You can tell a great deal about a man by the enemies he makes.
Consider the newest enemy of Missouri’s Governor Eric Greitens, a prosecutor brought on to help in the felony case against the governor. The prosecutor’s name is Ronald Sullivan, and he comes to Missouri by way of Harvard, where he is a professor of law. According to his faculty bio, he is a “theorist in the areas of criminal law, criminal procedure, trial practice and techniques, legal ethics and race theory,” and served as the chair of the “Criminal Justice Advisory Committee for then-Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.”
So what do his legal “theories” look like in practice?
In 2015, Sullivan defended Usamaah Rahim, a “devout Muslim,” who was plotting to commit acts of terrorism, including beheading the Executive Director of the American Freedom Defense Initiative. Rahim abandoned those plans — and then promptly decided that he was going to target Boston police officers instead.
The subject of an FBI terrorism investigation, Rahim was killed by law enforcement. In the incident in which he was killed, he advanced on police officers and an FBI agent, and he refused to drop his weapon. So law enforcement personnel did what they are trained to do: neutralized the threat.
Sullivan took to Rahim’s defense, arguing that the police escalated too quickly. The full video tape is worth watching. Rahim not only doesn’t drop his weapon and continues to advance menacingly toward the officers, but he shouts, “You drop yours!” and “Why don’t you shoot me?”
The whole scene leaves little doubt about Rahim’s intentions.
Professor Sullivan is also a beneficiary of George Soros. He is a founding member and senior fellow of the Jamestown Project, which was funded by Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Sullivan’s allegiances to Soros aren’t surprising: his new boss and the prosecutor who brought the charge against the governor in the first place, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, received nearly $200,000 from a George Soros super PAC as well. Sullivan’s connections to Soros should shock no one. He, Gardner, and Soros are birds of a feather.
But here’s what is surprising: why would Sullivan would leave the cushy confines of Cambridge and Harvard and head to the middle of the country to take on a sitting Republican governor, on a case with dubious merits?
There’s a plausible explanation here, and it goes beyond Sullivan’s radical politics, his defense of would-be cop killers, and even his ties to Soros. It goes back to the 2015 Ferguson protests. After the shooting death of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson, the city of Ferguson, in St. Louis county, erupted in violence which lasted for weeks.
Sullivan served as one of the attorneys for the family of Michael Brown, and given the fact that both a local grand jury refused to indict the officer and the fact that the Department of Justice cleared the officer of all wrongdoing and declared that the officer acted in self-defense, it’s not a stretch to imagine that Ferguson was, for Prof. Ronald Sullivan, a great personal failure.
According to reports, the Ferguson protests left an imprint on Gov. Eric Greitens as well. He took from them a sensible lesson: the looting and rioting and chaos after Ferguson was unacceptable, and law enforcement had their hands tied by left-wing leaders. That’s why the governor campaigned on and pledged to bring law-and-order back to Missouri.
It’s why he took bold, fair, and forthright action in advance of and during the trial of another white officer accused of killing a black suspect, Officer Jason Stockley. During the Stockley trial and in its aftermath, Gov. Greitens was clear: peaceful protest would be allowed; carnage would not.
Of course, nothing sticks a thumb in the eye of someone like Professor Sullivan more than a Navy SEAL governor making sure that people in the city of St. Louis can sleep safely in their beds at night. So Sullivan’s now joined the legal team against Gov. Greitens. The indictment is a chance for Missouri Democrats to score political points; it’s a chance for Professor Sullivan to avenge the death of Michael Brown.
We ought to be clear about what this indictment has been, continues to be, and will be in the weeks to come: an attempt by radical, left-wing, George Soros-funded, anti-law enforcement lawyers to go after a popular governor who disagrees with their politics. It is the worst abuse of the judicial system that I have seen in all my adult years.
The indictment Kim Gardner brought has not an iota of evidence to support it. I expect the false charges ultimately to be dismissed and the governor exonerated.
But those of us who value freedom and the American system of justice need to pay attention to this case, even if the case itself is flimsy. Why? Because a good man is having his reputation ruined by the worst forces on the organized, extreme Left. They must be stopped.
Mr. Hantler is a retired auto industry executive and frequent contributor to Breitbart.
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