President Trump, upon departing the White House at the end of his first term, suggested he was already planning his political comeback. He told a gaggle of reporters, “We’ll see each other again.” Yet the event that truly launched Trump’s historic return to the Oval Office was the FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago residence in August of 2022. By then, most Americans knew the Biden administration was failing, but few realized the regime had weaponized the Department of Justice to persecute its political enemies and their supporters. This alarmed a lot of voters and likely contributed to Trump’s victory. His administration has now launched a long overdue delousing of the DOJ.
[V]ery few voters will be moved by the travails of FBI goons who raided his home and violated his wife’s privacy by rummaging through her underwear.
Late last Friday, for example, Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered the dismissal of about two dozen Department of Justice prosecutors who perpetrated the interminable J6 investigations, which lasted four years and resulted in the arrests of more than 1,500 Americans — including hundreds who never so much as set foot inside the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021. Bove also invited eight senior FBI executives to retire or be fired by Monday. These actions came just a few days after Acting Attorney General James McHenry ordered the terminations of more than a dozen DOJ officials involved in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of President Trump. Predictably, these dismissals produced peformative protests from Democrats such as Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.).
We write to you with alarm and profound concern about reports of the administration engaging in the widespread summary firing and involuntary reassignment of excellent career prosecutors and federal agents throughout the Department of Justice (DOJ). This onslaught against effective DOJ civil servants began within hours of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, in complete contradiction of the president’s repeated pledges to maintain a merit-based system for government employment. These American public servants working strenuously to defend the rule of law have been removed from their positions without any evaluation.
Raskin hilariously refers to the terminated and reassigned individuals as “non-partisan professionals.” He has conveniently forgotten that it was just such “career prosecutors and federal agents” who did their level best to sabotage President Trump’s first term by launching numerous illegal investigations of the President himself as well as several members of his administration. Moreover, as Jack Smith’s abortive prosecution demonstrated all too clearly, this skullduggery continued for years after Trump had left office in January of 2021. This is, of course, why Acting Attorney General McHenry made it abundantly clear that he simply “does not trust these officials to assist in faithfully implementing the President’s agenda.”
The rapid pace of the Trump administration’s DOJ cleanup is a clear sign that the President and his advisors well remember the lessons they learned the hard way during his first term. When Trump took office in 2017, he knew the swamp had to be drained but didn’t quite grasp how poisonous its denizens really were. The aggressive launch of Trump’s second term indicates that both he and his team have long since been cured of such illusions. Moreover, it’s obvious that the personnel changes implemented at DOJ are meant to dispel the pervasive myth that this agency somehow exists independently from the Chief Executive. Even left-leaning expert, former federal prosecutor Elie Honig, debunks that claim in New York Magazine:
The Justice Department does not exist in a vacuum or on its own floaty cloud of righteousness outside of the rough business of government and politics. It’s part of our executive branch, as established in Article II of the Constitution, and the American public elected Trump to lead that branch. The preferences and practices of unelected, politically unaccountable career DOJ employees (like I once was) don’t take precedence, even if they’re rooted in good government principles … As much as it can feel cathartic to declare that Trump is “undermining our democracy” with his handling of the Justice Department, that’s not quite right.
Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution is not one of those ambiguous passages that sometimes appears in the nation’s founding document. No one literate in English can mistake its meaning: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Trump and his appointees have the power to hire and fire federal employees. Nonetheless, Democrat Senators like Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) bray, “Unelected Trump lackeys are carrying out widespread political retribution against our nation’s career law enforcement officials.” This is nonsense, of course, but there is little doubt that there will be legal challenges to the firings. On the other hand, it’s pretty unlikely that this is costing the President very much sleep.
According to a CBS News report, “A majority of Americans [60 percent] are optimistic about the next four years with Donald Trump.” It seems unlikely that disgruntled DOJ prosecutors and FBI officials are going to have much effect on this optimism. Indeed, despite 24/7 media coverage of his long twilight struggle with federal and state prosecutors, the voters returned him to the White House by a decisive margin. Thus, as long as Trump delivers on the economy and immigration, very few voters will be moved by the travails of FBI goons who raided his home and violated his wife’s privacy by rummaging through her underwear.
READ MORE from David Catron:
