DOJ Purge Continues With Firing Of Prosecutor Who Refused To Go After Trump’s Personal Enemies

from the when-no-one-is-left-but-the-loyalists… dept

The “appearance of impropriety” doesn’t bother this administration. It prefers open impropriety, having learned the wrong lessons from Trump’s first term, where most of his worst impulses were somewhat muted by the adults in the room.

There are no adults left. If they haven’t been fired, it’s because they were never invited to participate in the first place. His cabinet is stocked with Fox News commentators. Trump’s personal lawyers are now holding top-level DOJ positions. Another of his lawyers is now an appeals court judge.

The DOJ is bleeding talent. This is deliberate. The Trump administration is divesting itself of everyone but loyalists who view the president as a king, much to the mounting horror of the system of checks and balances, which simply assumed no president would dare to engage in this sort of audacity.

Another DOJ prosecutor is now unemployed. And they were fired because they refused to be another cog in Trump’s oppression machinery, as Devlin Barrett and Michael Schmidt report for the New York Times:

Career prosecutors at the Justice Department do not believe criminal charges are warranted from an investigation seeking to discredit an earlier F.B.I. inquiry into Russia’s attempt to tilt the 2016 election in President Trump’s favor, according to people familiar with the matter.

It leaves unclear what political appointees at the Justice Department might do, given the breadth of Mr. Trump’s demands that it pursue people he perceives as enemies. Already, the U.S. attorney in the Western District of Virginia overseeing the case, Todd Gilbert, was forced to resign in August because he refused to sideline a high-ranking career prosecutor who found the evidence flimsy, the people familiar with the matter said.

Todd Gilbert seemed like an unlikely target for Trump’s vindictiveness. He was a career GOP legislator before being elevated to the position of US Attorney in Virginia. But he made a fatal mistake: he refused to pretend there was anything to get prosecutorial about when it came to the 2016 FBI investigation into possible election interference by Russia.

Two people better known for their podcast antics than actual investigative expertise (FBI director Kash Patel and his loyal assistant, Dan Bongino) demanded more action on this front. Gilbert refused to play along, resulting in him being fired less than three months after Donald Trump installed him in office.

After reviewing the evidence, Mr. Gilbert told his superiors that he did not believe there was sufficient evidence to justify a grand jury investigation, these people said. Frustrated by that answer, aides to Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche, blamed a senior career attorney in the office who they believed had swayed Mr. Gilbert: Zachary Lee, a veteran prosecutor with more than two decades of experience involving public corruption and narcotics, among other issues.

[…]

Pressed to further sideline or remove Mr. Lee, Mr. Gilbert refused, these people said. Department officials then informed Mr. Gilbert that he would be fired, and he resigned shortly afterward, posting a GIF on social media with a joke from the movie “Anchorman,” in which the lead character exclaims, “Boy, that escalated quickly!”

That X post was captured by Bluesky user Waldo Jaquith, a former Biden advisor:

This administration knows nothing else but increasingly speedy escalation. It moves fast not just because it wants to break things, but because it’s so often in the wrong it needs to constantly correct course. Anyone who isn’t immediately and usefully subservient is expendable. The pattern will continue until Trump is surrounded only by people willing to indulge his worst impulses without entertaining any of their own second thoughts… or even first thoughts. They’ve installed a king in the Republic, making a mockery of their claims to love America and everything it stood for before they regained power.

Filed Under: dan bongino, doj, fbi, kash patel, retaliation, todd gilbert, trump administration, vindictive prosecution