By Andrew C. McCarthy
Saturday, February 15, 2025
The Adams case is not the only one that will bring the
foolishness of this directive into sharp relief.
In recording our podcast last week, I opined to Rich Lowry that Pam
Bondi’s first day on the job as attorney general was Trump II in small compass:
a flurry of directives that critics will have a tough time keeping up with, and
that combine a lot of good with some bad ideas that could undermine the
administration’s capacity to accomplish the good.
We are already seeing this.
This is the first in a series of posts that will address
the main bad idea arising from Bondi’s first-day directives: the Justice
Department’s new “Weaponization Working Group” (which itself follows on
President Trump’s executive order on “Ending Weaponization of the Federal Government”). The
“Weaponization” memo is a patently partisan and ethically careless political
document masquerading as legal guidance. As such, it lends itself to
exploitation by Democrats implicated in Trump DOJ enforcement actions, as well
as by the 570 judges appointed by Presidents Obama and Biden to the federal
courts over twelve of the past 16 years (about two-thirds of the total of
non-senior federal judicial seats in the United States).
And there is already abundant reason to conclude that the
last thing the Trump administration intends to do is remove politics from law
enforcement decisions.
Rather than simply announce an urgently needed policy to
investigate and prosecute civil rights violations (which necessarily include
“lawfare,” the punitive, selective deployment of law enforcement powers against
political adversaries), Bondi targets a number of Trump prosecutorial nemeses
by name. The AG’s directive is an obvious attempt to cement a revisionist
history of the Trump prosecutions as nothing more than the partisan harassment
of an innocent man — with this revisionism to be authored by newly minted Trump
prosecutors who, as defense lawyers, represented Trump and other defendants
implicated in the “weaponization” cases.
Perhaps worst of all, in theatrically decrying the
subversion of good-faith law enforcement by partisan political calculations,
and in standing up a “Weaponization Working Group” supposedly toward that end,
it turns out that Bondi was just kidding.
This week, the Trump Justice Department induced the
resignations of several top prosecutors — including Danielle Sassoon, the very
solid Trump-appointed interim U.S. attorney in Manhattan — by ordering them to dismiss the political corruption prosecution against Eric Adams.
The point-man on this debacle was Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney
general. He’s a recent Trump personal defense lawyer and “Weaponization Working
Group” member, and he said he consulted with the new attorney general in
issuing his orders. Manifestly, he also spent plenty of time consulting with
Adams’s defense lawyers.
Bove’s order to drop the case was explicitly political. He
did not question the strength of the evidence or the integrity of the
prosecutors on the case. Rather, the dismissal is a political favor for Adams
in exchange for the mayor’s using his powerful political position to assist the
Trump administration’s immigration-enforcement efforts — as U.S. Attorney Sassoon explained in eye-popping detail in her
letter to AG Bondi. Since the latter end of this quid pro quo is something
that New York officials must do anyway (there can be various legal and
financial penalties if the city and state obstruct the feds), Bove pathetically
attempted to paint the Adams prosecution as “politically motivated” (even as he
absolved the prosecutors of any political motivations) because it was brought
under a Biden-appointed U.S. attorney, Damian Williams. But it’s sheer nonsense
— politicized nonsense.
The Adams investigation, which has been overseen by four
different Manhattan U.S. attorneys, started under one of Williams’s
predecessors. Williams had minimal involvement in it. The corruption
allegations, which go back to Adams’s tenure as Brooklyn borough president,
long predated Adams’s comparatively meek criticisms of Biden’s non-enforcement
policies on immigration. (Adams, a chameleon whose latest incarnation, prior to
ingratiating Trump, was as a staunchly pro-Biden hack, initially blamed Republicans
for the city’s being overrun by illegal aliens.) So clear was it that the Adams
case was not politically motivated that his lawyers never even bothered to file
a motion to dismiss the indictment based on selective prosecution; such a claim
would have been frivolous.
Moreover, Biden and Williams are gone. U.S. Attorney
Sassoon, along with the case prosecutors and Justice Department Public
Integrity Section officials (many of whom have also resigned over the
dismissal), pursued the case with no political ax to grind. Because the
evidence is strong, they believe that Adams is guilty, and that the nonpartisan
administration of justice — the Justice Department’s core function — therefore
required proceeding in a matter that was scheduled, at Adams’s request,
for trial in April (in advance of the mayoral primary and general elections, on
June 24 and November 4, respectively).
If the president wants a political outcome unrelated
to the legal merits of the case — which is what Bove pushed for, after
consultations between the White House and Adams’s lawyers that quite
intentionally cut out the prosecutors — then he can pardon Adams. That would be
transparently political, and the president could take the heat (or perhaps reap
the rewards) for it, rather than trying to disguise a political favor as a
decision driven by law enforcement considerations. Bondi and Bove are apt to
learn this the hard way: Federal rules require leave of the court to dismiss
the indictment. The Biden-appointed judge on the case, Dale Ho, will be even
less inclined than the prosecutors to lend the prestige of his office to a
farce — expect him to make the litigation over whether he should grant leave to
dismiss the indictment as publicly painful as possible for DOJ.
In the Adams corruption case, the prosecution was
emblematic of nonpolitical law enforcement; it is the dropping of the case that
is, to borrow Bove’s ironic phrase, “politically motivated” — a mockery of
aspirations about “Restoring the Integrity and Credibility of the Department of
Justice,” the title of AG Bondi’s weaponization directive.
The Adams case is not the only one that will bring the
foolishness of this directive into sharp relief.
One of the new attorney general’s top initiatives is to
put the full weight of the Justice Department’s enforcement authorities behind
President Trump’s priority to restore border security and reassert federal
immigration law. As we’ve just seen, that’s the pretext for dropping the Adams
case. On Wednesday, Bondi filed a lawsuit against the state of New York for
obstructing federal immigration enforcement (mirroring action the AG had
already taken against the state of Illinois).
On the merits, the DOJ states a strong claim. Under
then-Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2019, the state’s Democratic-dominated
legislature enacted the so-called Green Light Law (the Driver’s License Access
and Privacy Act), which enables illegal aliens to obtain driver’s licenses. Not
only does it generally bar the state from sharing Motor Vehicle Department data
about licensees with federal law enforcement agents; the state affirmatively
alerts illegal aliens if the feds make inquiries about them, obstructing
immigration-law enforcement.
Over the last century, the courts have deemed immigration
enforcement a federal responsibility. The sovereign states are thus expected to
carry out federal immigration law. They are not required to support the
government’s federal immigration policies (which, to be sure, are often
unaligned with statutory immigration law), but they may not impede federal
law enforcement. Bondi makes a good case that the Empire State is doing
precisely that. A significant part of DOJ’s evidence entails characteristically
foolish pronouncements by the state’s progressive Democratic attorney general,
Letitia James, who has bragged about the state’s shielding of “undocumented
migrants” from potential arrest and deportation.
But the government’s case could be undermined by the
Bondi weaponization memo’s singling out of James for her hounding of President
Trump.
Put aside that it is not the Justice Department’s job to
generate partisan messaging or write political history. Bondi’s directive will
give James, New York State, and the many Democratic-appointed judges who are
likely to hear the immigration case, and others like it, ammunition to claim
that the Trump DOJ is using the Justice Department to pursue retribution
against Democrats who tried to ruin him.
You say Democrats would have made such contentions
anyway? Sure . . . but why help them? And why create legal obstacles to
the accomplishment of vital national security and law enforcement objectives?
It can only be because these experienced Justice Department lawyers, who
presumably know better, are putting on the show they know President Trump
expects them to perform.
That might titillate the base, at least in the short
term. It is going to bite the Trump Justice Department, though, in the
courtrooms where many questions of consequence for the nation will be decided —
decisions that could determine the fate of the president’s policy agenda.
In this series, I’ll address the problems presented by
the Weaponization Working Group and the way AG Bondi’s directive outlines its
mission. I’ll also discuss how the Justice Department could easily and properly
combat weaponization without the self-defeating appearance of politicizing law
enforcement — and would that it were just an appearance.
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