Angry Trump Humiliated as Effort to Prosecute Dems Backfires Again
In a hard-hitting assessment of the DOJ’s targeting of Trump’s enemies, Politico columnist Ankush Khardori notes that they’ve produced a string of embarrassing pratfalls. Those include the stalling-out efforts aimed at James, Comey, and Schiff, and even a baseless effort to prosecute Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, essentially for making Trump angry, which has backfired, sparking widespread criticism. The failed prosecution of Democratic lawmakers, Khardori writes, is Pirro’s “highest-profile flop to date.”
Yet the stakes here remain extraordinarily high. Anyone targeted in this way must sink enormous time and money into self-defense. This threatens to stifle dissent among lawmakers, institutions and prominent individual critics who might muzzle themselves rather than face investigation and potential prosecution. Indeed, it probably already has.
It’s easy to get seduced by the Keystone Kops vibe to all this. But these Keystone Kops continue to wield the enormous power of the federal criminal justice bureaucracy, and they have tethered it to the chaotic whims of a Mad King who thinks that being a Democrat who criticizes him is a prosecutable crime. That they’ve failed so far is heartening. But all indications are that Trump will continue demanding these prosecutions until one of them succeeds—or, possibly, until many more than one does.
