Why does a nation change its laws to become more fair and just? Almost always, it’s out of compassion for those suffering mistreatment. That innate and collective trait of compassion—what certain British philosophers called “sympathy”—is the core catalyst for positive social change. That’s certainly been the case in the United States. Uncle Tom’s Cabin told a simple story about the horrors of slavery. It became a predicate of the Civil War and emancipation. Photos of a murdered Emmett Till and film of black protesters inundated by firehoses and police dogs sparked the civil rights movement and culminated in federal civil rights laws.
Maybe such techniques for appealing to compassion no longer work as they once did. Grisly photos of dismembered unborn children have failed to sway public opinion about abortion, for example. It’s entirely possible, then, that a simple mugshot of an innocent man will not move people to recognize the viciousness of today’s lawfare. Yet there is something about such a photo that conveys reality and appeals to our sense of justice in a uniquely powerful manner.
Last month the Arizona Attorney General, Democrat Kris Mayes, obtained the indictments of 18 Republicans accused of cooking up a plot to overturn the presidential election of 2020 to benefit President Donald Trump. These individuals included lawyers and state and local Republican officials who, by all accounts, believed sincerely that Trump had been wrongfully denied reelection in violation of law. These unlikely defendants are now obliged to entertain their leftist masters by trooping downtown to pose for their mugshots. The mugshot, you see, has become the Left’s most cherished souvenir, much as a settler’s scalp once was in the same part of the country years before.
The defendants have met their humiliating fate in a variety of ways. Some faced their situation with a certain aplomb, posing for their photos with beaming, undaunted smiles. Others, such as John Eastman and Christina Bobb, followed Trump’s lead. They struck a more reasonable look of stony defiance.
The treatment of Bobb was particularly poignant. This accomplished, beautiful attorney in the prime of her career—recently elevated to be the Republican Party’s head of Election Integrity litigation—was forced to perp walk outside the Maricopa County courthouse as reporters deliberately crowded her to provoke a response. She remained ever the lady, insisting she was allowing them to film their “shot” and asking only that they respect that she was a woman wearing a skirt.
Yet the most powerful mugshots were of the ordinary Republican grassroots leaders who have been swept up in this French Revolution madness. They are not practiced in public relations. Their photos are the most genuine. These pictures capture simple people who took a stand for principle and now realize they are being destroyed for it.
One in particular caught my eye. I’m not going to list the man’s name, though I don’t consider it humiliation to note a brave man’s suffering. Those who think they can endure such legalized brutality and subjugation, as he and I both have, without emotion simply haven’t walked a mile in our shoes. I show his photo above this article to publicize an injustice. It’s a mugshot of an aged man of presumably modest means with tears welling in his eyes.
I spoke to countless Republican and conservative groups during my political years in Arizona. Chances are I met this man and shook his hand, maybe more than once. I will certainly remember him now—because of his mugshot.
Mourning What’s Been Lost
The April indictments of these 18 Republicans were foreseeable. I predicted them last year—and said specifically they would be “uncorked in the spring of 2024.” That was based on my own experience as an early target of lawfare, when I faced similar election-year attacks while up for reelection as Maricopa County Attorney, the DA for greater Phoenix.
I too was wrongfully threatened with prosecution and imprisonment. The Left and its henchmen sought indictments of me on similarly vaporous, made-up charges from not one, but two grand juries. Those grand juries of citizens refused to indict me. That came after I asked federal prosecutors to allow me to speak to them. I sought the opportunity to explain to these grand jurors that I was being railroaded by powerful figures and institutions in the state.
The acting U.S. Attorney for Arizona ignored my first email making this request. A week later I sent her a second email, and released it to the media. At that point she responded. More importantly, the grand jurors learned from the media of my offer and desire to speak to them.
I was never contacted by law enforcement nor asked to address a grand jury. Shortly thereafter, the two grand jury investigations closed without bringing any charges—a complete exoneration. Of course, the news of that victory was buried in a DOJ press release sent out right before the long Labor Day weekend. The powers that be settled for another strategy to get rid of me, using a process they fully controlled: a sham disbarment trial that plainly and shamelessly violated my civil rights. For example, the same supposedly neutral judge who presided over my disbarment trial also secretly presided over one of those two grand jury investigations. When this deeply suspicious double assignment was exposed, he claimed preposterously he “did not recall” the grand jury investigation (I was a major public figure there at the time). The rule of law in Arizona has never been the same.
These new 18 defendants in Arizona may or may not have considered my strategy of taking the offensive with the grand jury. It was an unorthodox approach, one I conceived on my own. I hired no criminal defense attorney and spent nothing on legal fees, trusting my own legal experience and instincts instead. It might not have worked for them. I certainly don’t second-guess the litigation strategies of these courageous people. After all, how exactly is one to behave in such circumstances? If Trump, who is as wily and resourceful as they come, could not stare down such forces, who can?
I don’t know the man in the mugshot. But I believe that such a man, with years of toil and purposeful life etched into his face, is the very opposite of weak. He is certainly not self-concerned, or he would not have taken the fateful step to serve in the alternate elector role that suddenly has been decreed a felony. From all of this, I conclude that he is weeping not for himself, but for his country.
If it makes him feel any better, I weep, too.
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Thank you for portrait of a patriot and empathetic backstory.Indeed many reasons to weep since Nov 2020;untold unjust suffering of Jan 6 Americans and families;persecutions & prosecutions for
protesting unreal election results,as has been done since our nation's founding!