You will not be shocked to learn that MAGA darling Argentinian President Javier Milei, who swept into office last year as an “outsider” crusading against “swampy” corruption and political elites, has nominated for an open seat on the South American country’s Supreme Court a judge described by the AP as having “been accused of conspiracy, money laundering and illicit enrichment, and has come under scrutiny for more ethics violations than almost any other judge in his court’s history.”
Among 55 year-old jurist Ariel Lijo’s greatest hits are a 2018 case in which he and his brother, millionaire Alfredo Lijo, were accused of selling favors to other corrupt businessmen in the form of jamming up prosecutions, with the country’s top anti-money laundering watchdog having found an “inexplicable increase” in the brothers’ assets, only for the case to be dropped in 2021 after a successful motion to dismiss from Judge Lijo’s then-defense lawyer, Mariano Cúneo Libarona.
Funny story: Cúneo Libarona is now Argentina’s Justice Minister, appointed by Milei last December.
We could go on for a while about how predictable all this should have been, that you need look no further than Washington, DC in 2017 to see what happens when a nationalist populist talks a big game about shaking things up on the campaign trail only to enter office and show everyone it was all a load of bullshit. Milei’s fanboys are no doubt already recycling the canned excuses their red-hatted friends up north deployed when it became obvious early on that their Lord and Savior was neither able nor willing to actually better their lives, much less avenge the injustices wrought upon them by “the establishment.” They might as well just skip to the part where they invent an alternate reality RPG in which he’s secretly fighting against a cabal of elite Satanic “globalist” pedophiles who will all be arrested en masse and publicly executed for their crimes any day now.
