Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.
–Attributed to Lavrentiy Beria
As Trump’s revenge tour goes on, he has issued three new Executive Memoranda to vindicate his personal grievances. His targets are two former members of his administration and the law firm that obtained a $787.5 million defamation settlement against Fox News on behalf of Dominion Voting Systems. It takes little, a typed page and a signature, for a president to make an official presidential declaration. It need not pass muster with anyone else, or be authorized by a law. It’s just a president doing it because he can. So Trump did.
Two executive orders targeted Christopher Krebs, who as a senior cybersecurity official oversaw the securing of the 2020 presidential election, and Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security during Mr. Trump’s first term and anonymously wrote a high-profile opinion article for The New York Times in 2018. Among other measures, the orders directed Pam Bondi, the attorney general, and Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, to investigate the former officials and report their findings to the White House.
During the “signing ceremony,” because presidents get to hold signing ceremonies when they sign officious papers held in blue covers, Trump said that he felt as if Taylor, “an egregious leaker and disseminator of falsehoods,” whom he simultaneously claimed to not know and only met a few times, committed treason by revealing information from “confidential” meetings.
The order punishing Mr. Taylor accused him, without evidence, of “illegally” publishing classified conversations in a book he wrote after his opinion article in The Times, adding that “this conduct could properly be characterized as treasonous and as possibly violating the Espionage Act.”
Chris Krebs, on the other hand, was the official who oversaw the election and stated it was not “rigged.”
Christopher Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), is a significant bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his Government authority. Krebs’ misconduct involved the censorship of disfavored speech implicating the 2020 election and COVID-19 pandemic. CISA, under Krebs’ leadership, suppressed conservative viewpoints under the guise of combatting supposed disinformation, and recruited and coerced major social media platforms to further its partisan mission. CISA covertly worked to blind the American public to the controversy surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop. Krebs, through CISA, promoted the censorship of election information, including known risks associated with certain voting practices. Similarly, Krebs, through CISA, falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines. Krebs skewed the bona fide debate about COVID-19 by attempting to discredit widely shared views that ran contrary to CISA’s favored perspective.
Asserting that the election was secure must have seemed inadequate to Trump, so he threw in a bunch of other accusations for which there was absolutely no basis besides Trump says so. And then there is the Executive Order against Dominion’s law firm, Susman Godfrey, who committed the offense of winning.
Apparently referring to the Dominion defamation suit, Mr. Trump’s order accused Susman Godfrey of spearheading “efforts to weaponize the American legal system and degrade the quality of American elections,” and attacked the firm’s diversity efforts, as well as its representation of other clients whom Mr. Trump disagreed with.
Had all of this amounted to Trump venting his spleen by accusing his enemies of tell the truth, maybe it would be good for a punch line to a joke or a Rachel Maddow special report. But Trump wasn’t satisfied with calling the folks who hurt his feelings mean names, and took the additional step of directing his attorney general, Pam Bondi, and his Secretary of Homeland Security, the cosplay loving and dog hating Kristi Noem, to investigate his enemies and report their offenses back to him.
It’s not that there is any evidence, or even hint, that any of the targets of the president’s hurt feelings did anything wrong. Sure, they said or did things that made Trump look Trumpian. They embarrassed Trump to the extent he’s susceptible to shame. They contradicted his fantasy narrative that he really won the 2020 election but was defeated by a “rigged” election when, inter alia, Dominion voting machines switched millions of Trump votes to Biden. When Trump was just the election loser, there wasn’t much he could do to punish those who made him look more foolish than he did himself, but now that he can issue really cool EOs in blue jackets without anyone telling him that he’s not fooling anyone, Trump had the means to take his enemies to task.
As for Kristi Noem, there is little expectation that she won’t do whatever she’s told to do, not because she’s pressured into it, but because she gets off on playing the secret agent enforcing Trump’s will. But Pam Bondi, unlike Noem, is the attorney general and has a different role to play, one that entails a measure of integrity in her representation of the United States of America rather than Donald Trump.
Bondi’s public statements up to now offer no suggestion that she will do anything other than what her boss tells her to do, without regard to law, facts or integrity. But the demand that she take two guys and a law firm and find a crime takes Bondi from Trumpian sycophant into Lavrentiy Beria territory. In the old days, back when the independence of the Department of Justice mattered, there would first be a crime before there was an investigation into an individual.
At her confirmation hearing, Bondi said she would keep politics out of the AG’s office, would broach no enemies list and would defy Trump should he pressure her to go after his enemies. Will she? Trump has put her to the test. Will she fail?
What a petty man Trump is.: a petulant child who stamps his feet and calls names like a bully in the playground when he doesn’t get his way. Except now he’s the president of the United States and the whole world gets front row seat to his “terrible two” childishness. That is not leadership!
We have no one but ourselves to blame. We were warned by the man himself!
The Republic hangs in the balance. Congress do your job and throttle this narcissistic bully and resume your rightful role in governing this country. Is keeping your seat more important that keeping our Republic? If you answer “yes”, you’re in the wrong job and deserve to be voted out.
. Is keeping your seat more important that keeping our Republic? That question has been answered. Of course their power is more important (to them) than the Republic. Unfortunately, what they don’t see is their power has been usurped by Trump.
Well said
Rhetorical question (unless someone knows and chooses to answer!): Does an oath to support and defend the Constitution mean nothing, especially to those (such as lawyers or here the AG specifically!) who should know better?
I mean, sad as it is I can understand a non-lawyer politician not knowing or caring, but shouldn’t lawyers know what they’re doing? Or is service to the client, no matter what, more important, and some lawyers get a taste for power and are unwilling to offer a principled resignation instead of following the lead into the quagmire?
She doesn’t have to “find a crime.” She only has to “investigate.” She’ll want to be thorough, maybe assign a dedicated staffer (attorney, investigator, or maybe mail clerk) to that sole task. Also, they should be afforded plenty of time. I would think they need at least three years, nine months and ten days, to make sure they don’t inadvertently clear any of these cheeky rascals without an adequate probe.
You hold Bondi in far higher esteem than I do. It’s not that she has to please Dear Leader, but that she wants to.
Since I’m not a lawyer, a simple question :
Does Trump enjoy legal insulation from slander and libel in his statements, similar to a member of Congress speaking from the floor of their respective chambers?
I don’t think I’m just imagining that while some might focus on Bondi taking charge , it’s bonds that have seized control of the agenda,. Trump has broken something with his random insane policies and it’s going to be felt in currency, bond , and stock markets for a very long time.
The president does not enjoy explicit immunity such as laid out in the speech and debate clause, but is broadly protected if what he is talking about relates to his work in the office in some way. Trump in particular has built a resistance of sorts to defamation claims a) if he bothers to contest them, and b) because several courts have agreed with his legal arguments that reasonable people do not believe anything he says.