Trump Will Jail His Enemies If He Has To Burn Down The DOJ To Do IT

And he might.

Image via White House Flickr

The Justice Department was the scene of an ecstatic orgy of corruption this weekend. Again.

On Saturday, Erik Siebert, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA), resigned his office. Trump had been grumbling for weeks about “his” US Attorneys refusing to indict his political enemies. And that’s even after Bill Pulte, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, went spelunking through decades of mortgage records looking for any discrepancy that might be spun up into a federal case against people who were mean to Trump. Unfair!

Seibert’s sin was refusing to charge New York Attorney General Letitia James with mortgage fraud with respect to the 2023 purchase of a property in Virginia. Incident to the sale, James executed a power of attorney in favor of her niece, and the document inaccurately described the house a primary residence. ABC reports that the power of attorney was prepared by title attorneys (and not James) from an uncorrected template, and that it was never even seen by the mortgage company. The rest of the deed and mortgage documents accurately reflected that the home would not be a primary residence.

Nevertheless Pulte pumped out dozens of social media posts and said on Fox News, "I believe this is riddled with mortgage fraud, and frankly, I think that's why she knew so much about the law in terms of how to go after President Trump."

But Pulte is not a lawyer, and Erik Siebert is. In fact, Siebert spent 15 years at the Department of Justice in the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) and was elevated to serve as interim US Attorney when his predecessor Jessica Aber resigned in January. Under 28 USC § 546, an interim appointment expires after 120 days, after which the district’s judges may appoint a successor who can serve indefinitely until a new US Attorney is named. And so, when his 120-day term expired, Siebert was unanimously appointed by the EDVA judges to remain in office. At the urging of Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin and with the support of Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, the president then nominated Siebert for a full term in May.

But on Friday, Trump complained to reporters in the Oval Office that he’d been duped into naming a liberal plant who’d been “blue slipped through by two Democrat senators in Virginia.”

“When I learned that they voted for him, I said, I don’t really want him,” he groused, suggesting that Democratic support is actually disqualifying for any nominee, despite the fact that Siebert had been voted out of the Republican-dominated Judiciary Committee a mere eight days earlier.

Seeing the writing on the wall, Siebert stepped down on Friday, after which Attorney General Pam Bondi tapped Maggie Cleary as his interim replacement. Cleary, who is active in Virginia Republican politics, only recently returned to the Justice Department. It’s unclear if she intends to try to persuade a grand jury to indict the New York AG.

But Siebert’s resignation did not mollify the president, who whined in a late-night social media post that “He didn’t quit, I fired him!”

Then he turned his firehose of rage on Bondi herself, howling about “statements” lamenting the DOJ’s failure to charge James when “there is a GREAT CASE, and many lawyers, and legal pundits, say so.”

The identity of the lawyers lauding the “GREAT CASE” against James is left as an exercise for the reader. Ditto for the origin of the “30 statements” bemoaning the DOJ’s dereliction. Truth Social? The president’s dental fillings? But Lindsey Halligan should be a familiar name to followers of Trump’s past crimes.

In 2022, after the FBI “raided” Mar-a-Lago, Trump went looking for attorneys willing to sign onto a legal challenge to the judicially-authorized search warrant. He had lawyers willing to say a lot of crazy shit, of course, but none of them were barred in the Southern District of Florida. Enter Halligan, an insurance defense lawyer in Fort Lauderdale whose courtroom experience consisted of serving as second chair in a two-day trial in a case brought by Miami homeowners with damaged roofs. But Halligan had made several appearances on Steve Bannon’s podcast praising Trump, and that (along with her Florida bar card) was enough.

Halligan gamely toddled along behind James Trusty and Evan Corcoran, Trump’s “real” defense lawyers, until the Eleventh Circuit smacked down Judge Aileen Cannon’s first attempt to bone the stolen documents case. And even though Halligan’s services weren’t needed after Trump’s PAC paid former Florida Solicitor Chris Kise $3 million to leave Biglaw and represent Trump, she never really left his orbit.

Halligan followed Trump to DC, where she is currently the “Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Associate Staff Secretary.” On March 5, Trump tasked her with de-woke-ifying the Smithsonian pursuant to an executive order in which he claimed the institution “has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.” Halligan, whose undergraduate degree is in politics, told the Washington Post that her visits to the museum left her dismayed with the lack of focus on the ways “America is so special.”

So it is perhaps unsurprising that Halligan, who is not barred in the Commonwealth of Virginia and who boasts zero prosecutorial experience, would feel confident in her ability to serve as the state’s top prosecutor. For his part, the president is certain that Halligan can “get things moving.”

Confusingly, Trump claims to have both “nominated” Halligan and “appointed” her as US Attorney for EDVA, making it unclear if he intends to “get things moving” imminently by installing her in office now.

Pushing out Cleary in favor of Halligan might well “get things moving” faster, particularly with Senate nominations taking months. But if Trump installs Halligan immediately via interim appointment, he risks having her time out the way Siebert did — and it’s a safe bet that the judges in EDVA aren’t going to bless her continued tenure the way they did with a guy who was actually competent.

There’s currently pandemonium in New Jersey after Trump installed Alina Habba, another of his personal lawyers, as US Attorney and tried to keep her on the job after 120 days without Senate confirmation. And whoever occupies the office may struggle to secure an indictment against James on the basis of this flimsy evidence. Next door in DC, US Attorney Jeanine Pirro keeps getting “no-billed” as grand jurors refuse to rubber-stamp the most blatantly political of this administration’s prosecutions.

But whatever the outcome, pushing out Siebert because he refused to charge Trump’s enemies is yet another massive attack on the rule of law. Trump’s mumbling about the “UNUSUALLY STRONG SUPPORT of the two absolutely terrible, sleazebag Democrat Senators” fools no one, particularly when it’s explicitly tied to the two impeachments and five indictments “OVER NOTHING.”

This is payback, and no one is really pretending otherwise.