Russell Brand Shreds Media Hypocrisy on Trump, Compares 'Authoritarian Attack' to Clinton Scandal
With every twist of the Donald Trump story, the two-tiered justice system in the U.S. becomes more infuriating to the country and Americans who care about it.
On Monday, comedic British actor Russell Brand used his podcast “Stay Free with Russell Brand” to draw attention to the differences between how Trump is being treated compared to the dirty tricks of a certain Democratic presidential nominee from six years ago.
He got in a shot at the current president, of course, and shredded the hypocrisy of the establishment media, too. But there was an even bigger point to be made.
Brand is a one-time progressive who has been best known in recent years for his outspoken attacks on the left, wielding the acerbic power of his British accent against targets as pitiful as former CNN personality Brian Stelter and as powerful as now-former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Some of his more recent headlines have been an outburst at MSNBC — and the liberal media in general.
On Monday, Brand combined his targets, comparing the treatment of Trump by Democratic power figures like Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg with Hillary Clinton’s treatment for her role in propagating the so-called Steele dossier and mocking the establishment media’s blatant bias.
Trump “is predicting an authoritarian attack,” Brand said near the start of the podcast. “We’re going to use this as a point to pivot and discuss authority. Who has the authority to arrest Donald Trump? By what moral authority? And are there any other comparable cases that if you were to arrest Trump … is there any comparable offense that was committed by the opposing party?”
Check it out here:
In the clip, Brand starts with voiceover from a correspondent covering Trump’s visit to Tulsa, Oklahoma, last week for an NCAA wrestling tournament, where the reporter noted that it was hard to see from Trump’s demeanor that “anything was wrong in Donald Trump’s world.”
“How would you, at that point, know that there was something wrong in Donald Trump’s world,” Brand asked sarcastically. “What should he do, nervously shuffle off that plane like how Joe Biden does? There should be at least one … accident … descending the stairs. ‘Oh, look, Donald Trump today looked besieged by doubt as he descended …'”
Then Brand got down to business, noting that the potential legal charges against Trump, related to a payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, stems from the use of campaign funds. For that, he’s facing a potential felony charge from a Manhattan grand jury and a near-continuous spotlight of critical media coverage.
Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, indisputably engaged in trickery with campaign funds from the 2016 election, though in service of a goal far more damaging to the country’s interests — handicapping an American president on fraudulent charges that he was compromised by a foreign power.
The accusation against Trump, Brand said, “if you think about it, is really similar to the Democrat Party situation with the ‘Steele dossier’ that they funded.”
The “Steele dossier,” of course, is the thoroughly debunked, utterly fictitious packet of lies put together by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Its impact on the American government was profound, handicapping the Trump presidency, leading to the hideously expensive, ultimately fruitless investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, and set the stage, at least, for the first Trump impeachment. (The actual impeachment was a trumped-up charge related to a phone to call to the president of Ukraine, but the whole country knew the Democratic House was going to take some action after the Mueller probe went bust.)
And for that, for a misuse of campaign funds that hindered a dynamic presidency that was producing solid results for the American people in the form of a roaring economy and record low unemployment as well as demonstrable gains in the cause of peace abroad, the DNC was fined $105,000 by the Federal Election Commission, as CNN reported last year.
The Clinton campaign was fined $8,000.
In the context of modern political campaign expenditures, those amounts are laughable. The fact that, combined, the amounts cover about one-tenth of what they paid for the dossier itself, it’s an insult to justice.
Meanwhile, Trump is facing the potential for an arrest and criminal trial on a charge that would be a misdemeanor if Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg were not a Democratic partisan of the most loathsome sort.
(This is the Alvin Bragg who literally started his term by making life easier for every criminal and criminal suspect in Manhattan.)
The disparity pointed to an obvious double standard, Brand said.
“We have to recognize that a lot of interests have been bought out,” he said. “That there’s a lot of bias and prejudice in media, in academia, in politics, in government. In fact, government is founded now on corruption.
“That’s a founding principle, isn’t it? …
“This potential pending arrest of Trump is another example of that.”
Trump’s alleged use of campaign money to buy Daniels’ silence over an alleged sexual encounter — which Trump denies — is facing an infinitely more severe punishment than Clinton’s acknowledged funding of the Steele dossier, a document that incited corrosive mistrust of the federal government among Trump supporters and arguably was the harbinger of the weaponization of the federal government that continues to this day.
“That’s interesting, isn’t it?” Brand said.
It’s more than interesting. It’s appalling.
It requires no judgment in regard to the allegations against Trump to say that the comparison to the Hillary Clinton-dossier situation is a disgraceful example of the political imbalance of power in the United States today.
The power of the federal government is in the hands of the left (whoever is behind the palsied hands of President Joe Biden at the moment).
The power of the establishment media Brand was mocking is in the hands of Democratic sympathizers, the power of the entertainment world is unabashedly leftist.
But none of that comes close to the warping of the justice system that has taken place in recent years, when far too many local justice systems is in the hands of men and women like Bragg — funded by billionaire George Soros with the express intent of remaking the American system of justice — and the federal Department of Justice is in the hands of the leftist toady Merrick Garland and an FBI leadership that has destroyed the nation’s trust in the bureau.
No sane man or woman needs to be a Trump supporter to be infuriated by that.
Just an American.
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