Dem prejudicial judgment day
AT a time when recidivist criminals are released with a slap on the wrist, procriminal prosecutors are installed with George Soros cash and biased DC judges are handing out lengthy jail sentences to Jan. 6 defendants for misdemeanors, you would think there would be more important matters to occupy the judicial system than sanctioning a judge for being a Donald Trump supporter.
But not according to the Judicial Conduct Commission and the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.
So offended were they by the social media output of Housing Court Judge Joseph L. Michaud that they conducted an intensive, two-year investigation of his low-follower Facebook account and found him very, very guilty of making a few mildly pro-Trump comments while posting content from The Post, The Wall Street Journal and Fox News.
Quelle horreur!
‘Conduct unbecoming’
His biggest infraction was to post a link to a story from Fox Business about how The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop scoop had been censored by Big Tech three weeks before the 2020 election.
“Hmmm I wonder why?” he commented.
His post was shared a grand total of five times and attracted 10 comments, the commission huffed.
His punishment is a “public reprimand” — aka denunciation in front of his peers — by the state Supreme Judicial Court for “engaging in conduct unbecoming a judicial officer that brought the judiciary into disrepute.”
No dunce cap was reported but he is muzzled and on a tight leash.
Michaud’s conduct doesn’t come close to the flagrant bias of hardcore Democrats who grace judicial benches around the country, some of whom appear to operate with impunity as political hit men.
Take, for instance, Bruce Reinhart, the federal magistrate judge in Florida who authorized the FBI warrant to search Trump’s Palm Beach home, Mar-a-Lago, and rummage through former First Lady Melania Trump’s underwear drawer.
A casual perusal of Reinhart’s social media offerings after the 2016 election would raise the eyebrows of even the laziest judicial-bias sleuth.
“I generally ignore the President-elect’s tweets, but not this one,” posted Reinhart before the 2017 inauguration. “Donald Trump doesn’t have the moral stature to kiss John Lewis’s feet.”
And what about all the partisan DC judges falling over themselves to jail Jan. 6 defendants for nonviolent misdemeanors while taking every opportunity to condemn Trump?
For example, Judge Reggie Walton slandered the former president during the sentencing of a Trump supporter last year: “We have charlatans like our former president, who doesn’t in my view really care about democracy, but only about power.”
I could go on, but against that backdrop, consider the sins of Judge Michaud, laid out in mindnumbing detail in the Judicial Conduct Commission’s 166-page decision, including 45 appendices.
Michaud’s “social media activity included posts of news articles, memes, and comments that repeatedly expressed support for [Trump and] news articles, memes, and comments denigrating toward or in opposition to [Joe Biden], other elected Democratic leaders, and the Democratic Party’s political positions.”
Rand inquisition
Have you ever heard of such wickedness!
Exhibit A: Michaud posted The Post’s October 2020 scoop “Biden’s secret emails” indicating that then-candidate Joe Biden, when vice president, met with son Hunter’s Ukrainian paymaster in DC, despite Joe repeatedly claiming he knew “nothing” about Hunter’s overseas business dealings.
“Not to be redundant,” commented Michaud, “but doesn’t this cause at least some degree of concern with my friends on the other side of the aisle?”
Well, yeah?
A week later, Michaud posted a meme featuring a photo of Hunter and Joe, with a quote from novelist Ayn Rand: “When the law no longer protects you from the corrupt, but protects the corrupt from you, your nation is doomed.”
Michaud commented: “Ayn Rand is right on so many fronts.”
Two-plus years later, with so much evidence confirming The Post’s original reporting on Biden family corruption, a criminal investigation into Hunter in Delaware, a special-counsel investigation into Joe’s potentially related alleged mishandling of classified documents, FBI whistleblowers and Elon Musk’s Twitter Files exposing the cover-up, and multiple congressional investigations, Michaud’s comments now look prescient and wildly understated.
The voluminous case against Michaud includes a Fox News story he posted on Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2020, at 9:34 p.m., titled, “Laptop connected to Hunter Biden linked to FBI money laundering probe.”
“Uh oh! Drip drip drip. Who would have thought that Biden and Hunter were tied to an international money laundering investigation? Obviously more Russian disinformation lol!” he commented.
The commission noted his post was “shared five times and included twenty comments. Twenty-eight users left an impression on this post.”
Will democracy survive?
Truth on trial
The commission notes that a week later, Michaud posted a link to a Fox News article about Hunter’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski who “alleged that then-candidate Biden had discussed his business dealings with Hunter, contrary to public statements by then-candidate Biden, [and] also asserted the legitimacy of an email that allegedly tied the Bidens to a financial deal with a Chinese energy company.”
Michaud commented: “Drip drip drip for the ‘Big Guy.’ ”
All true. What’s the problem? Sadly, Judge Michaud terminated his Facebook account after some woke New York judge reported him to the commission.
The “Committee on Ethics” that investigated Michaud opined that his Facebook posts “expressed favor for a specific political candidate and for specific political viewpoints.”
All that was missing was the struggle session.
Michaud is a 30-year Army veteran who served in Operation Desert Storm and an attorney who once served as a Republican town official in Dartmouth, Mass.
In his letter pleading for leniency, he pointed out that most of the offending screenshots the commission had gathered “relate to discussions between my older brother, close friends, and relatives [and] most of my Facebook page posts . . . involved discussions about our children, travel, books, and other items of personal interest.”
Not good enough if you’re a conservative, which, of course, is his real crime.