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Last Tuesday’s blue tsunami set off a red stampede at the Justice Department. In the week since voters handed Democrats both chambers of Congress, four Senate-confirmed DOJ officials have made a beeline for the exit.
Harmeet Dhillon, the social media addict who bragged about driving out three-quarters of the Civil Rights Division's lawyers, is out. So is Civil Division head Brett Shumate, who got a sendoff from his boss praising him for strong-arming clinics into dropping gender-affirming care for minors.
National Security Division chief John Eisenberg was reportedly pushed out after he balked at subpoenaing reporters to reveal their sources. And Jason Reding Quiñones, the US attorney in Miami who spearheaded the “grand conspiracy” investigation designed to lock up James Comey, Jack Smith, and the ghost of Robert Mueller in one fell swoop, has also left the building.
By sheer no coincidence at all, Attorney General Todd Blanche spent the past week on television desperately assuring everyone who sticks around that he’s got their backs.
“If you work in this administration, you have a lawyer,” the president’s former criminal defense lawyer told Fox News on Sunday. “It’s me.”
The parade of attorneys fleeing the building knows better. Blanche isn’t their lawyer, and, while a presidential pardon might keep them out of jail, it won’t save their law licenses.
With a Democratic Congress gaveling in on January 3 and Stephen Miller running the West Wing, they’re cashing out before the chaos and leaving the chumps behind to pick up the pieces.
Be a McGahn, not a Clark
Trump’s first term started at a high level of crazy and went totally off the rails after Democrats took back the House in 2019. That’s when he tried to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for dirt on Joe Biden, undermine the prosecutions of Mike Flynn and Roger Stone, and eventually overturn the election — all with the connivance of the Justice Department.
By then, White House Counsel Don McGahn, who ran interference for Trump during the Mueller investigation, had headed for the hills. Trump surrounded himself with diehard loyalists like Bill Barr, who parroted his lies about election fraud and black-clad antifa thugs flying around the country to riot. By the end, Jeff Clark, the acting head of the Civil Division, was plotting to use the agency to mount a coup by stealing Biden’s swing state electors.
Clark was only stopped when the rest of DOJ leadership threatened to quit en masse. He’s now collecting wingnut welfare at the Oversight Project, a MAGA oppo-research shop, trying not to get disbarred, and raising money online for his legal defense. McGahn went back to the law firm Jones Day, where he’s a partner pulling down millions of dollars a year.
There’s a lesson there, and it’s clear that the senior leadership at DOJ learned it.
Meet “your” lawyer, Todd Blanche
Against this backdrop, Todd Blanche is frantically signaling to members of the administration that they should stay put, despite Democrats’ threats to probe the past two years of corruption.
On CNN, he warned members of the House Oversight Committee that he “would be very worried” if he were them. Asked by Dana Bash whether Democratic vows to conduct oversight amounted to a crime, he replied, “It depends on what’s said. So, yes, there could be.”
Yesterday he was back on Fox complaining about “so much vile rhetoric” coming out of “incoming congressmen and senators.” After Brian Kilmeade invoked Charlie Kirk, Blanche agreed that “we cannot let the rhetoric turn from just honest debate to actual criminal conduct.”
This might be slightly more convincing coming from someone whose boss hadn’t called to hang members of Congress for sedition.
In every appearance, Blanche promises to protect administration witnesses hauled before Congress.
“Stephen Miller has a lawyer, and it’s me,” he vamped to Fox’s Laura Ingraham last Friday. “It’s me and the entire Department of Justice.”
“The Constitution sees it as my job,” he told Bash. (It does not. Neither the attorney general nor the Justice Department are mentioned in the Constitution, because they didn’t even exist yet.)
He also told Kilmeade “that’s exactly my role, to defend the administration.”
Part of this is a performance for an audience of one. But Blanche is also talking to the entire executive branch. The message is simple: Stay on the job. Sign the filings. Do what you’re told. If Congress comes calling, the attorney general has your back.
Except he doesn’t. And he couldn’t, even if he wanted to.
All the president’s men
The attorney general represents the United States, or, as Blanche calls it, “the administration.” Obviously, this DOJ works for Trump and Trump alone. But it’s been the longstanding position of the Justice Department that, when it provides legal representation to employees, its client is the government itself.
In 1980, the Office of Legal Counsel opined that, when a DOJ lawyer defends an employee, “he is the Government’s lawyer and not private counsel for the represented employee.” And under the implementing regulation, you only get a lawyer if “the Attorney General or his designee determines that providing representation would otherwise be in the interest of the United States.”
The minute your interests split from the boss’s, you’re on your own.
That dynamic is currently playing out in Chicago, in the wake of the implosion of the “Broadview 6” case.
Last fall, after an ICE agent drove into a crowd of protesters, the US Attorney’s Office charged six people with conspiracy. The case fell apart when Judge April Perry discovered gross prosecutorial misconduct by Assistant US Attorney Sheri Mecklenburg, who presented the case to the grand jury. There’s also a mountain of evidence that lawyers for the government lied to the court in an effort to cover up that misconduct.
Back in March, Assistant US Attorney William Hogan claimed in a court filing there had been “no communications of any nature” with anyone outside the office, including the White House and Main Justice. He called the defendants’ suspicions of political meddling “the product of fevered paranoia and delusional speculation.” Then the former head of the FBI’s Chicago field office sued, claiming that he and US Attorney Andrew Boutros met in his office with FBI Director Kash Patel and Todd Blanche to discuss the case.
Judge Perry has also called it “hard to credit” Boutros’s claim that he only found out about the grand jury misconduct months after the fact. She’s vowed to get to the bottom of this, ordering Boutros, Hogan, and Chicago Assistant US Attorneys Matthew Skiba and Andres Almendarez to explain themselves under oath at a hearing on November 16.
Since the summer, Boutros has tried to shift the blame for this debacle onto Mecklenburg. In September, she quit her job, hired her own lawyer, and moved to intervene in the case, arguing that she “has direct and distinct personal interests in the outcome of these motions … and that no other party to this case, including the United States, can fully represent those interests.” And, while Hogan, Skiba, and Almendarez remain on the government’s payroll, they have now hired lawyers of their own and moved to intervene as well.
These civil servants know damn well that Todd Blanche is not their lawyer and does not represent them. In fact, even as Boutros tries to sacrifice his staff to save his own ass, Blanche’s man on the ground has done everything he could to make this worse.
Chaos agent
On October 30, the two career prosecutors trying to clean up the Broadview 6 case withdrew and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, the Justice Department’s number three, entered his appearance.
Woodward previously represented various MAGAworld figures like Patel, Peter Navarro, and Trump’s co-defendant in the stolen documents case. As Blanche’s consigliere, he’s participated in some of the most outrageous episodes of Trump II, including the slush fund case, the “bunker” ballroom case, and the effort to block certification of the Alaska Senate race. Just last week, he managed to get Judge Ana Reyes to announce that she'll appoint a special master in the DC golf course case to investigate whether DOJ lawyers committed ethics violations.
When Woodward shows up, you can be sure that things are about to go sideways.
In Chicago, he immediately rejected Judge Perry’s offer to do this the easy way by voluntarily cooperating with her inquiry. In a series of breathtakingly insolent filings, he’s refused to comply with court orders and sneered that the judge has no authority to investigate the matter, while simultaneously feigning confusion and instructing her to clarify her orders.
The judge ordered prosecutors to turn over all communications about the case between the Chicago office and anyone outside it, both oral and written, with metadata attached, plus an accompanying privilege log explaining the basis for any item withheld. Woodward turned over two one-page emails as PDFs, asserted vaguely that "the privileges [the government] has asserted apply here the same way as they would in any other context," and informed the court that it would be “impracticable” to comply with her order to document any oral communications.
Judge Perry is already furious, and she's brought in law professor William Baude to brief the court on its options. Thanks to Woodward's shenanigans, she may wind up appointing a special prosecutor here, too.
None of that is good news for Mecklenburg, Hogan, Skiba, and Almendarez, who are getting dragged into this maelstrom. And, to the extent that the DOJ has evidence that would exculpate them — probably by inculpating their bosses, up to and including Blanche himself — Woodward has already said he’s not going to release it.
That is who is left at the Justice Department now that the adults are cashing out their chips! When Todd Blanche says that everyone who works for Trump has a lawyer, he means that he will dispatch a chaos monkey like Stan Woodward to make sure that the little guys on the firing line keep their mouths shut and take the fall.
The lawyers in Chicago figured that out the hard way. The rest of Trump’s minions have about seven weeks to wise up before the subpoenas start.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
Do keep us informed about matters arising from the Broadview 6. It could be very interesting, entertaining and important. Frankly if some entitled government lawyers who think the rules of law don't apply to them, get their rears fried I want to be informed about the sizzle.
I don’t know how things will turn out?
For example Trump. There’s little real doubt due to extrajudicial attacks, incompetence of the prosecution of military acts, ignorant mishandling of Covid, appointing RFKjr to HHS, Trump is ultimately responsible for thousands of unnecessary deaths, murder. I don’t think there’s really any doubt Trump raped children, sexually assaulted countless women, was clearly involved in trafficking. Convicted 134 felony counts. Civil conviction for what the judge called rape.
I listed all of these things so that you would know I’m aware of the seriousness of Trump’s crimes. The unforgivable act of Trump voters,&ridiculous Democratic abstentions.
I don’t believe Trump will spend a day in prison.
This long preamble was to let you know I’m not being glib when I say: Todd Blanche will be disbarred, will likely go to prison.