassing could immediately be leaked to the public, even though Tucker was otherwise only a peripheral figure in the Dominion case. But this idea works just as well when wielding state power. The left uses the force of government to get information, and then it makes sure that information becomes public. Sometimes, that means leaks. Sometimes, it means just giving a nudge about what FOIA requests to send.

Being media-savvy increases the range of positive outcomes. Even if you don’t successfully sue or convict somebody, you can inflict embarrassment. You can tarnish reputations. You can scare off donors or get people fired from their jobs. You can reveal information that might inadvertently clear the way for others to mount a lawsuit.

4. Patience

In The Simpsons’ Season 9 episode “The Cartridge Family,” Homer Simpson goes to buy a gun but is distressed to learn there is a five-day waiting period before he can bring his gun home.

“Five days? But I’m mad now!” he laments.

It’s easy for American patriots to feel like Homer and talk like Homer. They’re mad about what is happening to the country, and they want something, anything, to happen in order to hit back.

Against that, Revolver wants to point out that the regime itself did not do this. Their hatred for Donald Trump has been at the “mental derangement” level for a good eight years now. The cries to throw Trump in prison for something, anything, were louder than ever at the time he left office, just days after January 6.

And yet, they did not rush things. They did not shoot their wad on a stunt that would go nowhere. Instead, the four indictments they have brought are, embarrassingly, all the products of years of investigation and legal planning.

Does that mean the cases are particularly strong? Not at all! Overwhelmingly, the legal cases against Trump are flimsy, relying on weak evidence and totally novel interpretations of the law. Nevertheless, the left has worked hard to make the strongest possible push for its weak cases. They have taken a gross power grab and dressed it up, as best they can, in the guise of fairness and legitimacy.

If the left can spend years building up legitimacy for criminally weak cases, this cautions the need for meticulousness as well as swiftness in the patriotic response. Let’s get it on. We have work to do.

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