They call it the Department of Justice. 

But a more accurate name would be the Department of Double Standards of Justice.

Major corporations – legal persons – get wrist slapped. 

Actual people – living, breathing human beings – get handcuffed.

That’s according to a front page article in the August/September issue of the Capitol Hill Citizen.

The – article looks at two recent cases – Boeing and members of the African People’ Socialist Party. 

Boeing committed what a federal judge called “the deadliest corporate crime in U.S. history” – leading to the deaths of 346 innocents in two crashes of Boeing’s 737 MAX airplane. Boeing gets a deferred prosecution agreement. 

Earlier this year, the Department of Justice made the determination that Boeing violated the terms of the deferred prosecution agreement. And what did the Department do? It offered Boeing a plea deal to a lesser included offense, a minimal fine – effectively deferred prosecution 2.0. 

No criminal prosecution to trial for Boeing or of the higher level executives for the crime that led to the deaths of the 346 people on those two planes. That’s the wrist slap.

Compared that to the case of the African People’s Socialist Party – one of the few groups in the United States that blamed the United States for provoking the Russian invasion in Ukraine.

The U.S. position is that the Russian invasion was unprovoked.

According to Leonard Goodman, a lawyer representing one of the defendants in the case, the African People’s Socialist Party has long opposed U.S. interference in Ukraine. 

In 2014, the group publicly denounced U.S. involvement in the Maidan coup in which the CIA helped overthrow Ukraine’s Russia-friendly president, Viktor Yanukovych, and replace him with a U.S./EU puppet regime. 

The group blamed the United States and NATO for creating the crisis in Ukraine by expanding “800 miles toward the border of Russia,” by helping overthrow Ukraine’s elected president and by arming Ukraine. 

On July 29, 2022, FBI SWAT teams raided the homes of the party leaders, including its 82-year-old founder Omali Yeshitela, and the group’s offices in St. Petersburg and St. Louis.

They handcuffed Yeshitela and his wife and led them away.

Then in April 2023, the government formally charged three party activists – Yeshitela, Penny Hess and Jesse Nevelunder – with an obscure federal statute that makes it a federal crime to act as an agent of a foreign government without registering with the attorney general. 

If convicted, the three defendants face up to 15 years in federal prison. Goodman says that “to justify this charge, the indictment notes that the party received a small amount of financial support – about $7,000 – in 2016 from a person whom the government alleges has ties to the Russian government.” 

“Many activist groups receive financial support from foreign nationals or even directly from foreign governments,” Goodman wrote in the Chicago Tribune earlier this year. “This is perfectly legal, according to the U.S. Department of State website. For example, prominent Washington think tanks regularly receive tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments while pushing policies that reflect the priorities of their donors. None of the leaders of these groups are ever prosecuted as foreign agents.”

“Many Americans will disagree with the party defendants’ view that the U.S. provoked Russia into invading Ukraine. But agree or disagree, we must support their right to speak out and to dissent. The right to criticize our government is the most fundamental value protected by the First Amendment. If we lose that right, our democracy cannot survive.” 

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Goodman told the Ralph Nader Radio Hour earlier this year. “The African Peoples Socialist Party have no friends in the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. They’re major critics of both foreign policies no matter who the president is.”

“In July of 2022, the leaders of the African People’s Socialist Party had their homes raided by FBI SWAT teams, armed SWAT teams with drones, flash grenades. Their offices were raided. Their files were confiscated by the federal government. And they’ve been prosecuted under a rarely used statute.” 

“And there is no dispute in this case that the African People’s Socialist Party is not a national security threat. No one says that they are. They’re non violent. They don’t preach the overthrow or the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. They push for change through political speech and advocacy and through the power of their words.” 

“And they also do other community work, which is quite important in St. Louis and in St. Petersburg, Florida. They have farmers’ markets. They have a doula program. They have recreational programs for young people. They revitalize neighborhoods. They do a lot of important work. They’ve been around since 1972.” 

“We have filed a motion to dismiss based on the First Amendment. And I think one of the most important cases that we rely on is a case called De Jonge v. Oregon. And in that case, Americans who were being prosecuted for organizing public political meetings on behalf of the Communist Party. This was 1937 and the leader was convicted under a state statute. And the Supreme Court reversed and said – you cannot prosecute somebody based on their relationship to someone else. You have to look at the content of the speech, the content of the utterances. And if the utterances are protected by the First Amendment, then the speech is protected. So that appears to be a dispositive case.” 

(To get a copy of the print newspaper, go to capitolhillcitizen.com)