‘Rule Of Law’ Administration Keeps Losing Cases Because It Has No Respect For The Rule Of Law

from the bull-in-America’s-china-shop dept

America continues to be made great again. Or so says the collective of fascist buffoons currently holding federal positions of power.

The Trump administration has made a lot of noise about bringing the “rule of law” back to America — something that supposedly went missing during Biden’s term. The alleged lawlessness covers everything from rational immigration policies to whatever the fuck the word “woke” means to whatever White House mook is currently using that term in a disparaging way.

Trump’s return to office set in motion a whole lot of recklessness and lawlessness, starting with the wholesale dismissal of migrants’ constitutional rights and running all the way through several DOGE-gutted agencies until this regime reached its current nadir: straight up murdering people just because they happen to be in boats off the coast of Venezuela.

Anyone who actually respects the rule of law has either quit or been fired. They’ve been replaced by people Trump prefers, like former personal lawyers, Fox News commentators, and far-right podcasters.

We’ve already witnessed a lot of failure from the Trump DOJ, which can’t manage to secure indictments during revenge prosecutions ranging from anti-ICE protesters to high-profile names from Trump’s official enemies list, like NY Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey. Everyone that failed upward due to their MAGA loyalty has made a mockery of half of the DOJ’s name: justice.

Fortunately, courts — for the most part — aren’t just rolling over for half-baked “unitary executive power” legal theories. As Reuters reports, the DOJ is in the midst of a historic losing streak that’s the direct result of Trump’s preference for loyalists.

As President Donald Trump’s crime crackdown got underway in Washington, D.C., in August, federal agents and police spotted a man named Torez Riley tugging at his backpack inside a Trader Joe’s store, searched it and recovered two firearms.

But federal prosecutors were forced to dismiss the charges after video surveillance revealed the search lacked probable cause and was unlawful.

In a subsequent legal opinion, a federal magistrate judge said the errors were part of a broader pattern of unprecedented prosecutorial missteps, resulting in a 21% dismissal rate of the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s office’s criminal complaints over eight weeks, compared to a mere 0.5% dismissal rate over the prior 10 years.

It used to mean that getting prosecuted meant getting fucked. Judges tended to side with prosecutors and rogue cops, rejecting only a small amount of cases that contained violations too egregious to be granted a “good faith” mulligan.

At this point, the DOJ is struggling to secure grand jury indictments, which is a little like struggling to lift a feather over your head. Most indictments are considered slam dunks because they’re entirely one-sided presentations made by prosecutors to people who are just there to pencil-whip their way through the day’s prosecutorial offerings.

But with Trump running the DOJ (and handpicking people like his former insurance lawyer, Lindsey Halligan to handle politically motivated prosecutions), the government’s fridge is now overstocked with unindicted ham sandwiches.

This is on top of literally hundreds of court rulings declaring the administration’s deportation efforts are illegal — specifically, the jailing and indefinite detainment of alleged immigration law violators who don’t pose a threat to public safety or a flight risk.

The blustering continues, however, with no sign of respite in sight. The administration apparently feels that if it goes hard enough for long enough, everything will eventually work out in its favor. Meanwhile, its band of bigots and incompetents continues to undercut its ability to perform well in court, much less convince judges that the government is acting in good faith.

The errors have sometimes undermined the department on civil and criminal matters it cares about, from the prosecutions of Trump’s political foes, to cases about immigration, violent crime, gender-affirming care and voting rights. At times, they came about after senior officials made public statements about pending cases on social media or television that strayed from the allegations made in sworn court filings, violating department rules designed to ensure a fair trial.

These mistakes are causing department attorneys to lose credibility with federal courts, with some judges quashing subpoenas, threatening criminal contempt and issuing opinions that raise questions about their conduct.

Reuters calls these “errors,” but they’re actually “failures.” The administration is very deliberate when it comes to its efforts to allow (and encourage!) Trump to rule like a king, bypassing the legislative process entirely with daily executive orders and Truth Social posts that are meant to be treated as executive orders.

Meanwhile, the DOJ is bragging that none of this — from the failure to secure indictments to the hundreds of adverse rulings it has generated since the beginning of the year — matters. Its statement to Reuters gives away the game: the administration believes (and not unreasonably!) that it has the Supreme Court in its pocket:

“This Department of Justice is winning in court on behalf of the Trump Administration and the American People with 24 successful rulings at the Supreme Court emergency docket so far and multiple prominent indictments of transnational terrorists, violent criminals, and even politicians who have allegedly engaged in corruption.”

That the Supreme Court has decided to handle most of its stuff completely off the record with its reliance on its shadow docket, it is aiding and abetting the administration’s autocracy speed run. But the DOJ can’t pretend it’s “winning.” To get “24 successful rulings” (which overstates things a bit), it first had to lose far more cases at lower levels just to get the MAGA majority of the Supreme Court to reject (or ignore) rulings against the DOJ and the administration’s routinely unlawful behavior.

We can hope that sooner or later the administration’s complete disregard for the rule of law and the US Constitution will catch up to it. But hope is only going to get us so far if the nation’s top court keeps ignoring cases that might generate precedent that works against the bigoted efforts of the administration. Maybe it will finally reach a tipping point and return the nation back to the stuff that actually made it great. Until it does, we can at least take solace in the fact that the rest of the federal court system isn’t just rolling over for Trump. It’s generating precedent almost daily.

More importantly, most federal judges no longer consider Trump’s DOJ to be a credible party in criminal cases or civil litigation. That means the government’s omnipresent threat (“your word against ours”) to people it’s trying to punish becomes less useful with each passing day. The lower courts know this government can’t be trusted. And as all of this continues, the Trump administration gives the courts more reasons to treat it as the most unreliable of narrators.

Filed Under: doj, donald trump, federal prosecutors, james comey, kash patel, lindsey halligan, mass deportations, pam bondi, rule of law, trump administration, vindictive prosecution