Tag: Trump

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The Trump Justice Department Can’t Even Indict a Ham Sandwich

Insanity is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results

The Guardian, Grand jury again declines to indict Letitia James on mortgage fraud charges: New York attorney general dodges indictment for second time in a week as Trump justice department seeks retribution:

A federal grand jury has declined to indict Letitia James, the New York attorney general, on mortgage fraud charges for the second time in a week, according to a person familiar with the matter, in an embarrassing blow to the Trump justice department as the president has sought retribution against one of his political rivals.

The department has attempted to twice file new charges against James after a judge dismissed an indictment against her after determining the prosecutor handling the case had not been properly appointed.

A decision [not to indict] by a federal grand jury is extremely rare. Only prosecutors appear before a grand jury and defendants do not to offer evidence in their support of their case. There is a legal axiom that “any good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich”, underscoring the power prosecutors have over grand juries.

The justice department declined to comment.

“For the second time in seven days, the Department of Justice has failed in its clear attempt to fulfill President Trump’s political vendetta against Attorney General James. This unprecedented rejection makes even clearer that this case should never have seen the light of day,” said Abbe Lowell, a lawyer representing James. “This case already has been a stain on this Department’s reputation and raises troubling questions about its integrity. Any further attempt to revive these discredited charges would be a mockery of our system of justice.”

James was charged with one count of bank fraud and one count of making a false statement in connection with a home in Norfolk, Virginia in 2020. Prosecutors say James committed a crime because she indicated on mortgage paperwork that the purchase would serve as her second home, but then rented it out. James denies wrongdoing and experts have said the allegations are thin. The New York Times reported James’ niece lives in the home.

Career prosecutors did not think there was sufficient evidence to file charges against James and were subsequently fired. The initial case was personally presented by Lindsey Halligan, a Trump ally installed to be the acting US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia. In November, a federal judge dismissed the case after ruling that Halligan was improperly appointed to the post. The criminal case against James Comey, the former FBI director, was dismissed on similar grounds.

Nothing prevented the justice department from trying to refile the case and they did so last week before a federal grand jury in Norfolk. A career attorney brought in from Missouri to work on the case, Roger Keller, handled that presentation, which was rejected. The office could again seek to refile charges against James with a different grand jury.

So … What is Trump Thinking?

It’s an important question.

Some folks sanewash Trump by claiming that he’s retaliating against his enemies by forcing them to spend time and resources to establish their innocence.

I don’t think that’s a logical explanation of his thinking. Mainly because, by doing the same thing over and over, he his making himself and his team look like the idiots they are. 

No, I think it’s a lot worse than just an intention to misuse his office.

Trump does not understand that there are good legal arguments and bad legal arguments. To him, all legal analysis is a buzzing, booming confusion. Like some mad King Canute, he thinks he can bend reality with his magical bullshit. He does not understand that actions have consequences, and he is unwilling to accept advice from professionally competent individual who could correct his misunderstanding and help him to predict what the consequences of his actions will be. 

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It’s Black Friday, and Things are Looking Up

Michael Tomasky (The New Republic), There’s No Doubt About It: The Great MAGA Crack-Up Has Begun: Every single prominent member of the Trump administration has had a very, very bad week:

Here we are, Black Friday, officially Christmastime now. America is in a sour mood. Grocery prices are up, and so are energy prices. Donald Trump lies incessantly about both. The American people are onto him. They’re pessimistic about the future. 

The distrust goes way beyond the economy. Over these last few weeks, ever since the government shutdown, it’s finally begun to sink in on people that Trump and his entire administration are a bunch of raging ideologues or incompetents or both, peddling a fantasy version of their strength that people no longer buy. There’s no longer any doubt about it: The MAGA crack-up has begun. 

Look at a few things that have happened in just the last week:

• Trump tried to sell Ukraine down the river to Putin. The howls of outrage were instant, loud, and bipartisan to some extent. The administration backpedaled. Or appeared to. But then, on Tuesday, we got the leaked transcript of the phone call between envoy Steve Witkoff and a top Putin aide in which Witkoff offered tips to the Kremlin to help sweet-talk Trump. (Remember: Our ally here is Ukraine!) The fact that something like this was leaked, whether by someone inside or outside the United States, is a clear sign that people aren’t afraid of this administration the way they might have been six months ago.

• Trump, bumbling around on domestic policy because he knows nothing, desperately said he was considering extending the Obamacare coverage subsidies on Monday. Congressional Republicans were up in arms. It would actually be a sane thing to do, but it would never get through Congress, and he sounds ridiculous, considering that he just kept the government shut down for 43 days over this very issue.

• Trump and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth’s push to reinstate Senator Mark Kelly as an active-duty soldier (he’s 61!) so they can court-martial him is quickly turning into one of the leading disasters of this administration. There is no chance they’re going to convince a majority of Americans that a guy who flew 30-something combat missions is a disloyal American. Hegseth’s tweets chastising the Arizona senator for the state of his uniform only drew attention to Kelly’s heroism—and made the defense secretary seem ridiculous and the whole saga seem petty. Kelly and the other five Democrats who made that video advising troops not to follow illegal orders no doubt have surprised Trump & company by not taking this lying down. The revenge crusade is crashing and burning.

• It was a disastrous week for Attorney General Pam Bondi as she stood there watching a federal judge dismiss the laughable indictments she directed against James Comey and Letitia James. And she stood up there, in perfect East German Communist Party circa 1957 fashion, repeating the assertion that everyone knows to be a lie, that Lindsey Halligan is “an excellent U.S. attorney.”   

• FBI Director Kash Patel somehow had a worse week than Bondi. He acknowledged that the Epstein files may never be released in full. He took more stick for spending taxpayer dollars providing his country-singer girlfriend with security and then exploded when he learned they ditched her right before she was set to sing the national anthem at an NRA convention in Georgia. They’re now openly leaking that Patel is on the way out. He’s been every bit as horrible as many people predicted he would be. 

• Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was revealed by a Justice Department court filing to have personally ordered the continuation of those flights to Central America after a federal judge said they had to stop. This involved, you may recall, loading 261 people onto three planes and sending them to El Salvador, many to the notorious CECOT facility where they endured subhuman conditions. Noem, in other words, directly violated an order from a federal court. This is illegal. It could lead to contempt of court charges—and fines and even imprisonment.

I could go on. RFK Jr.’s been on a pretty bad streak too. There was the Olivia Nuzzi stuff, which was titillating even if perhaps not of overwhelming public interest—except that it might indeed be a matter of public interest if Nuzzi is correct that the ex-junkie in charge of the nation’s health is still using drugs, which she writes he admitted to her. And before that, he took the country further into dangerous surreality on vaccines and autism. 

That’s pretty much the whole murderers’ row of Trump’s awful appointments (well, the top-tier ones). All except Tulsi Gabbard. Wonder what happened with her. Surely she did something stupid too. It just hasn’t been reported. (Actually, surprise surprise, she did do something pretty weird.)

Everywhere you look, in other words, Trump and his people are wrecking the country. He doesn’t know what to do about the economy. Presidents don’t have a ton of power to lower prices in the first place, and people are now understanding that fact, and that Trump swindled them last year. He’s going to give Putin most of what he wants. His pursuit of his perceived political enemies is going to be massively unpopular and drive his numbers down into the mid-30s before too long if he keeps it up. And all these incompetent and corrupt henchpeople aren’t helping. The movement is collapsing.

And this will embolden both Trump’s opponents and those he’s had in his gunsights. Seven months ago, law firms and universities were terrified of Trump. I bet not so much now. It’s been so inspiring and important to see citizens in Chicago and Evanston and so many other places rise up to oppose Trump and his masked agents in their roundups. It was gratifying to see Zohran Mamdani run circles around him, and Trump’s passive demeanor that day was telling. Even the Beltway Democrats, or some of them anyway, are showing some game.

People may not hate incompetence. They may not hate corruption. And they may not hate extremism. But all three at once? It’s getting to be too much for people, and it’s a great way to close out the year.  

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Illegal Orders and the Nuremberg Defense—Wargaming it out, So to Speak

The Democratic officials who put out the video on illegal orders were clearly implying that

  • Trump had already issued illegal orders or that he was about to issue illegal orders or that there was a clear risk that he would issue illegal orders, and that
  • anyone in the military or intelligence services who obeyed such illegal orders could suffer the same fate as the German officials who, famously and unsuccessfully, relied on the “Nuremberg defense”—“I was only following orders.”

But the officials did not explicitly say what orders they considered illegal—obviously a conscious and considered omission.

One could plausibly argue that this omission was cowardly. More to the point, one could plausibly argue that the failure to specify exactly what illegal orders they were talking about could create confusion in the minds of military personnel. Indeed, some have made plausible arguments along these lines, and the controversy will continue to grow. 

However, our President, Mango Mussolini

  • lacks the mental capacity to construct a plausible argument,
  • would not recognize the Nuremberg defense if it bit him in the ass, 
  • has no sense at all of the difference between a strong legal position and a weak legal position—he just thinks all legal argument is bullshit, and the winner is the guy who shouts his bullshit the loudest, and
  • literally does not know right from wrong.

Afflicted by these mental lacunae, Mango Mussolini cannont begin to devise a workable plan to make the Democratic officials pay for their failure to identify the illegal orders of which they spoke. Instead, he can only bluster and threaten—in this case, threaten to order his minions (1) to arrest the Democratic officials for the crime of referring to the Uniform Code of Military Justice and then (2) to procure their execution following trial in the federal criminal justice system. 

But Here’s the Thing About Threats

First of all, pretty much everyone who plays in the arena of politics or business knows that it’s a bad idea to take the hostage if you are not prepared to kill the hostage. That’s because your extreme threat, followed by supine inaction, makes you look like a blustering fool. 

And, by the way, the reason why you look like a blustering fool is that you are in fact a blustering fool.

On the other hand, what if the Justice Department does arrest Senator Slotkin, get Lindsey Halligan to indict her for treason, and put her on trial in a United States district court? Well, guess what? It isn’t illegal, let alone treasonous, for someone to make a general reference to a provision of law—here, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Title 10 of the United States Code, Section 892, and the related case law. 

Conclusion? Either course of action—blustering followed by inaction, or blustering followed by a ridiculous prosecution in federal court—leads inexorably to failure by Trump.

The logical next step would be for Trump to tell the Proud Boys to get our their guns and go after Senator Slotkin and the rest of the crew. 

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The Shutdown Deal

Ezra Klein (N.Y. Times), What Were Democrats Thinking?

As far as I can tell, the headline is intended to be read in a straightforward way—“WHAT were Democrats thinking?”—not in a sarcastic tone of voice—“What were Democrats THINKING?” 

In any event, as per usual, Ezra Klein has a dozen or so really interesting things to say—some of which might not have occurred to you and me—and it’s best to let him speak for himself. 

But as a preamble, two brief comments from me. First, some of the eight senators who joined the Republicans are political heavyweights, and people not known for an inclination to wimp out. So, before your knee jerks and you hurl criticism at them for wimping out, please think twice.

Second, among the really interesting things one might say about this putrid mess, the most interesting, IMHO, is that Republicans are now set up to cast spectacularly unpopular votes to screw a large portion of the public on the health insurance costs. 

Ezra Klein writes, 

Back in September, when I was reporting an article on whether Democrats should shut down the government, I kept hearing the same warning from veterans of past shutdown fights: The president controls the bully pulpit. He controls, to some degree, which parts of the government stay open and which parts close. It is very, very hard for the opposition party to win a shutdown.

Which makes it all the more remarkable that Democrats were winning this one. Polls showed that most voters blamed Republicans, not Democrats, for the current shutdown — perhaps because President Trump was bulldozing the East Wing of the White House rather than negotiating to reopen the government. Trump’s approval rating has been falling — in CNN’s tracking poll, it dipped into the 30s for the first time since he took office again. And last week, Democrats wrecked Republicans in the elections and Trump blamed his party’s losses in part on the shutdown. Democrats were riding higher than they have been in months.

Then, over the weekend, a group of Senate Democrats broke ranks and negotiated a deal to end the shutdown in return for — if we’re being honest — very little.

The guts of the deal are this: Food assistance — both SNAP and WIC, I was told — will get a bit more funding, and there are a few other modest concessions on spending levels elsewhere in the government. Laid-off federal workers will be rehired and furloughed federal workers given back pay. Most of the government is funded only until the end of January. (So get ready: We could be doing this again in a few months.) Most gallingly, the deal does nothing to extend the expiring Affordable Care Act tax credits over which Democrats ostensibly shut down the government in the first place. All it offers is a promise from Republicans to hold a vote on the tax credits in the future. Of the dozen or so House and Senate Democrats I spoke to over the past 24 hours, every one expected that vote to fail.

To understand why the shutdown ended with such a whimper, you need to understand the strange role the A.C.A. subsidies played in it. Democrats said the shutdown was about the subsidies, but for most of them, it wasn’t. It was about Trump’s authoritarianism. It was about showing their base — and themselves — that they could fight back. It was about treating an abnormal political moment abnormally.

T he A.C.A. subsidies emerged as the shutdown demand because they could keep the caucus sufficiently united. They put Democrats on the right side of public opinion — even self-identified MAGA voters wanted the subsidies extended — and held the quivering Senate coalition together. You shut the government down with the Democratic caucus you have, not with the Democratic caucus you want.

The shutdown was built on a cracked foundation. There were Senate Democrats who didn’t want a shutdown at all. There were Senate Democrats who did want a shutdown but thought it strange to make their demand so narrow: Was winning on health care premiums really winning the right fight? Should Democrats really vote to fund a government turning toward authoritarianism so long as health insurance subsidies were preserved?

And what if winning on the health care fight was actually a political gift to Donald Trump? Absent a fix, the average health insurance premium for 20 million Americans will more than double. The premium shock will hit red states particularly hard. Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s longtime pollster, had released a survey of competitive House districts showing that letting the tax credits expire might be lethal to Republican efforts to hold the House. Why were Democrats fighting so hard to neutralize their best issue in 2026?

The political logic of the shutdown fight was inverted: If Democrats got the tax credits extended — if they “won” — they would be solving a huge electoral problem for Republicans. If Republicans successfully allowed the tax credits to expire — if they “won” — they would be handing Democrats a cudgel with which to beat them in the elections.

This is why Senator Chuck Schumer’s compromise, which offered to reopen the government if Republicans extended the tax credits for a year, struck many Democrats as misguided. Morally, it might be worth sacrificing an electoral edge to lower health insurance premiums. But a one-year extension solved the Republicans’ electoral problem without solving the policy problem. Why on earth would they do that?

In any case, Republicans were not interested in Schumer’s offer. Trump himself has shown no interest in a deal. Rather than negotiating over health care spending, Trump has been ratcheting up the pain the shutdown is causing. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers have been furloughed or fired. The administration has been withholding food assistance from Americans who desperately need it. Airports are tipping into chaos as air traffic controllers go without pay.

More than anything else, this is what led some Senate Democrats to cut a deal: Trump’s willingness to hurt people exceeds their willingness to see people get hurt. I want to give them their due on this: They are hearing from their constituents and seeing the mounting problems and they are trying to do what they see as the responsible, moral thing. They do not believe that holding out will lead to Trump restoring the subsidies. They fear that their Republican colleagues would, under mounting pressure, do as Trump had demanded and abolish the filibuster. (Whether that would be a good or a bad thing is a subject for another column.) This, in the end, is the calculation the defecting Senate Democrats are making: They don’t think a longer shutdown will cause Trump to cave. They just think it will cause more damage.

If I were in the Senate, I wouldn’t vote for this compromise. Shutdowns are an opportunity to make an argument, and the country was just starting to pay attention. If Trump wanted to cancel flights over Thanksgiving rather than keep health care costs down, I don’t see why Democrats should save him from making his priorities so exquisitely clear. And I worry that Democrats have just taught Trump that they will fold under pressure. That’s the kind of lesson he remembers.

But it’s worth keeping this is perspective: The shutdown was a skirmish, not the real battle. Both sides were fighting for position, and Democrats, if you look at the polls, are ending up in a better one than they were when they started. They elevated their best issue — health care — and set the stage for voters to connect higher premiums with Republican rule. It’s not a win, but given how badly shutdowns often go for the opposition party, it’s better than a loss.