Not even a story
By 
President Trump’s corrupt retribution against the Justice Department is now fully underway, with a series of moves over the past 24 hours that in any other era would be the defining political and legal story of the age. Today, it didn’t even make the front page of the New York Times.
- Trump’s acting attorney general sacked the career prosecutors who worked on the Trump prosecutions. Among those let go were Molly Gaston, J.P. Cooney, Anne McNamara, and Mary Dohrmann, NBC News reported.
- Trump’s acting U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., a political lackey from Missouri, launched an investigation of the prosecutors who brought the criminal charges against hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters.
- DOJ’s most senior career official was sidelined by being moved to a department backwater. Separately, the DOJ official who oversaw the prosecution of public corruption, who had previously been reassigned to the same backwater, resigned rather than continue in a reduced role.
The corrupt wholesale cashiering of career prosecutors who worked on the Mar-a-Lago and Jan. 6 cases against Trump was the most egregious of the corrupt acts, in defiant violation of the civil service rules and the rule of law. But the most absurd development was acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin’s purported investigation into why DOJ had pursued obstruction charges against Jan. 6 rioters. While the Roberts Court ultimately cut prosecutors legs out from under them, the obstruction charge was ratified by multiple federal trial judges and the DC Circuit before the Supreme Court held otherwise.
If you were taking a measured approach to see how things played out once Trump took office, the waiting is over. It’s a five-alarm fire at the Justice Department. Ousting independent career prosecutors is just Step 1, a prelude to Step 2, which is using the Justice Department to protect Trump and his administration from accountability for their wrongdoing. Step 3 turns DOJ into a weapon against anyone who Trump perceives as less than fully loyal and obedient.
The retribution is being exacted precisely as promised. As Joyce Vance put it: “The real witch hunt is here.”
When I blogged about the first bullet point yesterday, I assumed that the firings had at least the barest fig leaf of arguable legality, in the form of the prosecutors’ jobs having been reclassified as policy positions, per Project 2025’s formal plan to purge the federal government of anyone other than Trump loyalists.
But this turns out to have been a mistaken assumption. These firings are completely illegal on their face. The rationale that the acting AG gave for the firings was literally “these people took part in the attempted prosecution of Donald Trump.”
This would be, without exaggeration, the biggest scandal in all but maybe three previous presidential administrations, not counting Trump’s first. And, as Kurtz notes, it’s basically not even a story!
Donald Trump again publicly mused about serving further presidential terms Monday, asking Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson whether he was “allowed to”—just a few days after another House Republican introduced legislation to enable just that.
“I’ve raised a lot of money for the next race that I assume I can’t use for myself, but I’m not 100 percent sure,” Trump told House Republicans in Doral, Florida. “I think I’m not allowed to run again.”
Turning to Johnson, a former constitutional lawyer, Trump asked, “Am I allowed to run again? Mike, I better not get you involved in that argument.”
Just two days prior in Las Vegas, Trump spoke about serving “three times or four times.”
I notice NBC’s headline for this same story is “Trump Jokes About Running For a Third Term In Speech to House Republicans.”
These people are less educable than the Bourbons.