Two days left! Support our fundraiser by January 5th and 
DOJ Purge Continues With Firing Of Prosecutor Who Refused To Go After Trump’s Personal Enemies
from the when-no-one-is-left-but-the-loyalists... dept
The “appearance of impropriety” doesn’t bother this administration. It prefers open impropriety, having learned the wrong lessons from Trump’s first term, where most of his worst impulses were somewhat muted by the adults in the room.
There are no adults left. If they haven’t been fired, it’s because they were never invited to participate in the first place. His cabinet is stocked with Fox News commentators. Trump’s personal lawyers are now holding top-level DOJ positions. Another of his lawyers is now an appeals court judge.
The DOJ is bleeding talent. This is deliberate. The Trump administration is divesting itself of everyone but loyalists who view the president as a king, much to the mounting horror of the system of checks and balances, which simply assumed no president would dare to engage in this sort of audacity.
Another DOJ prosecutor is now unemployed. And they were fired because they refused to be another cog in Trump’s oppression machinery, as Devlin Barrett and Michael Schmidt report for the New York Times:
Career prosecutors at the Justice Department do not believe criminal charges are warranted from an investigation seeking to discredit an earlier F.B.I. inquiry into Russia’s attempt to tilt the 2016 election in President Trump’s favor, according to people familiar with the matter.
It leaves unclear what political appointees at the Justice Department might do, given the breadth of Mr. Trump’s demands that it pursue people he perceives as enemies. Already, the U.S. attorney in the Western District of Virginia overseeing the case, Todd Gilbert, was forced to resign in August because he refused to sideline a high-ranking career prosecutor who found the evidence flimsy, the people familiar with the matter said.
Todd Gilbert seemed like an unlikely target for Trump’s vindictiveness. He was a career GOP legislator before being elevated to the position of US Attorney in Virginia. But he made a fatal mistake: he refused to pretend there was anything to get prosecutorial about when it came to the 2016 FBI investigation into possible election interference by Russia.
Two people better known for their podcast antics than actual investigative expertise (FBI director Kash Patel and his loyal assistant, Dan Bongino) demanded more action on this front. Gilbert refused to play along, resulting in him being fired less than three months after Donald Trump installed him in office.
After reviewing the evidence, Mr. Gilbert told his superiors that he did not believe there was sufficient evidence to justify a grand jury investigation, these people said. Frustrated by that answer, aides to Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche, blamed a senior career attorney in the office who they believed had swayed Mr. Gilbert: Zachary Lee, a veteran prosecutor with more than two decades of experience involving public corruption and narcotics, among other issues.
[…]
Pressed to further sideline or remove Mr. Lee, Mr. Gilbert refused, these people said. Department officials then informed Mr. Gilbert that he would be fired, and he resigned shortly afterward, posting a GIF on social media with a joke from the movie “Anchorman,” in which the lead character exclaims, “Boy, that escalated quickly!”
That X post was captured by Bluesky user Waldo Jaquith, a former Biden advisor:
This administration knows nothing else but increasingly speedy escalation. It moves fast not just because it wants to break things, but because it’s so often in the wrong it needs to constantly correct course. Anyone who isn’t immediately and usefully subservient is expendable. The pattern will continue until Trump is surrounded only by people willing to indulge his worst impulses without entertaining any of their own second thoughts… or even first thoughts. They’ve installed a king in the Republic, making a mockery of their claims to love America and everything it stood for before they regained power.
Filed Under: dan bongino, doj, fbi, kash patel, retaliation, todd gilbert, trump administration, vindictive prosecution
Comments on “DOJ Purge Continues With Firing Of Prosecutor Who Refused To Go After Trump’s Personal Enemies”
The spoils system has worked well in the past.
The founder's naivety comes home to roost at last
The Trump administration is divesting itself of everyone but loyalists who view the president as a king, much to the mounting horror of the system of checks and balances, which simply assumed no president would dare to engage in this sort of audacity.
The legal system assumes that there are those that simply refuse to follow the law, and has rules accordingly. That the highest political office in the US has as it’s checks people that the president has either a significant or total control over, and does not include a ‘what if the president’s party is in on their power-grab?’ clause is turning out to be a massive mistake on the part of the founders.
They fought a war to get out from under the control of a king, you’d think they’d have spend a bit more time asking themselves, ‘What if a future president decides that what the US needs is a king of it’s own?’
Re:
At this stage I don’t understand how Trump’s exit strategy for the Presidency isn’t to die in office?
The moment he loses power scores are going to start being settled so fast it’ll be amazing to watch
Ergo, his plan must include the ability to never be held accountable for his actions
And the only way to do that without heavy jail time for him and his cabal of traitors, sycophants and psychopaths is to cling onto power regardless of anything else
Re: Re:
The problem is, you’re assuming that he has a plan. This is the same guy who can’t talk on-topic for more than ten seconds.
Re: Re:
That one is so blindingly obvious – he will pardon everyone in the administration on his last day, using Hunter Biden as precedent.
Re: Re: Not at all.
The whole point of getting rid of Trumpism is to do things right. The government structures were not able to get Trump prosecuted during the 4 years of Biden’s term. In the state they are now in, it will take a decade to get them back into working and independent state, and then you need to start over. All in all, that will give Trump more than enough time to continue his previous delay games.
He’ll be dead long before he will see prison. And he cares shit about his sycophants.
Re: Re:
I assume he only has the “concept of” an exit strategy.
Re:
They had an answer for that. They didn’t have an answer for what to do if Congress, the Supreme Court, the press, and about half the voters and state governments were all complicit.
Well, Jefferson did. I’d hope to avoid his solution but I increasingly suspect that a civil war is no longer on the horizon, it’s already begun and most people just don’t know it yet.
Re: Re:
They didn’t trust the hoi polloi so they added multiple layers of representation and first-across-the-gate selections.
Each level of representation adds leverage for corruption (cheaper to pay off few than many), each first-across-the-gate adds lots of toads to any things you’d actually want.
Totally sacrificing “honest” and “well-meaning” as must-have criteria was probably not the best idea of the voting populace.
Re: What can we do to fix this?
Anything I can think of can also be abused. Amendment that lets states do a vote of no confidence, red states would just veto any dem they dont like.
We would have to be absolutely radical and move to multi party proportional representation to even get free of all the current problems, make the president more like a prime minister I guess as well.
Point is, no easy solution that you can use to stop a king that cant also stop a progressive.
Re:
I’m not sure if it’s naivete. George Washington directly warned us about this in his farewell address over two centuries ago.
The founders knew full well the danger of allowing people to rule themselves. Honestly, I think if you told them it would take 250 years for this to happen most of them would be over the moon that it took this long, that the idea they cobbled together held out so long and became the most powerful and important country in the world at its height.
Not trying to be doom and gloom. The US may very well emerge from this crisis a better stronger nation, but even if it doesn’t, you gotta admit: it was a pretty good run. I think the founders would have been proud of that.
Re: Re:
It was a good run.
Now it’s going to be a matter of how much extra suffering is required before people wake up and change the way government is designed to function.
Imagine if the federal government was dissolved and states left to manage themselves.
I tell you it would truly be epic to see the worse off states just crumble after they dont have anyone else to blame but themselves for the sad state of affairs in their own land.
No doubt it won’t happen. There are too many dependencies between states and their economies to make it work peacefully.
Re:
They knew.
Re: Re:
They didn’t foresee the festering cancer of slavery would metastasize to institutionalized racism and xenophobia.
Without aggressive treatment in 2025 and beyond, hospice might be the only option.