DOJ Has a Rotten Week That Screams Out for Strict Oversight

Whether it’s the Department of Health and Human Services or the Environmental Protection Agency, there are plenty of federal departments that do not currently do what their name implies. However, the discrepancy is the most extreme when it comes to the Department of Justice (DOJ), which Donald Trump and his loyalists have quickly turned into an operation gone rogue.

This week in particular, it became clear that a more appropriate name would be the Department of Presidential Enrichment and Lawfare… and that it is in dire need of the most stringent oversight.

First, DOJ participated in the most overtly corrupt act in US political history when it established a $1.8 billion slush fund to reward the president’s supporters for breaking the law on his behalf and gave Trump, his family, and his businesses immunity from any potential past tax fraud (which might have saved him alone $100 million).

How shady was this arrangement? So bad that even Republicans have a problem with it.

Then, on Thursday, another one of DOJ’s politically motivated cases fell apart in spectacular fashion when prosecutors dismissed all charges against the last four members of the “Broadway Six” shortly before they were supposed to go on trial.

The entire thing was a charade from start to finish.

The defendants, which included former congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh and three local Democratic officials, were charged with conspiracy to impede a federal agent for protesting ICE’s conduct in Chicago during “Operation Midway Blitz.”

However, while some of the Trump administration’s previous political prosecutions fell apart or resulted in acquittals because the alleged “crimes” were nothingburgers, this one was much worse.

That’s because Andrew Boutros, the US attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, was forced to admit before a federal court that his team engaged in some serious misconduct.

District Court Judge April Perry was flabbergasted by the behavior she witnessed when reading the unredacted grand jury transcripts.

“I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts,” she said.

That misconduct includes “vouching,” i.e., when a prosecutor essentially tells grand jurors to trust him because of his experience and reputation, “improper prosecutorial communications of a substantive nature with the grand jurors outside of the grand jury room,” and the dismissal of grand jurors who disagreed with the government’s case.

However, Perry was most troubled by the government’s efforts to cover all of this up.

“Mistakes happen. They happen to all of us. But as I tell my children, you own it. You admit to it. You apologize for it, and you move on. What you do not do is hide it,” she said.

The judge added that she relies on attorneys to be truthful.

“I do that because, first of all, I treat every attorney who appears before me as an officer of the court. But secondly, because I put even more reliance on Department of Justice attorneys. Your sole goal is to do justice. Your client is justice itself,” Perry said. “I do believe deeply in the presumption of regularity and that most government attorneys are doing the best they can to do the right thing. That trust has been broken.”

Ironically, this kind of behavior is exactly what Trump keeps accusing the Biden administration of without ever producing any evidence of it. And, if anybody deserves compensation for being the victim of a weaponized DOJ, it’s the defendants in this case, not the people who assaulted police officers on Trump’s behalf on January 6, 2021.

With that in mind, the lawyers for the “Broadview Six” filed an emergency motion that would ensure that the US attorney’s office preserves its communications regarding the case.

And that still wasn’t all.

On Friday, another federal judge dismissed DOJ’s case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was illegally deported to El Salvador and then embarrassed the Trump administration when it was forced to return him to the US, where he was promptly indicted for human smuggling. That prosecution, according to the judge, was vindictive.

“The evidence before this Court sadly reflects an abuse of prosecuting power,” District Court Justice Waverly Crenshaw ruled. “The Court does not reach its conclusion lightly. The objective evidence here shows that, absent Abrego’s successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the Government would not have brought this prosecution.”

We believe that it is important to not view these cases in isolation but rather as part of a pattern. Combined with the unprecedented number of cases in which federal justices have not only ruled against the Trump administration but forcefully rebuked its lawless behavior, they demonstrate that the government is not interested in justice – just unconstitutional power grabs and doing the bidding of the president, no matter the cost.

As a result, it is high time to exercise some real oversight to rein in the excesses of this regime and its lawless DOJ.