The defining principle of the American legal system, really of American life, the principle that has kept us free, is equal justice — and the principle is fairly simple. No matter what you look like or who your parents were or what your politics might be, the law treats you exactly the same way as it would any other American. In this country, justice is blind. Now, that's a lofty standard, but because Americans have long believed in fairness and because most of the people in charge of administering that system have behaved in good faith, this country has, for the most part, lived up to its core ideal for 250 years, making it the greatest country in the world, but the populist surge of 2016 changed everything. 

Permanent Washington suddenly felt more threatened by its own voters, by American voters, than by any foreign adversary. Donald Trump, to them, seemed more dangerous than ISIS. They panicked, and in their panic, our leaders decided to turn the American legal system as well as the American intel agencies and if necessary the U.S. Army, against their political opponents. They felt they had no choice. In doing this, they abandoned the ancient principle of equality under the law and they replaced it with what is effectively a loyalty oath. Opponents of the regime became enemies of the state. That's a huge change and you're seeing the results of that change tonight.

Just 24 hours after a Manhattan grand jury indicted Joe Biden's rival in the next presidential race, another jury also in New York convicted a Republican social media influencer called Douglass Mackey. What did Mackey do wrong? Well, Douglass Mackey's crime was mocking Hillary Clinton voters online. You're seeing on your screen the meme that Mackey posted on Twitter during the 2016 election. In that meme, Mackey suggests it's possible to vote for president by text message because only Hillary voters could be stupid enough to believe something so absurd, but of course, in real life, no one did believe that. 

Mackey's insult did not alter a single vote in the election and no one has proved otherwise. The government brought forth not a single victim of this crime. It couldn't. Douglass Mackey was joking. Nobody believed he was a federal election official and in fact, his social media profile picture had a Donald Trump hat. It was unmistakable. This was mockery, but in the wake of the 2016 election and the rising hysteria about Donald Trump, mocking the Democratic Party became a crime. So as a result tonight, Douglass Mackey faces 10 years in prison. The case against Doug Mackey is the most shocking attack on freedom of speech in this country in our lifetimes. 

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It's also a useful lesson in who will be allowed to speak going forward. As it turns out, a woman called Kristina Wong posted an almost identical meme the same year back during the 2016 election, but unlike Doug Mackey, Wong voted for Hillary Clinton. "Hey, Trump supporters," she wrote. "Skip poll lines and text in your vote." Same crime, but the Department of Justice under Joe Biden has shown no interest in prosecuting Kristina Wong. Do you see how this works? Have you internalized our new partisan legal standards? That would be the point of the exercise. They want you to know the rules. We'll have more on the Doug Mackey case and what it means for you and for America in just a moment and by the way, Douglass Mackey is not the only Trump supporter who's now going to prison because of how he voted. 

According to new reporting from Julie Kelly, the FBI's counterterrorism division just arrested a grandmother in the state of Virginia on four misdemeanors this week. What exactly did she do? She entered the Capitol with her elderly mother for a total of 15 minutes on January 6. She hurt no one. She destroyed nothing. She just stood there and yet, at the very same time, during the very same week, none of the transgender thugs who invaded the Tennessee State House yesterday have been rounded up by the FBI counter-terror division and, of course, they won't be. Joe Biden just honored them with a trans day of visibility. So, what we're watching here unmistakably is bigger than Donald Trump, but we're going to begin tonight with the latest on his case, and we're doing that because he is — and this is not at all incidental to his prosecution — he is the leading Republican candidate for president.

Now, Trump apparently is being charged not with treason or insurrection or collusion or even shoplifting, but something much smaller: a slew of process crimes relating to a payment he apparently made seven years ago. In no fair system would that be a crime under the law seven years later, but the Soros-funded district attorney in Manhattan, Alvin Bragg, has stitched together a Frankenstein legal theory to justify this prosecution. Under normal circumstances, it would be impossible because the statute of limitations has passed, and as if all of that were not third-world enough, someone leaked the news of Donald Trump's grand jury indictment to the media. Now, that in itself is a crime under the law in New York. In fact, a much bigger crime than those under which Donald Trump is being charged.

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Will Alvin Bragg prosecute the leaker? Please. It's almost certainly someone in his own office. Nor will Bragg prosecute, as many people have pointed out today, the crimes of Hunter Biden or other Democratic partisans — those aren't rare or hard to find. Bragg will not prosecute Hillary Clinton, even though she just admitted to violating campaign finance law by paying for the fake Russian dossier. What's fascinating is that none of this has alerted the watchdogs to government abuse or media. No, just the opposite. The media are cheerleading our new standards of tribal justice. 

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, CNN: The good news is here, it's our legal system in action saying nobody is above the law.

FORMER REP. ELIZABETH HOLTZMAN: Nobody is above the law, not Republicans and not Democrats, not Donald Trump, not anybody. 

ADAM KINZINGER, CNN: I tend to think that nobody is above the law.

ARI MELBER, MSNBC: No person above the law. 

ANDREW WEISSMAN, MSNBC: We have political leaders who are not above the law. 

MSNBC GUEST: We don't believe that anybody should be above the law.

SYMONE SANDERS, MSNBC: They were all beating the same drum, if you will. No one is above the law.

MSNBC GUEST: No one is above the law. Today's evidence is that that includes Trump as well.

GLENN KIRSCHNER, MSNBC: New life has been breathed into that saying, "No person is above the law."

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Let's be completely clear. None of the people you just saw care a thing about justice. Let that word burn in their mouths. No, they are obviously bloodthirsty. They would cheer as you were necklaced in the street. "No one is above the law!" they would scream as you writhed on the ground. They would, but as long as they're still pretending that the old standards of fairness and equal application of the law apply, then what ever happened to Sam Bankman-Fried? Remember him? Largest financial crime in history? 

To this day, no one has explained or bothered to even try to tell us how Sam Bankman-Fried was able to make his bail that was set at $250 million. All that has been disclosed to us, the long-suffering public, is that a former dean at Stanford and a Stanford computer scientist put up $500,000 and $200,000 respectively, and his parents put up the value of their home. So that leaves quite a big gap. Where did the rest of the money come from? No one will tell us. No one in the media is asking because no one cared. Sam Bankman-Fried didn't pay off a former mistress. No, he defrauded a million people and ran off with houses in the Bahamas and yet the system is protecting him because he voted correctly.

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That's remarkable, but he's not the only criminal that Washington refuses to prosecute. There are so many of them. The people who destroyed the U.S. dollar, for example; the ones who degraded the United States military and turned it into a joke, which it is; the ones who flooded rural America with opioids and killed hundreds of thousands; the people currently selling our oil reserves to China. None of them have ever been prosecuted, in fact, they've all been promoted.

We'll have more on them in just a moment, but for now, we'd like to start with Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner who has been indicted for non-existent crimes in the middle of a presidential race. We have a very specific question about how this is going to affect the race because, of course, affecting the race is the entire point.