“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” Donald Trump announced last Tuesday night at his golf club after his indictment. As for the two special counsels currently investigating Biden’s retention of documents and his son’s finances, he dismissed both of them, Trump appointees, as not “real,” suggesting he would put more partisan prosecutors in place, were he to be elected president.
This from a man who is attacking Biden and the Democrats for weaponizing the Justice Department?
Trying to have it both ways, it certainly appears.
In fact, what was most noticeable last week in Trump’s indictment is what you didn’t see or hear. You didn’t see or hear anything from Merrick Garland, the attorney general, or Joe Biden, the president. This was Jack Smith’s show, as it should have been. The special counsel very clearly operated independently, conducted his own investigation, followed his own leads, presented his case to a grand jury sitting in Florida and intends to follow through with his prosecution. In doing so, he is following through with a tradition that dates back at least to Watergate of Justice Department independence from the White House on matters of high-level prosecutorial discretion, particularly when it comes to special counsels. Main justice does not interfere. And the White House certainly doesn’t interfere. The president doesn’t tell them what to do, nor does he decide which special counsel is “real” or not.
So you didn’t see Merrick Garland at any of the press conferences, and you didn’t hear the president trying to score political points.
Can you imagine if the roles were reversed?
Actually, you don’t have to imagine anything, because last Tuesday night, Donald Trump told you all you needed to know. In a second Trump administration, the norm of Justice Department independence, which has governed since Watergate, would be shredded.
The very same Republican conservatives who have attacked Democrats for supposedly “weaponizing” the Justice Department against Trump believe that the Department deserves no special status as an independent agency in the federal bureaucracy, that it is just another branch of the executive office and should be treated, and presumably weaponized, as such. Trump wants to use it to destroy the deep state, or so he said last Tuesday.
It is obviously the height of hypocrisy: to attack the Democrats for weaponizing the Justice Department and then to pledge to outdo them in the process. But consistency has never stopped these ideologues.
What is so troubling about these moves against the Justice Department is that they would shred an institution whose independence has been hard-won after difficult battles that proved it was necessary for the rule of law. If no man or woman is above the law, then it only makes sense that the Justice Department must have some independence from the executive branch, and that its appointment of special counsels and their conduct must be free from the interference of the executive branch.
Trump, in his remarks, made clear that he had only contempt for that tradition.
On the one hand, without evidence, he was accusing the special counsel Jack Smith of playing politics in his carefully worded 49-page indictment, at the same time as he promised to outdo him at it if ever given the opportunity to truly politicize the Justice Department and turn it against the Biden family, jettisoning any tradition of prosecutorial independence in the process. It is nothing short of a terrifying prospect that would turn back the clock on the last half-century of reform. And only a man with the hubris and arrogance of Trump would use the occasion of his indictment to announce such a policy proposal.
