The Wheels of Justice Came to a Halt After Donald Trump Slashed the Tires
Unqualified Authenticity Is Now Standard for Administration Hires
Although the inauguration of the next president has yet to occur, events yesterday signaled that the next Trump era has begun. Or maybe it never ended.
The release of Part One of the Special Counsel report on criminal investigations of Donald J Trump was essentially a rehash of the conclusions reached in the House January 6 Committee’s investigation. Part Two, which is presumed to contain evidence of national security matters detrimental to the nation, will have to wait decades to see the light of day.
Trump’s actions at the end of his first term to stay in power would have led to a felony conviction, according to the report. Instead, what we have is documentation of the processes with the Justice Department, along with previously revealed details of the conspiracy to retain power through fraud, trickery, and deceit. There will be no trial where evidence of the former President's disregard for the right to vote is introduced.
Calling what happened around the 2020 vote “election interference,” makes the crimes described sound abstract, when in fact real people’s expressions of democracy were to be denied. Those who stood in the way of the scheme were punished, as the judgements awarded to Georgia election workers attest.
Now we’re facing the campaign promise that those who dared investigate Trump’s actions will be prosecuted, or at least persecuted. In addition to bringing the power of the executive branch to defame Congress members, journalists, and former Justice Department employees, the unseen weight of massive legal fees will be thrust upon those who dared to assert that no person was above the law.
While many will blame Attorney General Merrick Garland’s cautious approach for allowing the target of this investigation to nullify its conclusion, Jack Smith points to witness assertions of executive privilege, each of which had to work their way through the courts for the investigation to proceed.
Transcripts of witness testimony before the January 6 committee, needed to check for consistency, were inexplicably delayed for months. Most damning of all, though not mentioned (professional courtesy?) in the Special Counsel report, was the foot dragging within the FBI and other agencies.
Here’s Allison Gill’s (Mueller She Wrote) take:
It’s quite normal for there to be disagreements among agencies, particularly between the FBI and the DOJ. In this instance, there were people atop the Washington Field Office and the DC US Attorneys office after the 2020 election that were at loggerheads with the Justice Department about whether to execute search warrants, or even read Merrick Garland in on prosecutorial concepts.
Some may say “just fire them,” but our protections for civil servants in normal times don’t allow for that, and we’re going to need those protections in place in the next four years. But something’s gotta give.
When D’Antuono, the head of the FBI Washington Field office refused to execute subpoenas and search warrants in 2021, the DoJ had to circumvent them by having the post office inspector general execute the search warrants. It wasn’t until February 2022 when the FBI, black and blue from what they experienced in 2017, started playing ball with the DoJ. Even then, later that year they were hesitant to search Mar-a-Lago as Garland wanted. As a former federal employee myself, we can’t ignore the protections put in place to protect the jobs of government workers, but there has to be a better way
What galls me about these reports of law enforcement refusals to cooperate is that they are not linked to the larger problem: the idea that some people are above (or below) the law is widespread among the people and agencies supposedly protecting everyone.
While the details of this behavior matter in a legal sense when it comes to the deliverance of justice, the fact of the underlying beliefs makes FBI foot dragging no different than the San Diego County Sheriff’s refusal to cooperate with even minimal oversight of its jail management processes.
Joyce Vance ties together the day, saying Jack Smith’s report is the past, and the future is Senate Armed Forces Committee hearing on Pete Hegseth’s nomination as Secretary of Defense
It has become popular for people to say, as they did in 2016, “it won’t be as bad as everyone said.” I’ve heard so many variations on this. People who are counting on Trump’s ineptitude or Americans’ lack of willingness to go along with extreme measures like mass deportations.
Then there was Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing to be Secretary of Defense today. If Jack Smith’s report is the past, it is the future.
Yesterday evening, NBC reported that Hegseth’s FBI background check did not include interviews with his ex-wives or with the woman who accused him of sexual assault—which he denies—in a hotel room in 2017. Shades of the investigation that was (or wasn’t) conducted during Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing. That’s some big stuff to leave out. Makes you wonder what else is missing and how the Senate can advise and consent if it isn’t first willing to learn the facts.
The questioning of Pete Hegseth had some alarming moments. Sadly, the drama invoked during questioning will likely be irrelevant. Fealty to Dear Leader will win over qualifications or questions of character.
Here’s On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder:
…it is ludicrous to imagine that Tulsi Gabbard is a reasonable choice to direct American intelligence agencies, that Pete Hegseth should run the defense department, or that Kash Patel should direct our national police force (the FBI). These people are entirely bereft of qualifications for these positions. And that should be more than enough to disqualify them.
What stands out about them is something that transcends even their total incompetence: their notorious positions in favor of destroying international and domestic legal order. Gabbard is known for nothing around the world beyond her defense of Assad and Putin. Hegseth believes that America should be fighting a "Holy War" against itself. Patel has argued for arresting Americans for their political views.
As we approach their nomination hearings, we should be thinking about what kind of America, and world, will be created if such people are allowed the run some of the most powerful institutions of violence in the history of the world. All the talk of Greenland and the rest has been shielding them. It distracts the media. And it makes chaos seem normal.
Benjamin Wittes, writing at Lawfare, calls the commonality running through all Trump’s nominees The Cult of Unqualified Authenticity:
You can see in it so many of the central tenets of Trump’s approach to governance: the contempt for expertise and traditional qualifications; the insistence that the only real qualification is authenticity—and that authenticity is somehow wrapped up in performative masculinity; the belief that sounding tough and being tough are the same thing; and the conviction that complexity necessarily reduces to weakness.
It’s all right there in the nomination of a proudly unqualified individual who frames his lack of qualifications as qualification of a different, more authentic, variety that reflects what he calls a “warrior ethos” America has somehow lost in its infatuation with equity. And this idea has the apparently silent assent of all of the Republican members of the committee and a few, at least, enthusiastic takers.
Running through these confirmation hearings, and indeed through all the Trump administration’s posturing is the presumption that the challenge to be met is undoing advances in the rights of everybody but white males.
What you should hear when the words “woke” and “DEI” are spoken by these MAGA heroes is: N****r, W*****k, F****t, B***h, T****y, along with reverberations for J**, T**chers, Lib****ns, and Dis****d humans.
One need look no farther than Sean Hannity and others of his ilk, who are moving past trashing LGBTQ+ humans to denigrating the people who translate speech into sign language to understand where this assertion of CIS male superiority is headed.
Uninsurable Futures by Hamilton Nolan at How Things Work
For Americans, the hardest part of what is coming is going to be giving up on the grand American myth of infinite material abundance. The classic vision of the American dream—the house, the yard, the driveway with a big car for everyone—is going to have to go away, by necessity. It will not go quietly. Americans regard these things not as temporary byproducts of a particular age of global capitalism that cannot last, but rather as human rights.
Much of the confounding Trumpian tendency to celebrate big trucks and more oil drilling and other things we know are bad for us is simply a child’s gut reaction to being told that we cannot have that lollipop, after all. Politically speaking, we are in the tantrum phase of the climate transition. This is understandable, on an emotional level; the sweet promise of abundance has long been the thing that soothed the public’s disgust with inequality. But we can’t allow ourselves to linger in this period. The longer we wallow in resentment and denial, the longer we put off the hard work of adaptation, and the more difficult and costly the adaptation becomes. Every time you see a politician telling voters they can damn well have a big McMansion with icy air conditioning and a Ford F-450 and cheap gas and a new highway to reach their new suburban development, take a moment to imagine how those voters will feel when the AC bills skyrocket, and the gas prices soar, and the heat kills the grass, and the overloaded electrical grid flickers, and the defunded public services mean that there is no one to come save them when the trees catch fire. We are not doing anyone any favors by denying reality.
It is odd, the experience of seeing a long-predicted calamity begin to unfold. It has a surreal quality that can be paralyzing. The insurance prices go up and up until they explode like fireworks over burning Los Angeles and flooded Asheville. For all the uncertainty that grips us, one thing is certain: The crisis isn’t coming. It’s here.
***
How a major bank cheated its customers out of $2 billion, according to a new federal lawsuit by Judd Legum and Noel Simms at Popular Information
“The CFPB is suing Capital One for cheating families out of billions of dollars on their savings accounts,” CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said in a statement. “Banks should not be baiting people with promises they can’t live up to.”
Capital One denied the CFPB's allegations and suggested the lawsuit was inappropriate so close to a change in administration. A Capital One spokesperson said the company was "deeply disappointed to see the CFPB continue its recent pattern of filing eleventh-hour lawsuits ahead of a change in administration" and pledged to "vigorously defend" itself in court.
Banks like Capital One will likely face less scrutiny from the CFPB during the next Trump administration. It is possible the CFPB will cease to exist at all.
***
Walgreens CEO Discovers That Locking Things Up Keeps People From Buying Them by Robyn Pennacchia at Wonkette
The problem is, the locked-up merchandise doesn’t just impact Walgreens bottom line, it also impacts how people view the world and our society. Recently, I overheard a woman more or less claim that shoplifting was up because people aren’t as good and moral as they used to be. This is bullshit. In reality, crime has been on a downward trajectory for years (though you wouldn’t know it to look at our overcrowded prisons). In 2023, crime fell in every single major category (though you wouldn’t know it to listen to Fox News).
Currently, crime is as low as it was in 1965.
But boy, it sure does seem like crime is up! After all, look at all those locked cases! It’s scary out there!
At some point, does California secession become a legitimate or realistic option?