Pam Bondi, as awful as she is, isn't satisfying Trump's craving to punish people he doesn't like.
On Jan. 8, the White House announced the creation of a new division in the Department of Justice for “national fraud enforcement,” to be headed by an assistant attorney general. What makes this move notable is that it will be run out of the White House, under the direct supervision of President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Never before has the politicization of justice been so blatant or so dangerous.
Having a prosecutor directly answerable to the president and vice president crosses a line that no other administration has dared to cross. It is the kind of thing one might expect in an autocratic or totalitarian regime, but not in the United States.
Yahoo
Except, the United States now IS an autocratic (or totalitarian) regime.
President Donald Trump's administration said on Thursday it was creating a new division at the U.S. Department of Justice to combat what the White House called "rampant" fraud across the country.
Rights advocates and critics have said the Trump administration has used fraud allegations as an excuse to target immigrants and political opponents. They have also dismissed Trump's ability to tackle fraud, citing pardons from Trump to those who have faced fraud convictions in the past.
[...]
The assistant attorney general for the new Justice Department division will be responsible for leading the department's efforts to investigate, prosecute and remedy fraud affecting the federal government, federally funded programs and private citizens, the White House said.
The White House said the official will advise the U.S. attorney general and deputy attorney general "on issues involving significant, high-impact fraud investigations and prosecutions and related policy matters."
Reuters
Explaining why the administration is creating the new position, Vance said, “This is the person who is going to make sure we stop defrauding the American people. When we get the bad guys, we want to make sure we get them permanently and they don’t have some legal technicality they can get out of.”
Yahoo
The courts will be the final arbiter of that. Or they used to be. How is Vance's office going to make sure there's no legal technicality available?
And how did Republicans in the Senate, which will be responsible for confirming the nominee to head the new division, react? Majority Leader John Thune said that the person “would be confirmed swiftly.”
Thune’s response is a clear dereliction of duty. It will now be up to his colleagues in the Senate to resist this dangerous power play.
Don't hold your breath.
And, in a moment of supreme irony, [after national security documents were recovered from Mar-A-Lago,] Trump said, “There could be no more heinous betrayal of American values than to use the law to terrorize the innocent and reward the wicked, and that’s what they were doing at a level that’s never been seen before.”
He was just foretelling his next administration. Remember: every accusation is a confession.
[T]he jurisdiction of the new assistant attorney general will extend to efforts against what Vance called “domestic terrorism networks” trying to thwart the administration’s immigration agenda. In his view, these supposed networks are “defrauding the United States by inciting violence against our law enforcement officers.”
Vance is not stupid. That's not fraud.
That’s an unusually expansive definition of fraud, but the administration is eager to let its newly created division loose to curb protest without letting niceties of the law — what Vance labeled “some legal technicality” — get in the way. Moreover, it seems not to matter to Trump and Vance that the Justice Department already has a Fraud Section housed within its Criminal Division.
What does matter is that going forward, decisions regarding some fraud prosecutions will be made in the White House and directed by the president and vice president. As Vance said at a press briefing, the new assistant attorney general “is going to kick [them] into high gear.”
That effort is also central to the administration’s ongoing effort to purge the Justice Department of any vestige of professionalism, an effort at war with the very reason the department was created by an act of Congress in 1870.
[...]
If Sen. Thune and his colleagues let this plan succeed, they will be taking a monumental step toward turning the American constitutional system upside down.
The Supreme Court is doing that job on their own quite nicely.
The Justice Department plans to insulate its criminal and civil fraud sections from a White House-run enforcement initiative rather than merge them into the newly established fraud division, according to an internal email reviewed by Bloomberg Law.
“It has been decided that the Fraud Section will remain entirely intact under the current Criminal Division structure and its mission will remain the same,” Tysen Duva, the Criminal Division’s assistant attorney general, wrote to the office’s employees late Monday.
Bloomberg
They'll just be working on actual fraud cases?
The new Senate-confirmed position, which Vice President JD Vance said Jan. 8 will be supervised directly by himself and President Donald Trump, will “be in addition to both the Criminal Division Fraud Section and the Civil Division Fraud Section,” Duva continued. “When a nominee is confirmed, that individual will hire attorneys to staff his/her own office.”
How very unrepublican. Expanding government.
The Criminal and Civil divisions’ fraud sections based in department headquarters have decades of experience coordinating the government program fraud investigations that Vance and an accompanying White House fact sheet suggested will be taken over by the new office.
[...]
Duva told employees Monday that his division “will look forward to establishing a collaborative partnership with the new AAG-Fraud, such that we can assist and leverage our experience to help identify, investigate, and eliminate fraud of all kinds throughout our country.”
Trying to hold on to some semblance of relevance. Trump is not looking for experience or professionalism.
Duva was sworn in Dec. 23 to head the Criminal Division, after his acting predecessor protected it from politicization and case reversals that have taken place elsewhere in the department.
“I am committed to supporting the great work that you are already doing in this area,” Duva’s email said.
Trump won't care what they're doing, as long as they don't interferer with his agenda of retaliation.
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