It’s hard to find good help these days. What’s a president to do when all he wants is to use the might of the state to persecute his political enemies, but all of these pencil-necked geek attorneys keep saying things like “sir, there is no case here”?
President Donald Trump’s retribution jamboree is being stalled out by career Justice Department prosecutors worried about stupid things like “the law” and “ethics.”
Take Elizabeth Yusi, a career prosecutor who has been an assistant U.S. attorney for about 15 years. According to MSNBC, Yusi will be telling Lindsey Halligan, a real-estate lawyer who has been interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia for about 15 minutes, that there’s no probable cause to prosecute New York Attorney General Letitia James for mortgage fraud.
How dare she?
Looks like Halligan is going to have to roll up her sleeves and take care of this herself, just like she did with bringing charges against former FBI Director James Comey. Sure, the indictment was comically thin, and sure, she didn’t manage to make one of the ginned-up charges stick, and sure, she had to present it to the grand jury herself.
Halligan, of course, was installed in her job because she’s perfectly happy to take on the shoddiest, most vindictive prosecutions. She was brought in to bring charges against Comey after her predecessor, Eric Siebert, said he wouldn’t.
Trump took a victory lap after Halligan secured an indictment against Comey, but for all the fanfare over that, there is so much more that has to happen before Trump can live out his fantasy of putting Comey behind bars.
Sadly for Trump, all of those steps require prosecutors. Many, actually.
At the moment, Halligan might need to consider a crash course in trial preparation, because as of Tuesday, no career attorneys from her office have entered an appearance in Comey’s case, even though the arraignment is on Wednesday. Though to be fair, Halligan probably doesn’t know about this, since she’s never been a prosecutor and her only client as a defense attorney was Trump.
Instead, it looks like Halligan is going to bring in prosecutors from outside her office. Can’t wait for a passel of freshly minted Liberty University School of Law graduates to handle a politically explosive and high-profile prosecution. Well, at least those who weren’t smart or vicious enough to land a clerkship with the many Trump judges eager to mold new baby fascists.
Meanwhile, when it comes to the Trump administration’s eagerness to have one state invade another, it seems to all rest—legally speaking—on the shoulders of one lawyer: Eric Hamilton.
Hamilton handled Sunday night’s hearing about deploying National Guard troops to Oregon and was then bundled off to Illinois to argue about how cool and legal it would be if Texas troops were deployed to Chicago.
Normally, of course, there is a veritable army of DOJ attorneys to handle these things. But between resignations and purges, the DOJ doesn’t have a lot left in the tank.
The agency lost 70% of its civil rights division. The top national security prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia was just purged. Multiple high-level prosecutors who refused to sign off on the DOJ’s quid pro quo with Mayor Eric Adams were also fired. Two-thirds of the attorneys tasked with defending Trump’s signature initiatives—like birthright citizenship and immigration—have bolted. And Trump has rapidly depleted the entire federal attorney bench.
This is also why there’s such turmoil among some U.S. attorneys right now. Trump knows he can’t get people like Alina Habba—another of his former personal attorneys—or Halligan confirmed by the Senate. But he also knows that only the most bone-deep partisan loyalists will do his bidding.
Eventually, all that the DOJ will have left are people who previously represented Trump in some personal capacity. Fortunately for Trump, that’s a lot of people. Unfortunately for the rest of us, they all suck.