Tucker Carlson: Conviction of Steve Bannon is an ‘escalation,’ this is about sending political enemies to prison

TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS: The hallmark of any authoritarian regime is politicized justice. Under that system, your opponents go to jail, your supporters can do whatever they want and this reveals that the state exists not to serve the people who live in it, but to preserve itself and to crush all dissent. Hate to think we’ve reached a point anywhere near that here in the United States because there’s nothing worse than that or scarier or harder to fix, but in fact, we have reached that point. That’s where we are.

Yesterday, for example, a man leaped on stage at a campaign event and tried to stab Lee Zeldin. Zeldin is sitting member of Congress. He’s challenging the unelected incumbent, Kathy Hochul, in the governor’s race in New York.

So ordinarily, attempting to assassinate a federal officeholder would be considered a big deal. But Lee Zeldin is a Republican, so it’s not a big deal anymore. The man who tried to murder Lee Zeldin was released immediately with no bail. Less than 24 hours later, by contrast, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon was convicted of crimes that until recently were not crimes at all, for which he now faces a prison term of two years. Bannon has been declared guilty of something called contempt of Congress. That may strike you as an unintentionally hilarious term, since most of the time Congress invites our contempt. But the point is, this is a crime the Democrats are not convicted of ever.

Attorney General Eric Holder and IRS executive Lois Lerner were once found to be in contempt of Congress, both of them, and for real crimes. In Holder’s case, it was gunrunning in Mexico. In Lerner’s case, it was targeting conservatives for audits, but neither one went to trial. Holder claimed executive privilege, which was enough, even after a judge ruled that executive privilege did not apply in Eric Holder’s case, but it didn’t matter. He walked. Lois Lerner cited the Fifth Amendment. It was as simple as that. Both of them, today, Lerner and Holder are free and richer than ever, but these standards do not apply to Steve Bannon.