patrick.net

CNN ran a remarkable story yesterday headlined, “Judge Chutkan rejects call from Democratic AGs for temporary restraining order blocking DOGE’s access to federal data.” Chutkan is the same DC Circuit judge who gave the J6ers such a hard time and was reversed by the Supreme Court. So you know that if she couldn’t find support for a TRO it was pretty bad. It was another I told you so moment.




Lawyers for 18 blue states had asked Chutkan to temporarily restrain Musk and DOGE from accessing government information systems... They also wanted the judge to block Musk and DOGE from firing any employees at those agencies.

But Chutkan ruled the states hadn’t shown “that they will suffer imminent, irreparable harm absent a temporary restraining order.” Regular readers will recall imminent, irreparable harm is one of the hardest elements to prove to get a TRO. So, that was good news. But it got much better.

Judge Chutkan—no friend to Trump—couldn’t find a way to justify a temporary restraining order. That means their legal case was embarrassingly weak—so weak that even the judge who handed down some of the harshest J6 sentences wouldn’t touch it. What did Judge Chutkan see? ...

They’ve been chasing the wrong person the whole time. The billionaire they love to hate —nobody elected Elon Musk!— is just a special consultant to the White House. But if you go back and read and listen to Musk carefully, you’ll find that, while he may have hinted at authority, he never actually claimed it. ...

Since Elon wasn’t confirmed by the Senate, they thought they had him dead to rights. But ‘advisors’ don’t wield significant authority. Thus, the Appointments Clause doesn’t apply—and the plaintiffs just lost their big constitutional argument.

It was pure political aikido—using the enemy’s own momentum against them. They built an entire legal argument around a fundamental mistake. Trump’s team let the media and the blue states chase Musk around, and then ripped the rug out at the last second.

Jackson recently made news by temporarily reinstated the fired head of the Office of the Special Counsel, Hampton Dellinger, a Biden appointee.

CBS 60-Minutes’ Gaslighter-in-Chief Scott Pelley was at it again Sunday night trying to put over the story that Donald Trump had unfairly cashiered a broad swathe of federal agency Inspectors General — whose job it is to investigate crime, mischief, and administrative malfeasance. In the spotlight sat one Hampton Dellinger, Special Counsel to the independent Office of Special Counsel, who just resigned after a court battle over his firing weeks ago.

Do you have any idea what a laugh riot that is? Dellinger’s job was to protect whistleblowers and enforce the Hatch Act (against public employees engaging in partisan political activities). Would you say he did a great job protecting FBI whistleblowers who testified before Congress last year — say, FBI agents Marcus Allen, Garret O’Boyle, and Steve Friend? They were suspended without pay, not allowed to seek other employment, lost homes, were financially wrecked, and hung out to dry by then-FBI boss Christopher Wray. Was Hampton Dellinger heard to make a peep about that? (Nope.) So much for protecting whistleblowers.

You can state categorically that thousands of federal employees have been engaged in what they call “the Resistance” since the first Trump administration. They openly advertise themselves as the Resistance. The Resistance is simply and purely Democratic Party activism. How is that not a violation of the Hatch Act? Hampton Dellinger did not notice any of it. Maybe that’s why he got fired, ya think?

For decades, the Supreme Court has delicately danced around the issue of universal injunctions, but has never definitively cabined their scope. The conservative justices, particularly Thomas and Gorsuch, have often signaled deep skepticism of district courts wielding nationwide policy-shaping power, particularly when those injunctions are weaponized against the executive branch.

I expect several key themes to emerge from the Supreme Court’s analysis of this appeal. First, is the Separation of Powers issue. Universal injunctions effectively let unelected district judges act like super-legislators overriding executive action without check. That’s a direct challenge to the constitutional balance of powers.

Second, the issue of Judicial Overreach versus Proper Relief. Traditionally, injunctions should only apply to specific, named plaintiffs, not hypothetical or future parties. The Supreme Court will likely reaffirm this strict standard, and reject the notion that district courts can possibly grant relief applying to the entire country—or beyond.

Finally, the Forum-Shopping Problem. The Trump team’s brief hammers on the coordinated lawfare of cherry-picking liberal courts to engineer politically motivated injunctions. The Supreme Court may even set new limits that could prevent a handful of progressive district judges from effectively governing the entire nation from the bench.

Trump Administration Deports Hundreds of Migrants, Despite Judge's Order Stopping Removal

The Trump administration has transferred hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador despite a federal judge’s order temporarily barring the deportations under an 18th century wartime declaration targeting Venezuelan gang members

The Trump administration has transferred hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador despite a federal judge's order temporarily barring the deportations under an 18th century wartime declaration targeting Venezuelan gang members, officials said Sunday. Flights were in the air at the time of the ruling.

U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg issued an order Saturday evening blocking the deportations but lawyers told him there were already two planes with migrants in the air — one headed for El Salvador, the other for Honduras. Boasberg verbally ordered the planes be turned around, but they apparently were not and he did not include the directive in his written order.

“Oopsie…Too late,” Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a Trump ally who agreed to house about 300 migrants for a year at a cost of $6 million in his country’s prisons, wrote on the social media site X above an article about Boasberg’s ruling. That post was recirculated by White House communications director Steven Cheung.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who negotiated an earlier deal with Bukele to house migrants, posted on the site: “We sent over 250 alien enemy members of Tren de Aragua which El Salvador has agreed to hold in their very good jails at a fair price that will also save our taxpayer dollars.”

The migrants were deported after Trump’s declaration of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which has been used only three times in U.S. history.

The law, invoked during World Wars I and II and the War of 1812, requires a president to declare the United States is at war, giving him extraordinary powers to detain or remove foreigners who otherwise would have protections under immigration or criminal laws. It was last used to justify the detention of Japanese-American civilians during World War II.

The ACLU, which filed the lawsuit that led to Boasberg's temporary restraining order on deportations, said it was asking the government whether the removals to El Salvador were in defiance of the court.

"This morning, we asked the government to assure the Court that its order was not violated and are waiting to hear, as well as trying to do our own investigation,” ACLU’s lead lawyer, Lee Gelernt, said in a statement Sunday.

Venezuela’s government in a statement Sunday rejected the use of Trump’s declaration of the law, characterizing it as evocative of “the darkest episodes in human history, from slavery to the horror of the Nazi concentration camps.”

Tren de Aragua originated in an infamously lawless prison in the central state of Aragua and accompanied an exodus of millions of Venezuelans, the overwhelming majority of whom were seeking better living conditions after their nation’s economy came undone last decade.

Trump Administration Deports Hundreds of Migrants, Despite Judge's Order Stopping Removal

The Trump administration has transferred hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador despite a federal judge’s order temporarily barring the deportations under an 18th century wartime declaration targeting Venezuelan gang members

@LokiJulianus • Mar 15

Current legal theory: the President can blow people up half a world away
without review, but he can't put some Venezuelans on an airplane without a
judge signing off on it.

LokiJulianus • Mar 15

Current legal theory: the President can blow people up half a world away
without review, but he can't put some Venezuelans on an airplane without a
judge signing off on it.

Impeachment would be too mild for the claque of Woke-activist federal judges attempting to nullify the executive branch with hectoring writs against any and all sorts of executive actions. If simply bounced off their benches, they could just take up new careers as NPR legal commentators or transsexual pole-dancers. Rather, what you’ve got here is an obvious seditious conspiracy, plain for all to see, orchestrated by the same legal Nosferatus as RussiaGate, the 2020 election, and the J-6 witch hunt.

The catch is, this time it is discoverable and subject to prosecution because the party running this legal insurrection no longer has its hands on the levers of power in the DOJ and the FBI as it did when they ran the aforementioned ops. And so, the mighty silence emanating from those two agencies just now should tell you something: namely, that cases are being carefully constructed to finally bring these despicable caitiffs to real and chastening law.

If you want to know one paramount reason for institutional failure in our country, look to the evil enterprise that calls itself “Lawfare.” It originated as a blog launched on September 1, 2010, founded by three key figures: Benjamin Wittes, Jack Goldsmith, and Robert Chesney. Over time it evolved into an activist operation, The Lawfare Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to (cough cough) “Hard National Security Choices,” and run under the shady umbrella of the Brookings Institution.

The point of Lawfare is self-evident in its name: it is an instrument of warfare against a perceived enemy which, for the past decade, has been the political faction led by Mr. Trump, the once-and-current chief executive of the federal government. Mr. Trump is a danger to the bureaucratic arm of the federal government because he has defined it as a racketeering operation and moved decisively to end its depredations. Lawfare is the praetorian guard of the permanent DC bureaucracy, including especially its rogue intel actors, who function as enforcers for the Democratic party that largely staffs the bureaucracy. ...

Now, the difference between Lawfare and the practice of law is that Lawfare trafficks lavishly in lies to do its business in the courts and actual law practice is supposed to be dedicated to ascertaining the truth in matters that come before the courts. Lawfare is grounded in dishonesty — as is its main client, the Democratic Party. That is exactly why Judge James Boasberg went along with FBI Director James Comey’s false warrant applications in the FISA court that enabled the RussiaGate operation to do its dirty business. Thus, the grand orchestrator of the Lawfare enterprise as a whole, Norm Eisen, is a sort of Father-of-Lies.

Remember beyond all this sturm and drang stands an essential principle: the truth is sturdy and untruth is fragile. Like you, I am standing by to see what eventually comes out of the Trump DOJ in the way of cases that might definitively settle this mighty battle between Lawfare and the law.

The Trump Administration on Friday updated its policy on troops with gender dysphoria asked Judge Reyes to dissolve her preliminary injunction.

The Biden-appointed judge immediately called a hearing and used it as an opportunity to shout at DOJ lawyers. Obviously, her mind is already made up.

Earlier this week, Judge Ana Reyes, a Biden appointee from Uruguay, issued a temporary nationwide injunction blocking Trump’s transgender military ban.

DOJ attorneys were back in court on Friday asking Judge Reyes to dissolve her injunction. ...

The Justice Department detailed Judge Reyes’ shocking statements toward its attorneys in last month’s hearing.

“During these hearings, Judge Reyes engaged in hostile and egregious misconduct that violates Canons 2A and 3A(3) of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges, which requires judges to “act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary” and “be patient, dignified, respectful, and courteous to litigants,” the DOJ wrote in a complaint against Judge Reyes.

the mighty silence emanating from those two agencies just now should tell you something: namely, that cases are being carefully constructed to finally bring these despicable caitiffs to real and chastening law.

Trump latest executive order flipped the safety off the government’s lawfare defenses. The last of yesterday’s EO was titled, “ Preventing Abuses of the Legal System and the Federal Court.” Reuters ran the story under the headline, “Trump Asks Bondi to Scrutinize Lawyers Who Fight US in Courts.”

The order directed newly confirmed Attorney General Pam Bondi to “review conduct” by lawyers and law firms who engage in “frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation” against the US. “Accountability is especially important when misconduct by lawyers and law firms threatens our national security, homeland security, public safety, or election integrity,” Trump wrote in the memo.

In plain English, Trump’s new executive order wasn’t only about legal ethics—it declared open hunting season on the class of lawyers who turned suing the federal government into a cottage industry during the last eight years. Wrapped in language about “restoring the integrity of the legal system,” the EO ordered the Attorney General to dig through past litigation for signs of so-called abuse—“frivolous lawsuits,” “fraudulent practices,” or other conduct that could justify sanctions, disbarment, or even security clearance reviews.

That last part is the tell. By invoking security clearances, Trump escalated the lawfare activists to the level of a national security concern, thereby weaponizing the courts as a tool for striking back.

What makes this EO a watershed moment was the targeting direction. For years, the legal Left swamped federal dockets with activist litigation, much of it designed less to win cases so much as to delay, entangle, or extract headlines.

Until now, the consequences were mostly reserved for Trump’s own lawyers, who’ve been sued, disbarred, and encased in leftwing blowback like swarms of angry hornets. But this EO flipped the script: it formalized retroactive scrutiny of government critics under the banner of ethics enforcement, potentially banning them from federal courtrooms, stripping clearances, or canceling lucrative federal legal contracts.

It wasn’t just a memo—it was a message: if you wage lawfare against the government, you’d better be on all fours, or the government might litigate back.

And lawfare is, after all, the Democrats’ favorite tool. So reduced court authority reduces opportunities for lawfare, benefitting conservatives most.

The fight is only starting. Congress holds power to define court jurisdictions and set rules like Issa’s bills limits on injunctions. There is a lot they could do, since only the Supreme Court is explicitly defined in the Constitution’s third Article.

“The judicial Power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.”

Congress controls the other courts. Congress can reshape them, reduce their jurisdictions, or even abolish them entirely if it wants (though it’d be political dynamite and practically unworkable). In other words, only SCOTUS is constitutionally immortal. The rest are legislative houseplants. Congress can water them, or not.

And they are thinking about the weed problem hard.

Surely you know the old joke: “What do you call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the sea?” (Answer: “a good start!”). There’s a reason why lawyers are so broadly despised. Law is humanity’s instrument for creating order out of the terror and chaos of nature, where anything goes. The result of law theoretically, is a civil society, where only the good, true, and right things can go.

These days, lawyers are hard at work to replace civilized order with the terror and chaos of nature — which is to say, the seeking of raw power: this is what I can do to you! That primal despotism is the motivating engine of the Democratic Party in its terminal phase, a feral, power-seeking monster. It was why, in case you hadn’t noticed, the essential drive of Woke politics was the sadistic pleasure it took in exacting its endless punishments — cancellation, personal ruin, censorship — not correcting alleged injustices against marginalized minorities. And that tells you, by the way, exactly why the J-6 defendants were treated so harshly by the likes of Judge James Boasberg, Tanya Chutkan, and their colleagues of the DC federal district.

Any lawyer or judge's power ends at the barrel of a gun.

In yet more good news yesterday, and probably not coincidentally, Politico ran a story headlined, “Appeals Court clears the way for Musk, DOGE to resume cuts to USAID.”

Earlier this month, Maryland District Judge Theodore Chuang (Obama appointee) had coughed up a preliminary injunction forbidding anybody —DOGE, Elon Musk, or even Marco Rubio— from working on USAID. Yesterday, a three-judge panel on the Fourth Circuit (Trump, Bush, Clinton) ruled 3-0 to toss Judge Chuang’s injunction and ordered that DOGE can keep on cutting while the lawsuit continues.

There isn’t much left to cut.

The court’s decision explained, “While defendants’ role and actions related to USAID are not conventional, unconventional does not necessarily equal unconstitutional.” For those of you following my primer on injunctions, as I predicted, the appeals court found the plaintiffs failed to prove the two hardest elements: they failed to prove a likelihood of success on the merits and failed to prove any irreparable harm.

“To the extent these alleged harms are cognizable damages at all,” the Court explained, “most can be remedied by money damages. Generally, injuries that can be cured by monetary relief, by law, are not irreparable.”

Then, for good measure, the Court briefly considered the government’s case. It did find irreparable harm— for DOGE. “The district court has, based on alleged injuries from a handful of plaintiffs, issued injunctive orders that dictate and restrict a separate branch of government. Unlike the harm alleged by plaintiffs, this harm cannot be remedied by monetary damages. It truly is irreparable.”

That was the shot heard ‘round the world’s courtrooms: District judges enjoining the President are causing irreparable harm.

Finally, warming to its theme, the order added several more refreshing comments about district courts minding their own business. I bet this language will soon begin appearing in all the government’s briefs:

Last, as to the public interest, the public certainly has an interest in ensuring the
government is acting constitutionally. However, the public also has an interest in judges
wielding power only when so authorized. That authorization limits us to deciding cases
and controversies, not political disputes. Cases and controversies involve actual injuries to
actual parties, not injuries that are speculative and extend beyond the parties in this case.
Courts must be wary of stretching to find harm at the preliminary injunction stage when
the record does not support it.

In short, the Trump Agenda sprang forward yesterday like greased lightning. Alas, the lawfare beatings threaten to continue until morale improves. “Supporters of the agency,” WaPo said, meaning grifters and deep-staters, “promised further litigation over the new cuts announced Friday.” Meaning, further litigation in friendlier circuits.

But USAID is already closed, disbanded, and its offices given away. They salted the USAID field.

French Court Bars National Rally Leader Marine Le Pen from Office for 5 Years After Embezzlement Conviction

Le Pen accused the prosecution of attempting to orchestrate her political death, stating, 'It's clear the prosecutor's only goal is to drive Marine Le Pen out of political life.'

From Trump to Le Pen: Lawfare and the New World Order

In 2016, when Donald J. Trump did the unthinkable and beat Hillary Clinton—a woman so ensconced in the halls of Davosian power she might as well have been issued a United Nations passport—the architects of the so-called "Rules-Based International Order" felt a tremor under their polished marble floors. For decades, this Order—an alliance of bureaucrats, multinationals, intelligence agencies, and supranational institutions—had operated under the conceit that history had ended, that global governance would henceforth supersede national sovereignty. Trump's triumph threatened their theology.
To these globalist mandarins, Trump’s insurgency was not merely electoral; it was heretical. He dared to question NATO’s utility, scorned open borders, mocked climate pieties, and—worst of all—promised to put America, not Brussels or Beijing, first. The idea that a nation might chart its own course, free from the guidance of transnational scolds, was an offense that had to be punished—not just to stop Trump, but to send a warning across the world: challenge the Order, and you will be destroyed.
By 2021, the game plan emerged with Orwellian clarity. Four separate prosecutions, nearly a hundred felony charges, and a cumulative sentence that would make Methuselah wince—Donald Trump was to be entombed under a legal avalanche. Not because he was uniquely corrupt, but because he was uniquely defiant. The United States, long a beacon of liberty, now took a page from banana republics, substituting ballots for subpoenas.
But while America’s progressive elite failed to jail Trump (at least so far), they succeeded in unleashing a new form of political warfare across the globe: lawfare as an instrument of regime preservation. The message was clear. Oppose the globalist consensus, and your name will appear on a docket.
Take Marine Le Pen. For years, the French nationalist leader has been the bête noire of Brussels. Her real crime? Proposing that the French—not the European Commission—should determine France’s future. After leading in the polls for the 2027 presidency, she was slapped with a conveniently timed conviction for misallocating parliamentary staff funds—a technicality so esoteric it wouldn’t pass muster in a Texas HOA dispute. On March 27, 2025, a Paris court sentenced Le Pen to a two-year suspended prison term, a fine of €20,000, and—most damningly—a two-year ban on holding public office. This means she is barred from running in the next presidential election. The case, involving €330,000 in alleged misuse of European Parliament funds, was initiated in 2016—conveniently revived just as she surged in the polls. The timing? Not coincidental.
It is worth noting that over a dozen of her National Rally party colleagues were convicted in the same case. The European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) referred the case, and the court’s decision—issued without the benefit of a jury—ignored the fact that similar cases in other EU member states have been quietly dropped or settled with modest fines. But Le Pen is not just another MEP. She is a threat to the supranational project. And in this brave new Europe, heresy against Brussels is prosecuted with greater vigor than Islamist incitement.
Germany—poster child for post-nationalist virtue—has declared open season on its own populists. Björn Höcke, a provincial voice for the AfD, faces trial for hate speech over the phrase “Everything for the Fatherland.” Frauke Petry, a former AfD leader, was convicted for perjury over statements about party finances. Meanwhile, the AfD itself is under intelligence surveillance, with whispers of a ban floating through the Bundestag. The crime? National identity.
In Romania, Călin Georgescu—a nationalist outsider—won the first round of the presidential election in November 2024, only to have the result annulled by a court citing “Russian interference.” The evidence? Nonexistent. But he was quickly arrested and charged with “communicating false information” and promoting fascism, rendering him ineligible. Democracy, you see, must be defended—even from the voters.
From South America to Eastern Europe, the same pattern unfolds. Former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was imprisoned for crossing his country's own border 'illegally' and later slapped with new charges conveniently extending his sentence. In Ukraine, Viktor Medvedchuk and former President Petro Poroshenko were charged with treason—one for allegedly sharing secrets, the other for buying coal from the wrong region. In both cases, opposition became sedition.
Even celebrity isn't a shield. Ireland’s Conor McGregor, a household name and political aspirant, is on the verge of facing hate speech charges if he dares mount a campaign. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, like Trump, faces a blizzard of indictments designed to ensure his banishment from politics. Venezuela’s María Corina Machado, banned for fifteen years over a decade-old “infraction,” was erased from the ballot despite winning her primary in a landslide.
In Turkey, Israel, and Austria, the mechanisms vary but the objective remains: judicial leverage against ideological dissent. On March 19, 2025, Turkish authorities arrested Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu—widely considered the leading opposition candidate to President Erdoğan—on charges of corruption and alleged links to the PKK. Critics widely view the arrest as politically orchestrated. Protests erupted nationwide, and nearly 1,900 citizens were detained in the ensuing crackdown. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, former Prime Minister Imran Khan was sentenced to 14 years in prison in early 2025 on corruption charges. His arrest followed a series of legal cases aimed at neutralizing his return to power. Numerous leaders from his party were also jailed or barred from running, effectively sidelining the populist movement ahead of national elections. The fig leaf of legality provides plausible deniability. But only those opposing the Order ever seem to find themselves in the dock.
What was once called democracy has become a curated simulation—democracy if and only if it produces the correct result. This is why the Biden precedent matters. By criminalizing a former U.S. president, he handed moral license to governments from Paris to Tbilisi to Caracas to do the same.
What links all these cases is not the gravity of the crimes—many are trivial, others ambiguous, a few outright fabricated—but the profile of the accused. They are nationalists. Populists. Skeptics of global technocracy. Opponents of forever wars, mass migration, and carbon commandments. For these sins, they must be disqualified. If not by voters, then by judges.
Democracy, in the globalist mind, is too important to be left to the people.
So yes, Trump was the first domino—but he will not be the last. The globalist establishment may wrap itself in the language of liberal democracy, but its actions betray a creeping authoritarianism cloaked in process. The ballot box is now guarded by the gavel. And in this brave new order, the only crime is dissent.

@elonmusk

When the radical left can’t win via democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail their opponents.

This is their standard playbook throughout the world.

Le Pen was convicted alongside eight other members of the Rassemblement national/Front national, and twelve parliamentary aides. She did not personally embezzle funds or enrich herself from EU coffers. Rather, prosecutors accuse her of directing aides to undertake work for her party while they were receiving salaries from the European Parliament. They claim this happened between 2004 and 2016, and that Le Pen and her associates misappropriated over four million Euros in this way. While nobody doubts the substance of the accusations, what Le Pen did was far from unusual and the sentence just seems ridiculous to me. Many European parliamentary representatives have used staff paid from parliamentary budgets for party projects – including Franziska Brantner, the present co-chair of German Green Party. Until recently this was a common practice, and even now the distinction between party and parliamentary work is not always easy to maintain, and both routinely and deliberately blurred.

Yes, this is obviously a gross abuse of both the justice system and electoral system in France.

embezzlement sounds like a crime and worse like a self-serving crime of moral turpitude whereby a politician stole from the people. this is why they are choosing to thus name this claim.

but let’s have a look at what really happened:

le pen was "convicted" of using money allocated by the euro parliament to pay for parliamentary assistants. there is nothing improper about that. this is, in fact, what the funds were for. at issue is whether those PA's worked sufficiently on EU-related legislative work as opposed to domestic work. this issue dates from 2004-2016, over a decade old, so hardly new news. the timing itself speaks volumes.

how this is being called “embezzlement” with a straight face is beyond me. this is literally a worker classification/how did you spend you time issue. calling it "embezzlement" is ridiculous. it makes it sound like she ran off with the money. clearly, that’s the point and many of the “media” stories on this are long on emotion and accusation and desperately short on context. ...

i’m sure it had nothing to do with this:




... note that she's the only one they seem to have "investigated." care to wager than basically no french parliamentary leaders could have survived a similar audit similarly applied?

the evidence is already legion:

pierre lellouche, a lawyer and former deputy of the french national assembly, appeared on CNEWS to point out that the current prime minister, François Bayrou, faced the same charge and suffered no consequences.

“Then, last but not least, there is the case of (François) Bayrou, the current prime minister, who has been prosecuted for exactly the same thing, i.e., for abuses of party funding declared as parliamentary assistants in Europe, at the EU parliament. Bayrou emerged from this affair without being in the least concerned. In fact, the public prosecutor’s office has once again referred the matter to the courts, but even so, we’re dealing with a double standard here. It’s a bit surprising.”

is this ringing any bells? perhaps bells around the handing of emails and information or servers and documents?

this is a ridiculous and targeted piece of trumped up lawfare that has become alarmingly common in the US and EU alike. if we don't like you, we arrest you. the selectivity and uneven standards are the key feature of this system.

it’s 1000% deliberate. ...

this is a coup.

it’s the judiciary taking over elections and presidencies, tying opponents in knots and taking them off the board, allowing havoc to be wreaked by one set of activists while arresting all others and sentencing them to real, hard gulag time.

French Court Bars National Rally Leader Marine Le Pen from Office for 5 Years After Embezzlement Conviction

Marine Le Pen Responds to Court Banning Her from Running for President: ‘Millions of French People Have Been Silenced’

In a chilling glimpse of how the U.S. 2024 presidential election could have panned out, French leader Marine Le Pen has been banned from running for president in France by a weaponized court.

Le Pen, head of France’s right-wing National Rally Party and the main rival of liberal French President Emmanuel Macron, reacted to the ruling in a new interview with TF1.

The court accused Le Pen and others in her party of misusing $4.9 million of European Union (EU) funds.

The funds were designated to aid legislators in the European Parliament.

However, the court ruled that Le Pen used the funds to pay party staffers uninvolved in work for the EU parliament.

By convicting Le Pen guilty of the charges, the judges barred the National Rally Party leader from running in the 2027 French presidential election.

She is now banned from running for public office for five years.

“I perfectly understood that the court president was explaining that she was issuing a political ruling,” Le Pen stated.

“The magistrate made it very clear that enforcing the temporary sentence barring me from seeking public office rendered my appeal void and would prevent me from running and getting elected, she said, in the presidential election.

“There are millions of French people who are outraged, outraged to an unbelievable extent when they see that, in France, the country of human rights, judges were implementing practices that we thought were typical of authoritarian regimes,” she continued.

“I think the judges got it wrong,” she said.

“I think they chose to ignore all of the explanations that were given because, in the very first hours of this trial, I had understood that the court was biased against us.

“I did not think the magistrates would go this far against our democratic process and interfere this much with the choice of the French.

“Let’s be clear: I have been silenced but it’s the voice of millions of French people that have been silenced as we speak tonight.”

“I’m a fighter,” she declared.

“I’m not going to let myself be eliminated like that.

“I’m going to pursue every avenue of recourse that I can,” she vowed.

“There’s a small path; it may be narrow, but it does exist.

“In fact, I’m going to ask, in the clearest possible way, for the appeal decision to be handed down enabling me to consider running in the presidential election.

“I will always stand by the French.

“Millions of French people believe in me.

“Millions of French people put their trust in me.

“And I’ve come to tell them, ‘I have been fighting for you for 30 years, and I’ve been fighting injustice for thirty years. And so I’m going to keep doing it. And I will do it all the way.’”