Amid Wednesday’s extensive coverage of the new target letter for former President Trump’s January 6th case on CNN This Morning, anchor Phil Mattingly asked CNN political commentator Van Jones about the delay in prosecutions for the cases. Jones claimed that there was a “two tier justice system, and Trump is benefitting from it,” providing several comical alternate examples in an attempt to prove this and explaining what he thought Trump’s true motives might be.
Mattingly asked Jones about the complaints that Democrats had had over the past few years, after the Capitol insurrection in 2020, about the slow progress in the trial process for it. Specifically, he asked how this delay, and also the recent rush of indictments and pending cases against Trump, “resonates in terms of people.”
Jones answered with his absurd claim that “there is a two-tiered justice system, and Trump is benefitting from it,” giving two examples of how the case would have gone differently if it had been someone other than Trump who had done it.
The first example that he gave was that “if Ilhan Omar had given a big speech and rallied ten thousand Muslims to attack a joint session of Congress? She’d have been in jail in three minutes, not three years,” referencing the three years that it took for a target letter against Trump to come out after the insurrection.
The second example was, “if Barack Obama had gotten Black Lives Matter to come attack a joint session of Congress,” claiming that he would have been “under Guantanamo by now.”
Well, throughout the summer of 2020, BLM was making many attacks, and though they weren’t on the Capitol building itself, they did between $1 and 2 billion in damage to countless businesses and other properties in 140 of some of the nation’s most populated cities, such as Seattle and Minneapolis.
Of the tens of thousands of people involved in these riots, only 326 cases were actually charged with various crimes, according to a report by Movement for Black Lives.
So, these kinds of riots were happening, but they were not being charged or pursued in court as much as Jones insinuated that they would have been. That’s not to mention the full-throated support they received from the liberal media, such as when then-CNN host Chris Cuomo asserted protests were not required to be peaceful.
Jones then said that Republicans had no cause to complain about Trump’s charges, since they had (the wrong) one of “two different realities”:
So, you talk about these two different realities. I think the Republicans say, they’re being too hard on our guy. And we’re saying, what are you talking about? This was, like, you know, one of the most outrageous things to ever happen in the history of the country, and we’re just now getting to a target letter? That’s where we are? We’re at a target letter? We still don’t have an indictment on—on—on the insurrection and all the bad stuff that happened before and after?
After doing exactly what he had just reprimanded Republicans for doing (complaining), Jones acknowledged that he was “not seeing the numbers change very much” as a result of Trump’s indictments, and decided to find another motive that Trump may have for revealing this impending one by releasing the news about his target letter.
Jones claimed that “he might be thinking of himself as an anti-hero,” and so wanted people to like him more because they saw how much others hated him.
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Transcript of the segment below (click Expand):
CNN This Morning
7/19/23
8:29:15 AM ET
PHIL MATTINGLY: Van, I think what’s striking in this moment is, there was so many complaints over the course of the first couple of years post-Trump, post-January 6th, of where—where—where’s the Justice Department? Where are the prosecutions? Where is everything right now? And it just seems like in the last couple of weeks, boom, boom, boom. And then particularly the last couple days, on this issue.
VAN JONES: Finally.
MATTINGLY: How do you think that resonates in terms of people?
JONES: Well, look, I—I—I think that on our side of the aisle, there is a two-tiered justice system, and Trump is benefiting from it.
Can you imagine if Ilhan Omar had given a big speech and rallied ten thousand Muslims to attack a joint session of Congress? She’d have been in jail in three minutes, not three years.
Can you imagine if Barack Obama had gotten Black Lives Matter to come attack a joint session of Congress? He would be under Guantanamo by now.
So, you talk about these two different realities. I think the Republicans say, they’re being too hard on our guy. And we’re saying, what are you talking about? This was, like, you know, one of the most outrageous things to ever happen in the history of the country, and we’re just now getting to a target letter? That’s where we are? We’re at a target letter? We still don’t have an indictment on—on—on the insurrection and all the bad stuff that happened before and after?
So I think, yes, we are finally, finally getting, I think, as I said before, to the stuff that was the most offensive to—to most Americans.
I also think that Trump, I—when you listen to him, I think he is making a certain bet. We all—we keep saying, you know, this is not gonna play in a general election, it’s not gonna pla—play in a general election. You know, I don’t know. Because I’m not seeing the numbers change very much with indictment after indictment. We’ll see if this one makes a difference.
But I think he might be playing a different game here. He might be thinking of himself as an anti-hero that can ral—in the age of anti-heroes. And, so I’m not sure. But I think, from my point of view, we’re finally getting down to the real stuff.
(…)