The Justice Department Isn’t Learning From Spectacular Failure
Donald Trump’s Justice Department just had a big, stupid, embarrassing summer.
It conjured a slush fund designed to pay $1.776 billion of taxpayer money to January 6 rioters that was so screamingly asinine it caused a revolt by ordinarily docile Senate Republicans. After bleating at a press conference that she’d rain down hell upon alleged Reflecting Pool liner-ripper David Hearn, D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro dismissed her own case, meekly attempted to deflect blame, and was lambasted publicly by the president for “chok[ing]” and folding “like an umbrella.” A federal judge in Tennessee dismissed the indictment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia because “the evidence before this Court sadly reflects an abuse of prosecuting power.” Justice Department leadership declared proudly that DoJ need not, and should not, be independent of the president. And the man responsible for it all, Attorney General Todd Blanche, was rewarded with Senate confirmation by a single vote cast before dawn on a sleepy Saturday in late August.
Now, as Labor Day approaches, we can look ahead to a fall of even more spectacular prosecutorial failures. With Blanche firmly embedded as the boss — his prize for abject maladministration of the nation’s top law-enforcement agency — look for the DoJ to continue careering down the road to prosecutorial overreach and, ultimately, failure.
The prosecution of former FBI director James Comey — the second one, after DoJ botched the first — has been circling the drain for months, and it’ll soon get flushed entirely. The Justice........
