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Attorney General Todd Blanche may have stepped into his new official role barely two weeks ago, but his Justice Department has wasted no time continuing the vindictive prosecutions. This week saw a surprise target, though: Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The Maryland man deported last year by mistake already had his federal indictment on human smuggling charges dismissed over vindictive prosecution, but now, the Justice Department is demanding the indictment be brought back. It requested the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals review a Tennessee judge’s decision to dismiss Abrego Garcia’s case, a prosecution that seemed completely lost. However, Abrego Garcia’s case is markedly different from other recent DOJ appeals, because upon closer inspection of the court filing, federal prosecutors don’t just want to indict the man, they want to fundamentally change how judges are allowed to apply vindictive prosecution in any case. If successful, this would drastically enable the Trump administration’s legal strategy of targeting political adversaries, with similar threats from future administrations to come.

The DOJ’s appeal was filed on Monday and it picks apart U.S. District Court Judge Waverly Crenshaw’s May decision to dismiss an indictment against Abrego Garcia after he found it was a blatantly tainted investigation “with a vindictive motive.” Federal prosecutors dispute everything from how Crenshaw interpreted the acting U.S. attorney’s decision to indict to communications with the attorney general’s office and televised comments Blanche himself made about this case. The most remarkable part of the court filing was how the DOJ argues “presumptive vindictiveness” should not be........

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