Revenge Drives Project 2025 Justice Department
One defining characteristic of Project 2025 is its selective use of specifics when it comes to actions by various agencies. There are overall goals, but the main goal of the Heritage Foundation and its right wing collaborators is to pack the government with non-civil service managers loyal to an all-powerful unitary executive.(Conservative, of course)
There are specifics sprinkled throughout the document, but I suspect many exist to keep the document readable for its intended audience. Many specific policy concepts, like a federal ban on abortion and prosecuting purveys of pornography are NOT spelled out. However, the means to do these things is always there. And the public statements from far right politicians DO give us specifics.
An exception to this observation is the reorganization of the nation’s legal apparatus. Not only are vast numbers of the current staffing to be excised, there are lists of specific tasks mandated for political employees.
Department of Justice. Author: Gene Hamilton Donald J Trump has been open about calling for revenge as a priority should he win a second term, and the Department of Justice, once politically sanitized, will be the vehicle for making those campaign promises into reality.
Attorney Mike Davis, considered by many on the right as a candidate for Attorney General in a Trump administration, has been busy making and bragging about lists, five of them to be specific.
Deep state operatives in the executive branch
The Biden family & associates, so they can be indicted
Ways to identify and round up the 10 million people who the administration will deport
Locations of sites for gulag-style facilities in addition to GITMO, for detentions.
Persons prosecuting for involvement in the Jan 6 insurrection, so they can be pardoned.
According to The Bulwark, Davis has identified specific journalists that he wanted to indict, deport, or detained at GITMO, and promised mass incarceration for the “violent black underclass” who are “monsters” and the scourge of “ghetto culture.”
Davis is far from the only one making those calls. He’s just on TV more often.
Donald Trump has been spelling it out in black and white, overtly pledging to jail his political opponents, vowing to "pursue" so-called "election fraudsters" (translation: his perceived critics) at levels "never seen before." He says that he already knows who these supposed "election fraudsters" are, explicitly threatening Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg and telling him to "be careful."
Recently, the former president repeated a call to set up military tribunals to prosecute former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, whose only “crime” was speaking out against Trump. He has also suggested that Gen. Mark Milley should be executed for treason.
Project 2025 starts off with the premise that the Department of Justice is rife with enemies, defined as an unaccountable bureaucratic managerial class and radical Left ideologues.
A list of “lawfare” actions blamed on the Biden administration is used to justify this assessment.
These include:
investigation into Russian collusion with the Trump campaign in 2016
Failure to make the public case about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop
Chilling the “free speech” efforts of parents threatening school boards and other officials over COVID restrictions
Investigating allegations of misinformation being spread via foreign powers on social media
Prosecuting individuals who interfered, harassed, or vandalized abortion clinics instead of Antifa
Suing states using questionable means in the name of election security
Failing to stop the flow of fentanyl
Not doing enough to prosecute law breaking immigrants
The solution, the author says, is installing a “vast expansion” of political appointees at the DOJ.
Attorneys within the DOJ would be prosecuted for involvement in the above-listed acts,
the FBI should be reformed from top to bottom,
the FBI director’s term should be concurrent with the president,
any investigations not in the “national interest” should be terminated,
End the pretense of the FBI being an independent agency
Prohibit the FBI from activities related to combating the spread of misinformation and disinformation.
Target violent criminals, not protesting parents
Go after localities who fail to meet conservative standards, including prosecuting District Attorneys, insist on more jail time for violent criminals.
Enforce the death penalty
Prosecute cases for possession of drugs where possible
Use the RICO act more (eds. Note- Georgia excepted)
Secure the border, including use of active-duty military personnel and National Guardsmen to assist in arrest operations.
Go after China
Pay attention to other emerging threats involving federal interests such as increases in “sextortion,” ransomware, and the proliferation of child pornography
Other tasks would include:
Redefining discrimination to include acts against white people
Use the Comstock law to prosecute providers and distributors of abortion pills that use the mail.
Move election-related prosecutions from the office of Civil Rights to Criminal Offenses.
Be the only federal agency required to collect more racial data
Ensure grants programs align with administration priorities (No LGBTQ+ groups allowed)
Assist immigration with investigations of immigrants without papers
Consider the appropriateness of withdrawing or overturning every immigration decision rendered by Attorney General Garland
pursuing overturning of the Flores Settlement Agreement
…there’s more, but I can tell your eyes are glazing over
I’ll conclude with a quote from Michael Harriot, author of Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed Story of America, writing at The Grio:
Project 2025 and Agenda47 are not four-year plans but guidebooks for making elections inconsequential. This is why down-ballot voting is just as important as a presidential choice and why voting in primaries is crucial to intraparty politics. It disproves the idiotic notion that “both parties are the same.” More importantly, how we turn out against the effort to reverse the progress we’ve made will ultimately reveal more about our ability to organize and fight than Trump’s MAGA agenda.
But if we f*ck around …
We will definitely find out.
* Gene Hamilton, former Counselor to the Attorney General at the US DOJ; Senior Counselor to the Secretary of Homeland Security; General Counsel on the Senate Committee on the Judiciary; Assistant Chief Counsel at US Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and as an Attorney Advisor in the Secretary’s Honors Program for Attorneys at the Department of Homeland Security. He was a key architect of legislation calling for the repeal of DACA and ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of individuals.
Programming Note:
I will be on Vacation from August 1 to August 13. The series on Project 2025 will resume upon my return. Election coverage leading up to my annual voters guide will commence on Labor Day.
***
Tomorrow:
Department of Labor, Project 2025’s Plan for Making Workers Suffer
Previously:
(Intro) Digging Deep into Project 2025 - (a multi-part Series)
Going Deep into Project 2025 - Partisan Priorities for Civil Servants
Project 2025: Christian Soldiers Marching Off to Land Wars
Homeland Security’s Authoritarian Role in Project 2025
What Can You Do For Trump Today? Project 2025’s Diplomats, Spies and Spokespersons
No Soup For You: Project 2025’s Foreign Aid Program
Project 2025’s National Nightmare for “The General Welfare”
Project 2025: Junk Food and Parents Rights
Make America Dirty Again: Project 2025 on Energy and the Environment
Project 2025: Some (Christian) People Are More Equal Than Others
Public Land for Sale, Cheap: Project 2025
***
Tuesday’s Other News to Think About
***
Telling people to have kids is just *weird* by LOLGOP at The Cause
You can see why JD Vance and all the JD Vance-types in the GOP are crying about Americans finally seeing their weirdness and, almost as one, pointing and laughing.
I think a big part of this is that Joe Biden being so old and running for office was weird. Much weirder than I was willing to admit at the time, in retrospect. That, combined with six years of MAGA wrecking him and his family fueled by Russian disinformation, was about all the weirdness we could handle.
Like the aforementioned “Father of the Country,” Biden found a way to step aside with maximal grace. Biden exited with a perfect swan dive, allowing the party and the nation to avoid the DEMS IN DISARRAY fantasy of some of the party’s biggest donors, who are genuinely displeased with how pro-worker Joe Biden has been as president.
Normalcy returned to at least one of our two major political parties, America looked up at JD Vance and said, “Who’s this clown?”
***
Opinion: Migrant Deaths and Agent Suicides Plague U.S. Border Patrol by Jenn Budd at Times of San Diego
When I served, it was clearly understood that asking for mental health care was considered weak and could get us fired. Instead, we self-medicate or let our trauma out in other, destructive ways. I believe this why we’ve seen increased corruption, assault, sexual assault, and domestic abuse from agents.
Over my six-year tenure, we lost one supervisor to an intentional opioid overdose and another to self-immolation. Others used their duty weapons to end their lives, often just before they were arrested for charges of corruption and violence.
Like me, some colleagues attempted killing themselves after leaving the agency. We are haunted by our actions and our inaction. After years with PTSD the pain simply becomes too much.
***
If Conservatives Want Stronger Marriages, They Should Look to Liberal Solutions by Jill Filipovic
Conservative politicians are complaining about childless cat ladies, declining marriage rates, unstable families, and single-parent households. Their strategy so far has been to ban abortion, offer families no real support, do nothing to help struggling Americans find greater financial stability, promote a deeply misogynistic worldview to young men, and then yell at young women that they need to get married and have babies. Shockingly, this is not working very well.
On the other side, liberals have de-emphasized marriage and the nuclear family as the primary organizing unit for society, while offering women and men alike more choices about when, how, and if to start families, and more support if they do. And while marriage and childbearing rates are down generally, the prototypical Democratic voter — the college-educated woman working for pay in or near a large city in a blue state — is more likely to find herself in a happy, stable marriage than the prototypical Republican voter.
This isn’t a coincidence; it’s a product of real policy choices as much as social and cultural mores. And if Republicans want stability for children and healthier American families — not just patriarchal hierarchies from the family up to the presidency — they should take note. Because there are a few things that make the marriages of educated liberals so strong, and none of them are that college-educated liberals are somehow naturally more committed or stable or moral or fit for marriage. The reasons college-educated liberals tend to have more stable marriages involve could be more broadly on offer to everyone: Financial stability and opportunity; gender parity; and a culture of optional parenthood paired with deep obligation toward children who are brought into the world.
