Trump's corruption of the DOJ goes much deeper than Gaetz
It's John Yoos all the way down.
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Donald Trump’s nomination of Matt Gaetz as attorney general is a giant middle finger to anyone who believes in the rule of law. But his nominees for other key Justice Department positions may be both more consequential and potentially more dangerous for democracy.
That’s partly because Gaetz is a lazy fool who never tried a federal criminal case and is functionally a “liberal tears” meme made flesh. It’s not that he’s too stupid to be dangerous — he’s clearly going to do his damnedest to prosecute Trump’s enemies. It’s that he’s exactly the kind of venal wastrel who publicly Venmos women for sex. He’s not the type who is going to hunker down and do the hard work of overturning democracy.
Gaetz is the polar opposite of Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, Trump’s first-term AGs, both of whom felt at least some fealty to civic institutions and the rule of law. Sessions had been a US attorney in Alabama, the Alabama AG, and and US senator. Barr was attorney general in the first Bush administration and a consummate DC insider. They were stalwart Republicans willing to do terrible things, but each man reached a point when their own personal ethics prevented them giving Trump what he demanded — for Sessions it was refusing to recuse himself from the Russia investigation, for Barr it was overturning the 2020 election — and both eventually found themselves exiled from the garden.
Perhaps Gaetz’s fecklessness may protect us in the same way that the institutionalism of Sessions and Barr protected us the last time. It’s hard to imagine someone so internet-pilled having the deftness to bury a special counsel report. But this will certainly not be the case with Trump’s personal lawyers, three of whom have already been named as high-ranking Justice Department officials.
Loyalty to one man
These are men (of course they’re all white men) who have some prosecutorial experience, but not a long career of public service. They understand how institutions work, but lack any interest in ensuring that they continue to do so.
Like Gaetz, their loyalty is to Trump. But unlike Gaetz, these guys are smart enough not to make stupid mistakes.
Trump has nominated his personal lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove for the number two and number three top jobs at the DOJ, reporting directly to Gaetz (if he’s confirmed or appointed to the top job during a Senate recess). Both men began their careers as prosecutors in the Southern District of New York before heading to the private sector to do criminal defense work. They represented Trump in the DC election interference case, the Florida stolen documents case, and the New York false business records case.
In each instance, they gave their client exactly what he wanted. They grandstanded, pushed facially ridiculous legal theories, and made spurious allegations about the prosecutors. In one especially egregious instance, they falsely accused Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg of withholding discovery, an accusation Justice Juan Merchan called “outrageous.”
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Blanche and Bove’s predecessors include former US Attorney for Maryland Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel, and Richard Donoghue, who torpedoed Trump’s attempt to use the Justice Department to steal the election in 2020. Both those men had institutional loyalty, not just personal loyalty to Trump. But Blanche and Bove were chosen not for their actual qualifications, but for their personal relationships with Trump himself. There is simply no universe in which they will stand up to Trump the way that Rosenstein and Donoghue did when the chips were down.
Dean John Sauer, Trump’s nominee for solicitor general, argued that the president could not be prosecuted for ordering SEAL Team 6 to assassinate his political rival because it was an official act. It was a grossly ahistorical argument universally lampooned by legal observers right up until the Supreme Court’s conservatives seized upon it and made it the law of the land. Sauer also served as solicitor general in Missouri, where he signed on to multiple failed Supreme Court briefs trying to overturn the 2020 election on the most anti-democratic pretexts. He’s dangerous because he’s smart.
This will not be a problem for another of his personal attorneys, Will Scharf, recently tapped to be White House staff secretary. Scharf founded the group “Jews Against Soros” and recently ran for Missouri attorney general on a platform of using the state prosecutor’s office to run defense for Trump in his criminal cases. Mercifully, he’ll be at the White House and not DOJ.
Turning DOJ into a protection racket
In 2017, when Jeff Sessions failed to protect him from the Mueller investigation, Trump complained, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”
Cohn rose to prominence as counsel for Sen. Joe McCarthy during the Red Scare and later worked as a fixer for Donald Trump and his family. When the Justice Department accused Trump of racial discrimination in his apartments in 1973, Cohn filed a $100 million suit agains the government for harassment. (He lost.) Cohn was repeatedly accused of misconduct and eventually disbarred, but to Trump he represents the platonic ideal of a lawyer: aggressive, snarling, vindictive, and unbounded by norms or law. Trump takes it as a given that his appointees should behave this way, and that they should be loyal to him personally, rather than to the law or the American people.
"I don't want to get into loyalty, but I will tell you that, I will say this: Holder protected President Obama. Totally protected him," Trump said in 2017, adding that "when you look at the things that they did, and Holder protected the president. And I have great respect for that, I'll be honest."
In the lead-up to first Trump administration, Trump was warned that it would violate the anti-nepotism statute to appoint Jared Kushner as his senior advisor. Trump shrugged it off, and his aides dummied up an opinion letter saying that the White House was somehow exempt from a statute enacted by Republicans to stop John Kennedy from appointing his brother Robert as AG. (History has a weird echo!)
It’s not illegal for Trump to nominate his personal lawyers, of course. But staffing the government with his minions is an ominous sign that the second Trump administration will be even more lawless than the first.
It’s one thing to thumb your nose at anti-nepotism laws or even the Emoluments Clause. The republic could withstand (if barely) Bill Barr’s machinations to bury the Ukraine whistleblower report and mischaracterize Robert Mueller’s conclusions. But now Trump and his allies are contemplating a massive assault on the rule of law itself.
This time the demand won’t be a laughable opinion allowing the president to accept foreign and domestic emoluments at his private businesses. This time Trump will be looking for legal justification to end to birthright citizenship. Or to order local governments to round up undocumented citizens for deportation. Or to claim that the president can call American generals back into service so that they can be court-martialed. Or to justify banning abortion nationwide under the Comstock Act.
And for that he’ll need not just Roy Cohn, but John Yoo.
Yoo was a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush on September 11, 2001. He was instructed to find a legal justification for torturing detainees in the War on Terror, and along with his boss Jay Bybee (now a federal judge), he did just that. The infamous “Torture Memos” magicked away the Geneva Convention by rebranding the practice as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” They were later repudiated, but not before hundreds of prisoners were “waterboarded,” “walled,” and “rectally fed.” Yoo was the ultimate hired gun, willing to take a facially illegal end and back formulate a means to justify it, and his association with the project has rendered him a conservative hero and a demon of the left.
We are long past an era where the government was merely corrupt — Trump isn’t even pretending to put his assets in trust this time so as to separate himself from his eponymous business. The second Trump administration will be focused on undermining the rule of law itself. And Trump is going to need a whole army of Yoos if he wants to enact his agenda.
Of course, the greatest troll of all would be to nominate Yoo himself. Which means that Trump will probably do just that.
That’s it for today
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“It’s that he’s exactly the kind of venal wastrel who publicly Venmos women for sex. He’s not the type who is going to hunker down and do the hard work of overturning democracy.”
Of course Gaetz isn’t the type to hunker down to overturn democracy; he’s just a figurehead, and a distraction (bright shiny object). That’s why Trump has nominated his personal lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove for the number two and number three top positions. And I agree, John Yoo would make a great addition to Trump’s team; someone has to water board the libs, and keep those pesky rascals from the MSM in their place.
And as you’ve pointed out, these two know exactly what they’re doing, and could be veryeffective behind the scenes, while a the MSM is completely glued to the Trump clown car.
I’m just waiting for Trump to announce Dog the Bounty Hunter for Director of the Marshall Service, and Hulk Hogan for FBI director. I’d suggest Judge Judy for SCOTUS, but after much consideration, I’ve realized she’s way over qualified. We’ll just have to go with Aileen Cannon!….:)
His experienced lawyers kept him from prosecution. Their new power and loyalty to the corrupt wannabe dictator will embolden them to carry out fraudulent investigations and cover up trumps inevitable Corruption. So many are twisting themselves into a pretzel in order to attempt to normalize Trump picks. Trump is making a mockery of our institutions and the Constitution. Shame on the HALF that supports this Disgusting disgrace.