So despite plenty of evidence that “Russian collusion” informant against Trump, Michael Sussman, was a partisan hack in the pay of Hillary Clinton who just made shiite up at her behest, he was acquitted yesterday of “making a false statement to the FBI” by a jury that just happens to be made up of Hillary donors. Ace of Spades has lots more. So does this lawyer’s Substack (via Powerline).
There are Talmudic and Midrashic writings about the city of Sodom, centering not on (homo)sexual acts but on callousness and corruption hiding behind a veneer of legality: “middat Sdom” (the measure of Sodom) is still a Hebrew term for perversion of justice. For example,
There were four judges in Sodom who meted out justice in a unique fashion. Their names were Shakrai (“liar”), Shakurai (“awful liar”), Zayyafi (“forger”), and Mazle Dina (“perverter of justice”). If a man assaulted his neighbor, the judges required the victim to pay the assailant a medical fee for the “bleeding” he received. The judges also ruled that a man had to pay eight zuzim for crossing through the waters of a river although the fee was only four zuzimwhen he crossed by ferry. On another occasion they ruled in favor of a Sodomite who stole a carpet from a traveler, and insisted that the stranger had only dreamed that he possessed it. In addition, the outsider was charged three pieces of silver for having his dream interpreted. If a man assaulted his neighbor’s wife and caused her to miscarry, the judges ruled that the woman had to be given to the assailant so she would become pregnant from him to compensate for the lost child ([Talmud, Sanhedrin] 109a–b; Sefer ha-Yashar, Va-Yera).
I am sure that, if it served their purposes, “Justices” Shakrai et al. would have found a way to declare a bumblebee a fish, as a California appellate court just decided, in a 35-page exercise in sophistry that would have filled absurdist writers Samuel Beckett or Eugene Ionesco with admiration.
And if you’re Paul Pelosi, the husband of Nancy, you can cause a traffic accident driving into the path of an oncoming car while drunk-driving your Porsche and running stop signs, yet the police will let you sit around for hours in the hope you will pass a breathalyzer test. Nancy Peelousy, otherwise quick to rush to judgment, of course wants the media to treat this as a private matter. (She was on the other side of the country at the time of the events.)
As Vodkapundit quips, “it’s good to be the Nomenklatura“…
Spin, strangeness, and charm 
I think that this acquittal will not result in the hoped for closure on this whole affair. Among people paying attention it is clearly just a sign that, as you write, justice is different for the well connected. That’s not in fact a good thing. But the brahmandarin class aren’t good at figuring out these sorts of 2nd or 3rd order effects.
It is worth noting that Sussman and Joffe clearly played various straight shooters (e.g. Tom Grasso and, I think, Baker to a degree) so that they would pass on data without the source of the data being known therefore making it a lot less obvious that all the bits came from the Clinton campaign. One of the problems that this is going to cause is that, in the future, there will be a lot of distrust regarding legitimate tips that need discretion.
Afaic the whole edifice is rotten there is not a single alphabet agency that shouldn’t be purged at the very least and probably eliminated altogether. They are worse than useless because they have become actively harmful in their corruption and incompetence.
I haven’t noticed any problems with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), but they mostly do maps.
The issue with the definition of “fish” including bees seems more of a problem with how the legislature amended the definition rather than what is commonly held in English language.
There are three levels of justice in the US system, really. We just saw the Blue apparatchik kid-glove version.
Then there’s the medium-rough treatment that happens to apolitical people on the same lying-to-Feds charge – EG, Martha Stewart’s life was badly disrupted, a year in jail IIRC, but not totally destroyed.
Then there’s what they tried to do to General Flynn. This same jury that just aquitted Sussman because “lying to the FBI is no big deal” would have happily put Flynn away for life on considerably flimsier charges (looked like entrapment PLUS FBI massaging of the notes of his “lie” to me) because he worked for Trump. Clearly an enemy of the people, ya know?
Clapper was the director of NGA (in fact, its creator since the organization was a “four-letter” agency before he reimagined the name/acronym to make it three letters, so he wouldn’t feel inferior to his fellow agency leaders when sitting in meetings) before he was Director of National Intelligence. A more recent NGA director was involved in a scandal for procuring a much more expensive official vehicle (inferiority complex, again) and a recent deputy director was sacked for an improper sexual relationship with a subordinate. They’re adequately corrupt, just not important enough to merit blaring headlines.
[…] Hillary lawyer Michael Sussmann of lying to the FBI last week. While not unexpected, the not guilty verdict very nicely illustrated the dual track system of justice in operation today, where a Hillary campaign lawyer can lie to the FBI with impunity (mostly because they wanted to […]