Glenn Kirschner is a retired federal prosecutor whose voice is worth listening to. In this video, he outlines four stories that illustrate his thesis that the United States Department of Justice is crashing and burning.
I believe his conclusion is sound.
If a Thing Cannot be Done, Then it Will Not be Done
One reason for all the crashing and burning is that many lawyers, especially those who have chosen government service over maximizing their earnings in the private sector, are people of honor and integrity.
A second reason—buttressing the underlying good character and ethics—is the well-founded fear that obeying illegal orders could lead to highly adverse professional consequences.
And, finally, good character aside, fear of legal discipline aside, the attorneys at the Justice Department are being ordered to do things that are impossible to do successfully. Mainly, they are being ordered to obtain criminal convictions of people who are innocent—and whose innocence is provable.
If a thing cannot be done, then it will not be done.
And a Word About All Those Redactions
If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, I recommend skipping to the very end, where Kirschner makes an interesting, and I think entirely valid, point. I’m not speaking of his views on the alleged willfulness of the Justice Department’s failing to redact many Epstein victims’ names, as required by the Epstein Transparency Act. He may well be right about that, but I don’t know enough to have an informed opinion, myself.
Rather, I am speaking about Kirschner’s claim that victims whose names were exposed to the public, and who can show how that exposure caused injury to them,
- will have standing to sue the Justice Department for failing to follow the law,
- and that these plaintiffs will likely get the judge to appoint a special master to second guess DOJ’s handling of the files,
- who will, in turn, get to the bottom of what the hell was going on with the screwy redactions, and very probably,
- will get the DOJ to cough up the rest of the damn files.
Sounds about right to me.
Facing MAGA 