As The Washington Post is losing tens of millions of dollars and losing enough readers to fill a city, if there is any hope of saving it, it’s essential that owner Jeff Bezos fires the right people. Jennifer Rubin needs to go. So does Philip Bump.

Also near the top the list is Ruth Marcus. Marcus is a Post veteran of several decades, which means she might be harder to scrape off the hull. Or maybe she’s ready to go. In either case, it’s time.

Marcus is an apologist for the Justice Department and the deep state who rejoices whenever the government abuses its power to destroy people. Here is what Marcus wrote when Senator Matt Gaetz removed his name from consideration for attorney general:

“The system, for the moment, passed. For that we should feel grateful and, even more, relieved. Gaetz is experientially unqualified and temperamentally unsuited to be the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, even leaving aside the sordid accounts of his sexual exploits. He is a professional provocateur, not a sober-minded prosecutor. He would have been an eager executor of Trump’s desire to use the criminal justice system to punish his enemies.”

When Marcus comes across a genuine example of government overreaching to “punish enemies,” she always takes the side of the Stasi. The worst example was the case of Aaron Swartz. In 2011 Swartz, a computer whiz, was arrested and indicted on multiple felony counts for downloading academic articles from a subscription database called JSTOR. As the Guardian noted at the time, “it was unclear what Swartz intended to do with the articles. He might have wanted to make them openly available to online users, believing as he did in the fundamental principle of freedom of information. He might have intended to analyze the data. Or he might have simply wanted to show it could be done. Whatever the reason, Swartz did not expect his actions to attract the full retributive force of the judicial authorities.”

U.S. attorney Carmen Ortiz and Massachusetts assistant U.S. attorney Stephen Heymann threw everything at Swartz. Federal prosecutors charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release. Swartz declined a plea bargain under which he would have served six months in federal prison. Ortiz issued a press release at the time of his indictment stating: “Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar.” 

On 11 January, Aaron Swartz hanged himself with his belt in his Brooklyn apartment.

In his book Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law, Justice Neil Gorsuch uses the Swartz case as an example. “The motive for Aaron’s conduct remains unclear, but many suspected that he intended it as an act of civil disobedience in line with his belief in open access to ideas and information,” Gorsuch writes. “Regardless, once caught, he returned the articles to JSTOR and the company considered the matter closed, telling the U.S. attorney’s office that it ‘preferred that no charges be brought.’” You read that right. JSTOR didn’t even want to press charges—kind of like the banks that worked with Donald Trump and were roped into the ridiculous lawfare cases against him.

Ruth Marcus offered this about the case Gorsuch’s description: 

Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch worries about big government. About agencies that overreach and infringe the rights of unwary and unsophisticated individuals. About using the overwhelming force of criminal law to bludgeon relatively minor wrongdoers. About the federal government supplanting the power of state and local governments that are closer to the needs of their citizens. Was this a terrible case of prosecutorial overreach? Once again, to read Gorsuch, it sure looks that way. And once again, the Gorsuch recitation minimizes the underlying facts. As University of California at Berkeley law professor Orin Kerr has laid out, Swartz’s effort to download the JSTOR database was no one-time lark, but a sustained campaign marked by attempts to avoid detection.

Incredible. In response to this hateful take, Jennifer Sitsa Granick, a lawyer for the ACLU—no conservative—took to Bluesky to take Marcus apart:

@ruthmarcus @washingtonpost review of Justice Gorsuch’s new book contains factual errors about Aaron Swartz’s case, and demonstrates a lack of understanding and compassion for the pressure the DOJ brought down on this young man.

Prosecutors offered Aaron a plea bargain involving 6 months in jail, not 3. They told him that if he declined, they would push for 7 years, not 6 months. She is defending the DOJ imposing a punishment on Aaron for exercising his right to trial.

When Aaron did decline, the DOJ got a superseding indictment with a lot more charges. These duplicative charges hung 35 years, then 50 years, over Aaron’s head. These plea-or-punish “offers” are terribly common, but they are still oppressive, which is Gorsuch’s point.

Marcus recites Aaron’s efforts to conceal his identity. She says Aaron’s activities would attract government attention. So what? It was uncertain that (even quickly) downloading articles a student had the right to access is a crime, even if JSTOR didn’t like it.

It’s sad to see Marcus—who has written in the past about the “terrifying harassment” that “infects” the system—justifying prosecutorial overreach because she doesn’t like Justice Gorsuch.

My own nasty experience with Marcus seems to corroborate Granick’s take. In 2018 Marcus began writing a book about the Brett Kavanaugh nomination. Chronicles readers, by now, know the story of how I was caught up in that circus so I don’t need to go into detail about it here. For those interested in knowing more, it’s all in my book The Devil’s Triangle. However, my brief interaction with Marcus still disgusts me. In November of 2018 Marcus sent this nauseating email to my lawyer:

Hi, 

I know this is a long shot but I’m on leave from my job as columnist/deputy editorial page editor at The Post to write a book about Justice Kavanaugh and I wanted to ask about the prospect of speaking with Mark Judge. My pitch is: there are going to be a number of books about and continued interest in what did or didn’t happen. I am truly hopeful that what I produce will both interest contemporary readers and serve as the definitive, at least initially, historical account. I am open-minded about what transpired and determined to write as full and fair a book as possible. To that end, it would obviously be great from my point of view to hear directly from Mr. Judge, but perhaps there is some way in which it might serve his interest as well to have his perspective more fully related than was possible or advisable in the heat of the moment.  I’d be happy to talk about this further, and of course to speak, with you or him, on whatever basis is most comfortable. My cell is ******* and I appreciate your consideration,

Best,

Ruth

Of course, Marcus had, and still has, no interest in writing “a full and fair account” of what happened in the Kavanaugh case. Marcus is incapable of answering even the most basic questions about it. In Supreme Ambition: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover, she glancingly addresses the bizarre fact that Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Brett of sexually assaulting her in 1982 while I watched, never bothered to contact me. Marcus attempts to explain this away, writing, “One possibility: Ford would call Mark Judge, remind Judge of what had happened, tell him to call Kavanaugh, and advise him to spare his family the ordeal. She dug up Judge’s Twitter handle but wasn’t sure how to go about contacting him.”

Wait. What? “She dug up Judge’s Twitter handle but wasn’t sure how to go about contacting him.” Really? I’m a journalist who has written for most major publications and many minor ones. I’ve been on Fox, CNN, and EWTN. I’m on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. How could it be possible that Ford didn’t know how to contact me? That was only one small thing, but it points to the sloppiness of Marcus’s work and her incuriosity when the answers don’t suit her preordained conclusions. I’m happy to talk to Marcus anytime—provided she answers some of my questions.

While promoting Supreme Ambition at the lefty D.C. bookstore Politics & Prose, Marcus had an awkward moment. A questioner from the crowd noted that in all the time that has passed since the nomination, not a single soul has come forward to support Blasey Ford’s story. “Well,” Marcus replied, “it was never investigated.” The man shot back: “Well wait—you investigated.” (Note the 50:00 mark of this video.) The man was right. That was supposed to be the subject of her book, but she didn’t do her homework.

Marcus had no answer. As an ideologue and a hack, she never will. If Bezos has any hope of saving the Post, it’s time for her to go.