Tony Podesta, the Democratic über-operative and brother of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, has been offered immunity from Special Counsel Robert Mueller in exchange for his testimony against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.  The two men were doing the exact same "crime," which was acting as unregistered lobbyists on behalf of the Ukrainian government, but Podesta skates, while Manafort goes to prison for the rest of his life.

As Fox News's Tucker Carlson, who broke the story, pointed out, the only difference between them is that Manafort worked for Donald Trump.

Talk about unequal justice.  How delicious it must be for Podesta indeed to be able to testify against his brother's Republican rival, the one who beat him.  How great to settle scores.  Mueller probably wouldn't even need to offer the carrot of immunity on that one, given the pleasure factor it would give Podesta and his fellow Democrats.  Funny how that happens.

As for the rest of us, all we see is one set of laws for Democrats and another set of laws for Republicans.  To the Washington swamp, and Mueller who heads it, it all makes perfect sense.

Just the optics of it, never mind the substance, are amazingly bad.

Mueller, recall, has a special counsel's team that's loaded with Hillary Clinton campaign donors.  Complementing that, he's hired rabidly partisan FBI agents to complete his team effort, as the testimony of the wild-eyed, smirking FBI counterintelligence section chief Peter Strzok has demonstrated on his amazingly partisan text messages.  Strzok is so extreme that he texted about overthrowing the Trump government.

Then there's the context, which looks really bad, too.

Democrats and the Deep State already have a loaded record of unequal justice on all of these national security questions.

Trump gets a big special counsel investigation complete with rabidly partisan FBI agents and Hillary Clinton campaign donors, while Hillary Clinton skates on her obvious violations for national security through her illegal server, carefully reworded by Strzok as "extremely careless" from the legally problematic "grossly negligent"?  Not a problem for Mueller.

Hillary Clinton got zero consequences for leaving the State Department's entire communications exposed to foreign hackers through her illegal private server, while Navy seaman Kristian Saucier got the book thrown at him, complete with jail time, for an inadvertently indiscreet photo?  Nobody on the left sees an issue there.  After all, it's just a little guy.

Cheryl Mills got complete immunity for destroying evidence while serving in a conflicted-of-interest position as Hillary Clinton's lawyer, while the dog, the cat, and the rhododendrons (to paraphrase Tom Wolfe) of the Trump team are getting indicted on peripheral issues such as "lying" to investigators, even though the investigators don't think they lied?  See the case of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was framed on just such charges, not to mention the powerless, no-money-for-lawyers pipsqueaks, such as George Papadopoulos and Rick Gates, whose lives have been ruined by  Mueller. Don't even bring up Carter Page, whose helpfulness to the FBI in the past got him no points in the FBI's decision to surveil him based on a partisan campaign "research" opposition dossier.

What is wrong with this picture?

What we are seeing is one set of laws for Democrats and another set of laws for Republicans.  Its analogy in the press is media bias – one kind of coverage for Republicans, and another kind for Democrats, as we recently saw with the undocumented children case, which it turns out was President Obama's doing, not President Trump's, but guess who got the wall-to-wall coverage.  People notice things like that.  The Deep State doesn't, but normal people do see these double standards.  Double sets of laws for the elites and masses are precisely why voters turned to Donald Trump back in 2016.

This Manafort-Podesta thing isn't about justice.  It's about the Deep State's bid to preserve its power.  It can only serve as rocket fuel for Trump.

Image credit: Cliff via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.