The Trump-corrupted Department of Justice indictment of the president’s declared political enemy, New York Attorney General Tish James, on flimsy bank fraud charges is a joke and the matter should be easily dismissed by an independent federal judge.
Whether this is selective prosecution or malicious prosecution is to be established, but it is absolutely an unwarranted prosecution. There is no crime, only the DOJ political appointees in pursuit of something, anything, to please the impatient man in the White House.
Trump is livid at James because she successfully brought a civil fraud case against Trump for the phony valuations of his holdings.
The criminal charges against James are focused on a house in Norfolk, Va. that James bought in 2020. The indictment asserts that James said in mortgage papers that the property would be used as a secondary home, but that she instead rented it out. Did that actually happen? Was it a federal crime requiring prosecution? Getting a grand jury to go along with the narrative of Trump’s hand-picked wholly inexperienced hatchet woman interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan was no great feat.
It was 40 years ago when then-New York State Chief Judge Sol Wachtler, on a visit to the Daily News, uttered his famous truism that a prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.” That’s a low bar that Halligan managed to clear, as she did against former FBI Director Jim Comey, also for the crime of upsetting Trump.
This is the state of the once-proud Department of Justice, under Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi.
Before yesterday’s indictment of James, Bondi embarrassed herself and the country in her performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
Over the course of hours, Bondi focused entirely on aggressively dodging questions about the administration’s authoritarian overreaches — including troop deployments to major cities and the weaponization of the department against political foes — as well as Trump’s nexus to late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, instead levying apparently pre-prepared attacks against the senators who dared try to exercise their oversight function by asking her to explain her and the administration’s conduct.
We don’t know how to tell her this, but Bondi is not the president’s attorney nor part of his political operation, or at least she shouldn’t be. The responsibility of the office is to the public and the preservation of the rule of law in the United States, not to the executive that appointed her.
She should also be reminded that Congress is not some irksome group to be swatted away when their questions are inconvenient or she doesn’t feel like answering them. It is a co-equal branch of government that has a constitutional mandate to provide oversight of the executive and judicial branches, and their questions are not optional.
It is absolutely bizarre and unconscionable that the attorney general would flatly refuse, for example, to even attempt to respond to a senator’s question about the legal rationale behind a lethal military strike that seems on its face to have been very much illegal. Explaining these things to Congress is not an annoyance or a burden or superfluous, it is a responsibility of the job.
Then again, despite being the executive branch’s foremost attorney, she does not seem to be particularly competent when it comes to legal matters. Just a few weeks ago, Bondi said that hate speech was not free speech and that the government would target those engaging in its own conception of the former, an interpretation that would get a first-year law student reprimanded by their con law professor but which is now being advanced by the confirmed attorney general.
With legal advisers like this, it’s no wonder that Trump is now publicly saying “we took the freedom of speech away,” something that he has no power to do and which in ordinary times would get a president impeached.
Bondi’s smarmy contempt for the law and a government rooted in supposed checks and balances is perfectly seen in the Halligan charges against Tish James and Jim Comey. The fish rots from the head and the decay runs right down to the Eastern District of Virginia.
