When the Justice Department is used to seek Trump’s revenge rather than justice, the US is not a strong democracy.
“The Justice Department has removed the career Miami federal prosecutor leading the investigation into John Brennan, after she resisted pressure to quickly bring charges against the former CIA director and prominent critic of President Donald Trump, according to people briefed on the matter.
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The investigation into Brennan is focused on one of the president’s longest standing political grievances — the 2017 intelligence assessment that found Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help him.
Trump’s demands have taken on more urgency for the Justice Department after Trump fired former Attorney General Pam Bondi, in part because of dissatisfaction at the slow pace of cases he wants brought. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has redoubled efforts to satisfy the president’s demands as he seeks to keep the job after Bondi’s ouster.”
The US is paying out 1.2 million dollars in a case it won. This is corruption by the Trump administration–subverting the rule of law for a political ally.
The Trump administration goes out of its way to arrest people on camera and then makes crude and mean memes out of the images. Rather than focusing on justice, like building a case, arresting when appropriate, and then trying to convince a jury of guilt, justice department resources are wasted on unnecessarily arresting people who don’t even get indicted and making sure to get sweet propaganda images. They’ve even edited some of them to make the arrestee look more pathetic. Lying to the public with false images is the opposite of justice.
In one example, the Trump administration is misusing federal laws to arrest obnoxious protestors in order to make propaganda memes when the people are likely guilty of local trespassing laws, which is for local law enforcement to deal with.
“Before Donald Trump made him second in command at the Justice Department, Todd Blanche was the president’s most prominent defense attorney, shielding him from an avalanche of criminal cases that threatened to land him in jail for years.
That loyalty led Trump to appoint Blanche as his designated representative to the National Archives, the keeper of White House records from the president’s first term. Large swathes of those first-term records are slated to become publicly available next week, and under the Presidential Records Act, the president’s designees play an outsized role in governing the public’s access to those files.
American Oversight, a prominent left-leaning government transparency group, is urging Blanche to relinquish his role as the gatekeeper to Trump’s presidential records, saying his attorney-client relationship with the president — in addition to his role as deputy attorney general — presents a conflict. Anything less, the group argues, will erode public confidence in the process.”
Trump called his Department of Justice lawyers weak and told them they needed to get on his retribution campaign. After this meeting, the lawyers went after the Fed chairman, Jerome Powell.
Unusually, some Republican Congressmen are breaking with Trump and criticizing this move.
“Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powellsaid Sunday the Department of Justice has served the central bank with subpoenas and threatened it with a criminal indictment over his testimony this summer about the Fed’s building renovations.
The move represents an unprecedented escalation in President Donald Trump’s battle with the Fed, an independent agency he has repeatedly attacked for not cutting its key interest rate as quickly as Trump prefers. The subpoena relates to his testimony before the Senate Banking Committee in June, Powell said, regarding the Fed’s $2.5 billion renovation of two office buildings, a project that Trump criticized as excessive.
Powell on Sunday cast off what has up to this point been a restrained approach to Trump’s criticisms and personal insults, which he has mostly ignored. Instead, Powell issued a video statement in which he bluntly characterized the threat of criminal charges as simple “pretexts” to undermine the Fed’s independence when it comes to setting interest rates.
“This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions — or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation,” Powell said.”
It is not normal for the justice department or the FBI to release the internal files of an investigation. Such files have lots of speculations and falsehoods in them, and releasing them can falsely destroy people’s reputations.
Over the 20th century, the U.S. developed norms that separated the justice system from the whims of the president. Trump is breaking that down and weakening the United States as a strong democracy.
“Federal law enforcement last year investigated Homan, who allegedly accepted $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents posing as business executives seeking government contracts, according to an MSNBC report on Saturday. The outlet reported that Homan indicated he could help the undercover agents secure government contracts. The Justice Department waited to see if Homan planned to fulfil this claim, but the case stalled and was closed this summer.”
Does he still have the money?
… Homan is a close ally of the president, and served for a stint as the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during his first term. The border czar has been among the most visible defenders of the president’s second term immigration agenda, and has been a key player in executing the administration’s deportation policy.
“An archived version of the study is still available online, and states that “far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides” than the left”