The second Trump administration is a chaotic mess, with many different flavors of incipient fascists jockeying for position. The madness is fueled by the fevered imaginings of the worst people you know. But Donald Trump and his ilk still have one overarching goal: to strip the government of meaningful oversight while weaponizing the meager oversight that remains.
That’s what appears to be happening over at the Department of Justice. The Washington Post reports that the Trump administration may stop requiring appointed federal prosecutors to get approval from career attorneys in the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section before investigating or indicting a public official.
The requirement is there for a good reason—it just doesn’t happen to be a reason Trump cares about. Or, more to the point, it’s a reason he actively loathes. Career attorneys review these sorts of things because doing so provides a nonpartisan layer of review, a bulwark against the DOJ being used just to settle political scores.
Let’s be crystal clear about what this move means: If you are an elected or appointed official who crosses Trump and he demands that you be indicted, there will be no review of that demand by a career prosecutor, no neutral person with the ability to stop your political persecution.
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Thus far, no Congressional Republicans have reacted with the slightest consternation over this blatant power grab by the executive branch. You’d think that even the most basic understanding of civics would help them understand that ceding increased prosecution power to the executive is sorta suboptimal for the legislative branch.
On the other side of the aisle, Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse does get it. He contacted Attorney General Pam Bondi back in March to express his concern that the DOJ had slashed the size of the Public Integrity section from 30 attorneys to just five. To be scrupulously fair, some of those departures were voluntary, as several attorneys left that section rather than play a role in the administration’s corrupt quid pro quo decision to drop the prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
What Trump has created, consciously or not, is a sort of kayfabe. The administration and all its fans are pretending that Trump is using the tools of government to stamp out corruption in a transparent and ethical manner, even though everyone knows that isn’t true. What we actually have is a collapse of meaningful oversight replaced with arbitrary, partisan faux-oversight wielded as a cudgel.
And it’s not just the Department of Justice, though that department is best suited to helping Trump carry out threats, given its power to prosecute. The administration has significantly curtailed the Securities and Exchange Commission’s ability to go after crypto scammers, a neat benefit for Trump’s family in particular, given that they own a scammy crypto company.
Then there’s the Department of Education, which Trump promised to close. Instead, it remains open basically only to serve political interests. That department has functionally stopped investigating actual civil rights complaints and instead now primarily exists to threaten schools for being too woke or for being insufficiently evil to trans students.
None of this is oversight, and none of it is how the government is supposed to function.
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