The Department of Extortion and Dishonor

As corrupt bargains, mass resignations, and summary firings go, Trump's Justice Department leadership has broken execrable records set by Richard Nixon over 50 years ago. There are also clear indicators that despite Trump's pledge to respect court rulings against him, he and his subordinates are laying the groundwork to defy or even try to remove federal judges who do so.

The "shock and awe" approach to a thorny public policy problem ended badly for Bush 43 in Iraq, but just a month into his second term that political method appears to be working for Trump--for now.

As former federal prosecutor Daniel Richman put it in his New York Times piece yesterday:

Every occupying force knows the tactic: If you want to cow a large population, pick one of its most respected citizens and demand he debase himself and pledge fealty. If he refuses, execute him and move on to the next one. This is how the Trump Justice Department thinks it will bring U.S. attorneys’ offices around the country under its control, starting last week with the Southern District of New York.

Last week's stands taken by Southern District of New York lawyers Danielle Sassoon and Hagan Scotten against the flagrantly corrupt bargain indicted New York City Mayor Eric Adams offered to the Administration--Adams could only help Trump in NYC if Adams was no longer a federal criminal target--were based on the law and long-standing Justice Department policy and practice.

Sassoon and Scotten opted to exit Trump's Justice Department rather than go along with Adams' sleazy quid pro quo offer. But we should temper any praise for their performance in this episode by remembering that they chose to work for this Administration once Trump took office, despite knowing its leader's despicable legal and political past.

Trump, who was twice legitimately impeached, who attempted to overthrow the Republic on January 6, 2021, has now in less than a month in office violated federal law yet again by sacking multiple agency or department inspectors general without required Congressional notification in advance, and perhaps other personnel related laws as well.

In that respect, they remind me of former House January 6 Select Committee vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY).

For the first several years of Trump's first term, Cheney went along Trump's political program, as she acknowledged briefly in her memoir, Oath and Honor (p. 322):

Beginning during the 2016 presidential transition, we had helped the new administration form its team in the federal agencies that mattered to Wyoming. And we worked very closely with that team, introducing and passing legislation and steering policy. During the Trump administration, important policies changed in areas such as land use and energy policy. I was pleased to introduce and cosponsor a number of pieces of legislation in these areas that were signed into law. Wyoming prospered. 

Whatever personal and professional "red lines" Cheney, Sassoon, and Scotten had, for entirely too long they did not involve working with or for Donald Trump. But when their limits were finally reached, each acted decisively to break with Trump.

The examples of Cheney, Sassoon and Scotten were not matched by Public Integrity Section senior attorney Ed Sullivan, who elected to affix his name to a motion to dismiss the rock-solid corruption case against Adams in what will likely prove a vain gesture to delay the inevitable sacking of the rest of the Public Integrity Section lawyers (and likely many more in Washington and around the nation) in the coming days or weeks.

What also seems certain is an even more aggressive push by Trump to undo Executive branch internal oversight and accountability mechanisms through further "lawfare."

Indeed, Trump may well direct Attorney General Pam Bondi to have the Justice Department's acting Solicitor General inform the Congress that the Department now views the Inspector General Act of 1978 as unconstitutional. In doing so, they will likely cite the same rationale as they offered to Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Dick Durbin (D-IL) in announcing that the Department believes statutory protections for multi-member regulatory commissions are unconstitutional and it will thus no longer defend such statutes in court.

The current legal battles over Trump's firing of the heads of the Federal Trade Commission, National Labor Relations Board, and the Consumer Financial Protection Board are likely just his opening gambit to lay the legal groundwork for claiming that Congress cannot in any way interfere with his hiring and firing of what are supposed to be independent inspectors general. If he does so and wins, the last vestiges of internal Executive branch oversight will be swept away.

And if he loses, he has friends in Congress who appear prepared to try to impeach federal judges who rule against him.

The threat by at least some in the House GOP to impeach judges who rule against Trump policies is just the latest and most outrageous example of the GOP's degeneration into a full-on cult of personality--devoted not to defending the Constitution and the Framer's vision of competing branches of government checking each other’s power, but to one man's twisted vision for America in the 21st century.

The abject failure of House and Senate Democrats to use every available procedural and political tool at their disposal to disrupt or derail Trump's assaults on core constitutional principles only underscores the ineptness of the party's leadership in the struggle for very survival of the Republic now underway.

Even some of the younger generation of Democratic leaders at the state level have shown signs of appeasement or accommodation on immigration raids that already have swept up American citizens and forced city leaders in places like Denver to try to oppose ICE raids themselves. Such appeasement is not only dishonorable and self-defeating, it validates Trump's toxic narratives and emboldens him and his minions to double down on their fascistic program.

Democrats and "Never Trumper" ex-GOP leaders and groups should be targeting ads and outreach to the Latino community nationwide reminding them that if they have family members here illegally, those family members are absolutely at risk of deportation by Trump's ICE agents. That's a message that Latinos who voted for Trump really need to hear repeatedly and daily.

At the same time, Democrats and "Never Trumpers" should be reminding police at every level that Trump's pardons of violent J6 insurrectionists are not only an insult to them and their comrades wounded or killed on that day, but that Trump's pardons have resulted in violent criminals being released into their own communities--some of whom have already committed fresh crimes.

Driving political wedges between Trump and key voting blocs that went for him and GOP House and Senate candidates in 2024 is going to be vital in the 2026 midterm elections.

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