Is the federal justice system still in the business of seeking truth, or has it become a machine built to force capitulation? That question runs through a new American Thinker column by Horace Cooper, an author and legal commentator who once served as counsel to former House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey and taught constitutional law at George Mason University School of Law.
Cooper’s answer is blunt: a selective weaponization of the justice system has grown “like a malignant cancer,” and the remedy the Founders built into Article II — the presidential pardon — is meant to be used.
A documented pattern, not a theory
Cooper grounds his argument in recent congressional activity rather than abstract complaint. He points to the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which he says released a report on September 23 detailing how federal prosecutors deploy asymmetric resources and high-pressure tactics to coerce targets. In Cooper’s reading, the subcommittee’s findings describe prosecutors who function less as seekers of truth than as unchecked machinery designed to force people to give in.
He also cites House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan’s formal criminal referral to the Department of Justice against former Special Counsel Jack Smith, accusing Smith of lying about the aggressive and unconstitutional collection of lawmakers’ private records in his investigation of Donald Trump. For Cooper, the significance is structural: when the country’s most prominent prosecutors face criminal referrals for pushing the boundaries of state power, it exposes a deeper problem. The government brings near-limitless bank accounts and bottomless resources to bear against an individual, and the balance the system depends on collapses.
That imbalance is where Cooper locates the constitutional case for pardons. The Founders, he writes, engineered the presidential pardon into Article II precisely as a safety valve — not a political favor or an instrument of elite back-scratching, but a mechanism to break systemic overreach, restore structural balance, and deliver justice where courts fail to.
The Pflueger case as Exhibit A
To show what overreach looks like on the ground, Cooper turns to the case of businessman Alan Pflueger. More than a decade ago, Pflueger became the target of what Cooper describes as a highly coordinated and relentless federal tax investigation — one whose scale was hard to square with the amount actually in dispute. The government’s contested calculation placed the alleged tax loss below $1 million, a figure Cooper notes is routinely handled through civil assessments, penalties, and collection. Yet the case moved with a velocity and aggressiveness suggesting something well beyond a standard compliance matter.
The escalation looks even more striking, in Cooper’s telling, because the sentence ultimately included only about $26,000 in unpaid taxes along with a $40,000 fine.
Cooper describes a target-centric squeeze in which government operators went after Pflueger’s family behind closed doors — specifically his elderly father. Facing a legal assault on his father that he felt he could not stop, Pflueger accepted a plea deal even though he maintains his innocence, in Cooper’s account sacrificing himself to spare his family.
What happened next, Cooper argues, removed any doubt about the prosecution’s character. Despite Pflueger accepting responsibility to protect his family, the government kept pursuing charges against his father anyway. The elder Pflueger, armed with high-quality legal counsel, fought the case in court and won a full acquittal on essentially the same charges. For Cooper, that outcome proves what the Weaponization Subcommittee’s findings warn about: a fundamentally flawed government case, built on overreach and sustained by coercion.
Cooper adds a personal toll that he calls compounding cruelty. Pflueger was incarcerated during some of the final months of his father’s life, denying them time together over a prosecution that the acquittal had shown to be meritless. Even so, Cooper writes, Pflueger completed his sentence and paid every cent of his financial restitution, meeting every condition with a humility that surprised even his harshest critics.
The case for a pardon
Here Cooper pivots from the mechanics of prosecution to the question of what a person deserves afterward. In cases where a citizen survives the worst the system can throw at him, he writes, justice cannot simply be a lifetime label of “felon.” He describes Pflueger’s life as a model of community service, business mentorship, and philanthropic leadership — the hard, invisible work of proving that character is defined by a lifetime of service, not by a flawed government narrative.
Cooper’s conclusion ties the individual case to a broader political moment. As Congress continues to expose prosecutorial weaponization and the White House pursues its own efforts to end it, he argues that a presidential pardon for Pflueger would send a powerful message across America: that the country values fair play and is committed to dismantling the machinery of rogue prosecutions.
Whether or not one accepts Cooper’s framing, his column reflects a broader argument now circulating on the right — that the pardon power is less an act of mercy than a structural corrective, and that using it is itself a defense of the rule of law. The Pflueger case, as Cooper presents it, is offered as the human evidence for that claim.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/overcoming-the-machinery-of-rogue-prosecutions/