Dotcom deserves a fair hearing
He won’t get that from Trump, so New Zealand should refuse to hand him over, writes Phil Quin.
Australian shadow foreign minister Penny Wong ripped the Band-Aid off – speaking out on the challenges of dealing with a reckless and unpredictable White House. Donald Trump, Wong said at the University of Sydney recently, ‘‘evinces a rejection, at least in part, of the rules and norms to which we have become accustomed . . . generating something of a global rethink about how best to work with the US’’.
Perhaps her less-than-diplomatic truthtelling was inspired by David Remnick, editor at the New Yorker, who pleaded with politicians in his own besieged democracy to ‘‘find the capacity to say what is obvious and what is true’’ about a president on a rampage against long-cherished alliances on the foreign stage, and democratic norms at home.
New Zealand faces the same challenge with respect to current and future dealings with the White House. The extradition proceedings regarding Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom may soon bring this into sharp relief.
In the event that the Supreme Court upholds the lower court ruling on Dotcom’s extradition, the scalding hot potato lands in the lap of New Zealand’s political leaders. In weighing their next steps, I would urge them to take into account the state of the Trump administration in general, and the conduct of the Department of Justice (DOJ) in particular.
However distasteful one may find Dotcom (very, in my case), this ought to have no bearing on the broader question: should the Government actively co-operate with the Trump administration by handing over legal residents to face untested charges in what looks more and more like a vendetta, and less a genuine effort to tackle piracy or protect intellectual property?
As the agency responsible for providing legal cover for a radical anti-immigrant, anti-voting rights agenda, the DOJ is Trumpism’s engine room. In Jeff Sessions, Trump has an attorneygeneral whose rabid hostility towards immigrants and minorities is legendary.
Sessions was the first US senator to endorse Trump at a time when conventional wisdom assessed doing so as somewhere between risky and suicidal. Just last week, displaying nothing of the dignity of his office, Sessions giggled and joined chants of ‘‘Lock her up’’ – the anti-Hillary mantra – while addressing high-school students.
Trump and Sessions famously don’t get along these days, as a result of Sessions’ decision to recuse himself from the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump regarded that as unforgivably treacherous. But don’t let the disputatious relationship bamboozle you. Personalities aside, Trump and his chief law enforcement officer are ideologically in lockstep. Both are profoundly reactionary, especially on questions of race. Sessions, from deep red, Deep South Alabama, has dedicated his career to rolling back every civil rights advance of the past five decades.
Trump, of course, is himself a notorious racist. Long before headlining the Birther movement that alleged Barack Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim, Trump led the charge against the Central Park Five, AfricanAmerican men wrongly accused of rape, and has been fined by previous administrations for barring people of colour from his apartments.
The DOJ has been admonished repeatedly by courts for efforts to upend norms, from the first two iterations of the so-called Muslim ban to the establishment of a bogus commission on voter fraud, an obvious effort to purge electoral rolls of as many young and minority voters as it could. That’s before we get to the family separations at the southern border, which shocked the conscience of the world. Critically, the policy rejects the legal asylum process, almost certainly abrogating international agreements with respect to the treatment of refugees.
If extradited, Dotcom will be joined by his arguably more sympathetic former colleagues – low-key coders, law-abiding residents with Kiwi kids and a new business that works daily with New Zealand and international law enforcement against cyber risks.
Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk would be prohibited from using their own funds on a legal defence, likely forcing them to rely on public defenders who would not stand a chance against federal prosecutors on such a densely technical case. The DOJ doesn’t like trials, which is why it secures pleas in the vast majority of cases.
In the Megaupload case, its strategy is transparently to bully its way to a plea deal with defendants dragged from home and family, and deprived of a proper defence. There’s no interest in a fair go; only total victory.
These are Trump values, not ours. New Zealand must not play along.
Phil Quin is a former Labour Party staffer.