Navy sailor Petty Officer Wenheng Zhao was caught passing classified information concerning an Okinawa radar system, along with plans for a large-scale maritime training exercise in the Pacific theatre, to a spy for the People’s Republic of China. [OPSEC note: the exercise plans would allow, among other things, the PRC to watch the radar system in action during the exercise.] Zhao has been sentenced to 27 months in prison. A whole 27 months. A wrist slap.
Meanwhile, the 6 January rioters—those who have actually had trials three years(!) after the event and whose trials have actually run to completion—have been sentenced to 3-6 years, and some have been sentenced to as many as 20 years.
Meanwhile meanwhile, insurrectionists rioters in Portland and Seattle have, in the main, gone wholly uncharged at all, with a few scapegoats getting a few months.
It’s long past time to clean out the DoJ, from top to bottom, including the FBI. In parallel with that, it’s long past time to clean up our sentencing laws and sentencing guidelines.
If a Navy traitor can get off with a wrist slap, so, too, should the rioters at Capital Hill. That precedent was set prior to Zhao’s case, with those “rioters” who seized Seattle territory, drove out the Seattle government, and held the territory for weeks getting off with wrist slaps or going scot-free, and with those “rioters” in Portland who attacked and tried, for weeks, to burn down a Federal building with Federal government security personnel inside also getting off with wrist slaps or going scot-free.
Alternatively, the Navy traitor should have gotten tens of years in jail, even a life sentence. The 6 January rioters—a truly mostly peaceful affair, just noisy and boisterous (the only true violence was a security officer shooting one of the rioters and a security officer getting bashed over the head by a rioter using a fire extinguisher)—should have gotten off with sentences for the trespass they were committing, and the occasional petty theft they were committing in their souvenir hunting. The insurrectionists in Seattle and Portland should have gotten intermediate sentences in the fives of years in jail range.
It’s long past time to clean out the DoJ, from top to bottom, including the FBI. In parallel with that, it’s long past time to clean up our sentencing laws and sentencing guidelines. Whether or not you, dear reader, agree with my sentencing suggestions for these particular cases, the rules need to be adjusted to produce truly similar sentences for substantially similar actions, and—especially—existing personnel completely replaced with those who actually will apply and enforce the rules.