No One Is Safe
One of the most pernicious effects of corrupting federal law enforcement is that it undermines public confidence — as it should — in everything the Justice Department does.
You can’t have a Justice Department or FBI doing corrupt work with one hand and normal aboveboard work with the other and expect anyone — from citizens to lawyers to judges — to decipher which is which in any given case.
At it’s core, that is what losing the “presumption of regularity” is all about. It casts doubt on everything.
For defenders of the old DOJ, reformers, watchdogs, and journalists, one of the pitfalls of the descent into endemic DOJ corruption is that they themselves take on the onus of figuring which cases are legit and which aren’t. It’s an impossible task. Given the limited access and visibility that outsiders have into federal cases — criminal and civil — there’s no real way to assess on a case-by-case basis where impure motives, retribution, and bad acts are involved.
It’s only because Trump is such a uncontained raving moron that many of the early vindictive prosecutions are so obviously driven by his desire for retribution. He could have picked less sympathetic characters, people who had less obvious reasons for being in his crosshairs than Letitia James or James Comey.
Even then, if I had a penny for every time I’ve been told that Comey deserves what he’s getting because of his heavy-handed role in the closing days of the 2016 campaign, I’d have retired by now. The notion that Comey had it coming so totally misses the heart of the matter that I’ve given up trying to correct people on this point.
If Trump were less impulsive and more calculating, he would have begun by targeting unpopular, unsavory, dubious characters where the corruption could be more easily camouflaged.
The news yesterday that former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) is now under federal criminal investigation related to the sexual misconduct allegations against him is case in point. We could fall into the trap of trying to figure out whether this is a legit prosecution given Swalwell’s contemptible conduct. We could try to parse which parts of the investigation are legit and which aren’t. But it’s a crazy-making undertaking. You can’t possibly separate out Trump’s repeated threats against Swalwell and the prior investigation of him and Trump’s eagerness to target political foes like Swalwell from the possibility that there’s a valid legal and factual predicate to justify the feds looking into him.
The onus must remain firmly on the Trump DOJ to be aboveboard at all times, and the presumption that it is corruptly proceeding should remain firmly against it as long as it has a corrupt leadership. I don’t mean Bondi or Blanche or Patel or whoever else becomes titular head of federal law enforcement. I mean Trump.
While Morning Memo is mostly focused on the politically oriented vindictive prosecutions, there’s a vast range of other DOJ cases, investigations, and regulatory actions that have come under suspicion for obvious reasons. These are far-flung examples because the problem itself is so all-encompassing:
Corporate fraudsters are being let off the hook right and left. Who gets let off and who doesn’t prompts endless but justified speculation about what it takes to receive such dispensation.
In one particularly concerning case, a career federal prosecutor in Miami fired for years-old anti-Trump blog posts he wrote before joining the department has sued the Trump DOJ, claiming that he was terminated immediately before he was scheduled to try a major fraud case — and not-so-subtly suggesting that the only way MAGA influencer Natalie Winters could have been tipped off to the old blog posts was by “one of the parties,” the implication being that it was all a bid to delay the upcoming fraud trial. Defense counsel have “vigorously denied” having anything to do with unearthing the fired prosecutor’s writings.
Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s brother Joshua’s fire-sale purchase (along with Bob Iger) of the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers while the previous owner Mark Walter is fighting off a federal investigation has prompted insidious but understandable speculation that law enforcement scrutiny was a tool to force the sale.
The suspicion, rumor, and conjecture — some of it more grounded in fact, some of it less so — arising from the Trump DOJ’s now-presumed corruption is in the darkest sense the fruit of that corruption. It’s everyone getting the message that the Trump DOJ is open for business. The perverse pressures that puts on honest lawyers inside DOJ and outside lawyers who have cases against the department is enormous and irreconcilable.
The threat of a corrupt federal law enforcement apparatus run amok in America is a threat to everyone. No one is spared the risk, even if not everyone is eventually targeted. The arbitrary and capricious nature of corrupt justice creates an oppressive atmosphere of fear, doubt, and suspicion. It erodes civic life. It incentivizes people to stay in the good graces of the regime. It encourages ambitious scoundrels in and out of government to use the corrupt system to their own advantage and to the disadvantage of their foes, whether in politics, business, or their personal lives.
What Will California Do About Tina Peters?
California’s two Democratic senators have written to the state’s top election official expressing “grave concerns” about the prospect of convicted election denier Tina Peters being hired as an election administrator in Shasta County.
Oops …
The DHS recent claim that massive numbers of noncitizens are registered to vote in Nevada has already collapsed under the weight of its own bogosity.
Important Read
TPM’s Josh Kovensky contextualizes some of the latest filings by the defendants in the “Minneapolis 15” case:
HSI’s expansion of the use of certified undercover (CUC) operations from infiltrating drug cartels and international money launderers to targeting domestic protesters;
the tantalizing reference to “Op Keyhole,” which suggests the (unconfirmed) existence of a DHS operation targeting domestic protesters;
how this all may fit together with the Trump DOJ’s Joint Task Force Vanguard, which seeks to treat anti-Trump protests as domestic terrorism; and
a related legal fight over whether HSI’s bumbling undercover surveillance of protesters in Minnesota violated a court-ordered injunction against immigration enforcement in churches.
Midterms Watch
The Cook Political Report has moved the Senate races in Texas and Iowa in Democrats’ favor, from “Lean Republican” to “Toss Up.”
Re: non-citizens on voting rolls...OK, we have a trump claim of "278,000" of the latter in only four states, and a figure of "15,903" in Nevada. After further review — as they say on NFL broadcasts — that's been pared down to a "potential" 185 registered voters, but none of those have been named and sent on to NV election officials, preventing any sort of assessment and correction.
However, none of this matters to trump, his DoJ and DHS flunkies, as he has put out his claim minus corroborating evidence, then modestly proclaims on SM, "I WON THE ELECTION!!!" And weeks later, the claims are blown up, but in the meantime, the regime has gone on to other election-distorting nonsense, and will not stop, even past the November vote certification processes in all 50 states, which is the purpose of this stream of bullshit.
It's called "setting the table" for multiple voting "fraud" challenges, and will continue up to the swearing-in of the new Congress, assuming one of the two Houses goes Democratic...bank it.
For the young or those not paying attention, my ancient read is that Trump sought to be mentored by Roy Cohn because he wanted to be a lawless thug but sufficiently within the law so as not to be busted.
Too, he was the son of a thuggish businessman — a briber of elected officials, an abuser of customers. So, not unnaturally, a pathological failure of a human being would of course seek to outdo dad. Which Trump did and has done at an unimaginable scale.
So his abuse of DOJ tracks ~10,000%. The only way one can be surprised by anything he does is by failing to see him for what he is.