COMMENTARY Republicans call the trial of a former president in Colombia ‘unacceptable’ political reprisal — but what’s truly unacceptable is the retribution Trump’s unleashing in America.
Miami Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart tweeted about the trial of former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe this week. His criticism of the proceedings in Bogotá goes on for about 100 words, so let me boil the message down to eight for you:
“Do what America says, not what we do!”
Diaz-Balart, a Republican, adores the archconservative Uribe, who is charged with bribery and witness tampering. Uribe is accused of trying to get members of Colombia’s murderous right-wing paramilitary armies — which fought murderous left-wing guerrilla armies during a half-century-long civil war that ended in 2016 — to change their testimony that he had ties to paramilitary death squads. (He denies it.)
Because Uribe is being tried during the presidency of left-wing Colombian President Gustavo Petro — himself a former leftist rebel — Diaz-Balart of course calls the trial a Petro-engineered “farce,” “political persecution” and a “witch hunt.”
But the tweet becomes a tad hilarious when Diaz-Balart goes on to warn that “the politicized use” of judicial systems “as a tool of reprisal is dangerous, harmful and profoundly anti-democratic.”
“It is,” Diaz-Balart concludes, “unacceptable.”
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Coming as it did from an ardent supporter of President Trump — who right now is on an unhinged crusade to politicize U.S. justice — Diaz-Balart’s tweet was a gobsmacking piece of hypocrisy, about as convincing as an incel warrior preaching against misogyny.
Hearing a GOP politician warn the world against weaponizing justice right now sounds about as convincing as an incel warrior preaching against misogyny.
It’s a rich coincidence that on the same day Diaz-Balart took to X to rail at Uribe’s federal bribery trial, Trump had his Justice Department order prosecutors to drop federal bribery charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams. The transparently political reason: Adams, though a Democrat, has been desperately sucking up to Trump in recent months like a Silicon Valley billionaire.
Then look at Trump’s patently political purge — the tool of reprisal, to quote Diaz-Balart — of Justice Department prosecutors who worked on the cases of Jan. 6 insurrectionists. The ones who violently and destructively stormed the U.S. Capitol — hoping to accomplish by force what Diaz-Balart and 146 other GOP Representatives and Senators tried to do when they voted in favor of blocking certification of the presidential election Trump lost.
‘Enemy from within’
Or consider that even before his Senate confirmation, Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, looks to be orchestrating his own purge of politically undesirable agents, including those who investigated Jan. 6 crimes.
Or ponder Trump’s repeated pledge to use the historically independent Justice Department to prosecute what he calls America’s “enemy from within” — meaning his political foes and critics.
Miami Congressman Mario Diaz Balart being sworn in at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 3, 2025.
In fact, Trump’s presidency looks built on the “political use” of American justice, the kind Diaz-Balart claims is defiling Colombian justice — and martyring his hero Uribe.
I’ll be first to disparage Petro as a blundering lefty, especially as we watch his cabinet implode this week under the weight of his selection of a new chief of staff who’s widely accused of corruption and violence against women. And I’ll be just as ready to credit Uribe for neutralizing Colombia’s Marxist guerrillas (with a lot of U.S. aid) when he was president from 2002 to 2010.
But that doesn’t mean — nor is there much proof — that Petro is pulling the strings of Uribe’s prosecution the way Trump looks poised to turn U.S. courtrooms into his personal puppet show.
It’s true that Uribe’s case moved ahead under Petro more than it did under Petro’s conservative predecessor Iván Duque — an Uribe acolyte. Still, there appears to be enough evidence against Uribe to justify at least the trial that got underway last week.
In other words, Uribe’s tribunal is not a witch hunt; it is by most standards a reasonable and unpolitical prosecution — just as Trump’s New York hush money trial last year was merited, and just as the prosecutions of former President Biden’s son Hunter were warranted.
That’s why I and so many others were angered by former President Biden’s pardon of Hunter. It sent a message to the world that he too considers America’s justice system a politically weaponizable institution — and that’s given Trump a perverse justification now to dismantle it.
Which is what the rest of the world — especially developing countries like Colombia — is seeing now when it looks at the U.S.
And you know something, Congressman Diaz-Balart? That’s what the world finds unacceptable.
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Publish date : 2025-02-12 23:00:00
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