Barbaro asked whether a future president could use the same approach against the right or the middle. Reitman cites the prosecutors' line "bad facts make bad law": the shooting of an officer let the government charge the whole group as terrorists, and unless the ruling is overturned on appeal, it becomes a template.
Absolutely.
…if the president right now wants to, in a certain sense, criminalize protest that he doesn't like, which happens in this moment to be left-wing activism, who's to say that the next president won't criminalize the activism of the right or the middle. Who knows? I mean, how much is that a real risk?
…an undisputed act of violence, that allowed the government to basically say, well, see, they are terrorists. See, they are violent. Here's political violence. Let's charge them all as violent terrorists. And where that makes bad law is that if it is not somehow overturned in an appeals court, which at the moment it's very uncertain what will happen, that bad law can be applied to anybody. So as long as you've created a permission structure to go after people that you disagree with based on your belief that their ideology is dangerous, then anybody can use that same template to go after a different group of people. So while this was used against the left, four years or five years from now, it could easily be used against the right. This is the kind of case that January 6th, arguably, based on everything that occurred, could easily be called a terrorist incident. There were a million things that people did on January 6th that qualified, but they weren't charged in that matter. And they actually wanted. Walked out of prison after a very short amount of time. But if there's something similar like that happened in another…
we have a system from the top on down, the present on down, where terrorism is in the eye of the beholder. And that is not something we've ever had. That's not a tradition we have legally in this country. Terrorism is supposed to be terrorism.
The idea that terrorism is in the eye of the beholder is the danger in declaring a war on terror. As somebody who's been reporting on it for a long time, this is why anyone who has been involved in prosecuting terrorism, in working in law enforcement, they understand that. That once you declare a…
Well, Janet, thank you very much. Appreciate it.
