(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) In an interview on MSNBC’s Inside with Jen Psaki, former Attorney General Eric Holder explained that former President Donald Trump was unlikely to be jailed as a result of the recently reinstated gag order.
Holder acknowledged the viability of the gag order—which he claimed was not very restrictive, despite criticism from legal experts that it was overly broad and subjective.
He appeared to agree with another Obama Justice Department official—former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal, who appeared recently on Psaki’s show to discuss the gag order—that Judge Tanya Chutkan cold not treat the prosecution of the former president and current GOP frontrunner as a normal case.
But while Katyal suggested that the unprecedented nature of the case made Trump’s arrest all but inevitable, Holder suggested that Chutkan would be wise to proceed with caution given the politically charged implications of her actions.
“Were going to have some ultimate questions that I think are going to have to be determined,” he said. “Would a judge actually do that which would happen to a normal person and put somebody in jail for violating that gag order? I suspect that’s not likely to happen with this defendant…”
He went on to say that Trump was more likely to be fined or legally limited in his use of Truth Social.
“I’d try to be as creative as possible if I were the judge, but I would be extremely reluctant to take a person who’s a former president, the leading candidate of one of our major parties and actually put him in jail,” Holder added.
Psaki, asking for clarification, wondered if Holder would say such a thing out of concern for the possible political consequences or the reaction among the citizens.
“This is already a pretty divided nation and to do something like that—to take somebody off the campaign trail, to put them in jail—I just would be very reluctant to do that,” he said.
This reasonable take from Holder came as a surprise to many, especially as the one-time top prosecutor, whom President Barack Obama described as his “wingman,” has a history of refusing to uphold the law when it was politically inconvenient.
In fact, Holder may have singularly set in motion the disturbing trend of leftist officers of the law engaging in selective enforcement, which has resulted in what many consider to be a troubling two-tiered system of justice based on political ideology and identity politics.
However, as a singular voice of sanity on the left, Holder now may be holding back a Jacobin mob, according to the American Thinker.
It referenced the vengeful mob-rule that emerged following the French Revolution, “impos[ing] a state of revolutionary justice untethered to any sense of Judeo-Christian morality,” in which the ends largely justified the means.
“In this last decade, Jacobin justice has been unleashed on everyone from school board protesters to local police to a former president of the United States,” wrote the website’s Jack Cashill.
“Much of it flows directly from the DOJ, but state and local prosecutors have been keen to launch witch hunts of their own,” Cashill continued. “In doing so, they have corrupted evidence, rigged juries, allowed fear to dictate outcomes, and abandoned all traditional notions of equality before the law.”
Following their brutal “Reign of Terror,” the Jacobins eventually were themselves arrested and executed in a backlash known as the “Thermidorian Reaction.”
