We see all around us the detritus left by the wrecking crew of woke-ism, damaging our institutions and savaging our traditions, customs and history by preaching the poisonous theme that America was never great as it was built on the backs of slaves and is forever tainted by that history. This note will be about one of those traditions, the sacred doctrine in American law that a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Examples of the damage done to that bedrock principle abound in the past few years of vicious lawfare, principally against President Trump and several lawyers who had the temerity to represent him in the various spurious lawsuits, impeachments, indictments, arrests, etc. to which he has been subjected. One example out of many would be the preposterous filing of the Special Counsel’s “report” in the record of the so-called January 6 case. It is replete with numerous unproven and untested allegations, especially egregious after the Supreme Court had all but finished off any remaining vitality that case had in its presidential immunity ruling. It must also be noted that the federal judge in that case, who had publicly made her loathing of President Trump clear in on-the-record comments in her Court, was only too happy to go along with this outrageous stunt.

We are now seeing another version of this tragedy play out in the case of former Rep. Matt Gaetz who is facing the nearly unprecedented release of the House Ethics Committee report after his resignation from Congress. This report, which could well be public by the time this post is published, will almost certainly contain untested, unproven, unchallenged assertions; these allegations were considered by the Biden Department of Justice, no friend of the former Congressman, but determined to be too weak upon which to base a prosecution.

Here I should note something in the way of a disclaimer: As a constituent of Mr. Gaetz when he represented the First Congressional District of Florida, I should make it crystal clear that I am no fan of his and that the reasons for my opinion of him are not germane to this discussion. That is since I write this not in the defense of Matt Gaetz, the person, but of Matt Gaetz, the American citizen entitled to the full panoply of rights and privileges we know as due process under the law.