“Bizarre times and the Twilight Zone” is how CNN legal analyst, criminal defense attorney Joey Jackson, views President Donald Trump’s most recent comments about not bringing back Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador.
“We're in very troubling and difficult times, and I don't want to overstate it at all. But I do want to be objective and I want to be fair and I want to be honest,” Jackson said on his CNN News Central appearance.
“People talk about a constitutional crisis. The reality is, that we are in a constitutional crisis as we speak right now, that reality is plain and apparent. We have a Supreme Court of the United States who said to facilitate right, to facilitate the process. I don't know how much we can debate with you right now as to what your meaning of facilitate is and what mine is,” the legal analyst commented. “But it's very clear with respect to what you need to do, picking up the phone would be that. So when you have a situation where the President of the United States is ignoring a co-equal branch of government, that's troubling, problematic, and very concerning, and so, yes, he's indicating that he's flouting it.”
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Jackson strongly affirmed his position with another point, “Remember what the administration did to an attorney, the Department of Justice, who was in court and was honest, the judge asking him questions as judges do, and the judge giving the indication of, hey, you know what? What happened here? Oh, it was a mistake. I can't get a clear answer, said the U.S. Department of Justice attorney for my client, with respect, the government with regard to what happened here, that person was fired. And so we're in bizarre times in the Twilight Zone. This is not how it's supposed to work. It's working that way. And that's troubling.”
“Justice department lawyers appear before a federal judge today,” noted anchor John Berman. “They need to inform the judge what they've been doing to try to get Kilmar Abrego Garcia home. How does the president's statement that he could pick up the phone, he could do something? How does that change the legal situation? How will the judge read that?”
“I think the judge reads it as we all read it. Right? That is that the administration is doing what it wants. This is not how democracy works. You can't come to court and make an argument that contradicts reality,” Jackson strongly commented.
“If you have the president, who, by the way, is the head of the justice department, I know it's actually the attorney general, but make no mistake about it, it is the president. When you have arguments that are legally contradictory to what's being said in public, where are we?"
Jackson later added, “You have co-equal branches of government. Each has a role, and when a Supreme Court of the United States tells you to do something, you do it. There's no question about that. There's no flouting what facilitate means to that. You just comply. There's not compliance here. That, to me, is not democracy. That's totalitarianism, and we're in an abyss. We're in a problem, and I'm just wondering where we go from here.”
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