Iustitia's missing blindfold

Mueller pushed the NY district court investigators to invade the offices of one of Trump's lawyers (Cohen).  They did so because of a claim that the lawyer was "not acting as a lawyer" and may have been violating tax laws.  The investigators took everything: every piece of paper, every record, every computer.  Everything.  They treated the lawyer as if he was a drug dealer or someone suspected of being a serial murderer - not as a lawyer with clients other than Trump (yes, he does have other clients).

Ok, so he was Trump's lawyer.  I get it.

But he was also someone else's lawyer (a name has already been floated).  A person who may be a truly uninvolved someone.  A person who has nothing to do with Trump.  Someone who lives an honest life.  And someone who was a client of the same lawyer.  The reason that someone chose Cohen as his lawyer is immaterial.  Unless that someone has been charged with a crime, and even if he had, busting into a lawyer's office and confiscating all of the lawyer's records, including that uninvolved someone's records... Just. Isn't. Done.

The legal records of that someone are now held in a district court and will be viewed by investigators as they search for (ahem) "wrongdoing".  That person - the uninvolved person - has had their right to the lawer-client privilege destroyed.  That person was not served with a warrant.  That person was not told that they were under suspicion.  That person has now been dragged into a wholly-unrelated situation.  And that person's records, and any deep, dark, legal, intentionally-hidden secrets, have now been exposed.

Because Trump.

This is why Dershowitz is so angry and why the ACLU's silence is so loud.  If this warrantless and unconstitutional action is allowed to stand unquestioned, then the lawyer-client privilege is dead.  A precedent has been set that "the state is all powerful" and gets to decide who may (and may not) use the 5th Amendment's prohibition to protect themselves from self-incrimination via the use of the lawyer-client privilege. The doctor-client privilege could be next... and, if some overzealous judge decides to get involved, the sanctity of the confessional could vanish as well.

Because... Trump.

Regardless of how you feel about her, there was an expectation of privacy of Clinton's records on Clinton's private server.  The same was not true of Abedin's laptop.  Abedin's laptop didn't belong to her.  It belonged to the government.  Thus, there was no expectation of privacy for any information on it: it was a government-owned system and the assumption is that anything on it was owned by the government (that's one of the reasons I rarely use company systems for anything other than emails that I don't mind if other people read).  The reason that her government-issued phone and other government-issued phones were physically destroyed with hammers was to prevent the extraction of information from those phones.  It doesn't matter whether it was government information or personal information.  The devices were destroyed against government rules.

Clinton's personally-owned and maintained email server did not belong to the government, was not located on government property, was not maintained via government funds, and was thus private.  Her use of that private server for sending and receiving government emails was obviously meant to defeat government rules regarding government information.  But because the server was privately owed and operated, there was an expectation of privacy - which was respected.  Hence, a subpoena was issued to get the contents of the server.  It was not until the refusal to turn over that server's records that the subpoena demanded the physical hardware itself.  But in any event, Clinton claimed to turn over all of the government emails and was not compelled to turn over anything she claimed was private.

And that's the difference: Clinton was given the opportunity to decide which emails to turn over.  Trump's lawyer was given no such opportunity.  Clinton was directly violating State Dept rules.  Trump's lawyer may have violated campaign laws but there is no direct evidence he had.

So we are left with a problem that has caused the scales of justice to become seriously unbalanced: the personal feelings and opinions of a few have overcome the obligation to administrate the law fairly and without bias for everyone.

And the people that exemplify this problem, who have put their thumbs on the scale, and who have destroyed any belief that "justice is blind" are the same people in whom we put our trust: the highest level bureaucrats in the Department of Justice and in the FBI.

Because... Trump.