Madam President, I am here for the 35th time to call attention to the rightwing scheme to capture our courts and justice system, now out to target and persecute Trump political enemies and do Trump political favors.
We have heard a lot about weaponization of the justice system from Trump and his allies. That is for two reasons. One, it is a handy narrative for Trump and MAGA cronies to paint him as a victim, not a convicted criminal who only dodged proper sentencing and further criminal charges because of sweeping Presidential immunity granted by a Supreme Court stacked with rightwing Justices he appointed.
Two, it is a tactic. For would be autocrats, accusations signal intentions. You accuse the other side of doing what you are plotting so that when you are caught doing it, you have set it up to look like offsetting penalties. Accusations signal intentions, and sure enough, now there is real weaponization of the justice system unfolding before our eyes.
I am going to take a minute and drill down into one episode. It begins with a climate fund, duly created and appropriated by Congress, maintained after the funds were disbursed at a private bank, and overseen by EPA. But MAGA’s dear leader claims, falsely, that climate change is a hoax. That is his catchphrase for the truest things he doesn’t like. So this climate fund became a MAGA target.
There is a problem, however: The Constitution limits the President’s veto power over congressional spending, both with a time limit and the right of Congress to override, and the time limit to veto these funds had been over for years.
The funds were properly appropriated back in August 2022 when President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act. The grants were awarded in April 2024, giving recipients legal rights to the funds. And then they were distributed to the bank as fiscal agent for the recipients, all in regular order.
Enter Trump’s corrupt Justice Department through two colossal Trump suck-ups: the Acting Deputy Attorney General, Emil Bove, and Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Martin is an activist MAGA type, a lawyer for January 6 attackers, who had criticized this fund even before he was appointed interim. Bove and Martin cooked up asking Martin’s U.S. Attorney’s Office to freeze the climate fund by opening a criminal investigation so they could assert that the ongoing investigation justified the freeze.
Their problem: They couldn’t point to a crime. Oops. The career criminal division chief, an experienced veteran prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, pointed out that launching a criminal investigation without evidence of a crime—what prosecutors call predication—is a violation of prosecutorial ethics and Department of Justice policy. That warning from the career prosecutors to MAGA Martin is red flag one.
But the MAGA U.S. attorney didn’t listen to that warning from his career staff. Instead, he demanded that the career criminal chief resign. He forced her out. Well, that is another big red flag—red flag two.
With the criminal division chief out of the way, Martin still couldn’t find one staff prosecutor in his office to pursue the matter. Now, you remember in the Nixon Saturday Night Massacre, they had to fire all the way down to Robert Bork, who became notorious for ultimately doing the dirty deed for Nixon, but here, no Bork. No prosecutor would sign from this big Federal prosecution office. That is red flag three.
Martin then proceeded in his own name alone. That is red flag four. As a former U.S. attorney, I can assure you there is almost always a career attorney’s signature on every pleading filed. And bear in mind that Martin is not some rare legal whiz. He had never spent a single day as a Federal prosecutor before he got this gig, and here he was fumbling around by his lone MAGA self.
So—no surprise—when Martin presented his request to the Federal magistrate judge, the judge denied the petition. That is red flag five, and it is a massive, flapping red flag to anyone who has served in a U.S. Attorney’s Office. Federal prosecutors never want this to happen, so they triple-check and backstop every application to ensure that they are ironclad. In my U.S. Attorney’s Office, a Federal judge shooting down one of our warrant applications would have set off internal reviews. That should be what is known in the medical field as a never event. It is a shocker, particularly with the U.S. attorney presenting the petition in person.
Even that series of disasters didn’t stop this scheme. Somebody started shopping the case to other U.S. Attorney’s Offices, hoping that some other office would try again in a different district. Well, shopping a case around U.S. attorney’s offices, after the matter has been shot down in court, that is red flag six. It seems that no other U.S. attorney’s office has been willing to go before any court with this hot mess, but somehow, a Federal prosecutor down in Florida—Florida—ordered Washington-based FBI agents to start questioning EPA employees about the grant program.
Well, we are going to find out more about that. But meanwhile, in a related case, a different Federal judge blew up the EPA Administrator’s administrative effort under Trump’s Executive orders to freeze these funds, and they defended the freeze with the same pretext that there was fraud that needed to be prevented. Well, the judge asked: Tell me about the fraud. Show me some evidence. There was none.
The judge noted in her decision that, for all the big talk, the administration could produce—her words—‘‘no evidence to support that claim.’’ So a second Federal judge shoots down the scheme. We are up to red flag seven.
Compounding this prosecutive fiasco, both Martin and EPA Administrator Zeldin unleashed a barrage of public comments, flooding the information zone with public accusations of fraud, the same accusations of fraud that the career U.S. attorney staff rejected and the magistrate judge determined to be unfounded and the judge said DOJ and EPA had offered no evidence to support. Well, that is a problem.
Unfounded accusations of fraud are what lawyers call ‘‘defamatory per se.’’ And derogatory public comments about the subject of an investigation is trouble under multiple Department of Justice policies.
The administration officials’ public comments were out of bounds. I have been a U.S. attorney. You don’t get to do that. Discovery in civil litigation will likely ultimately reveal the depths of the misconduct, the potentially unlawful motive, and their potential liability for their misconduct.
We are not at the end of this yet, but what we see is real weaponization—not MAGA phony claims of weaponization, part of a political propaganda campaign to excuse the criminality of the dear leader.
Here, all these red flags of actual weaponization are flying: internal warnings that the case had no merit, removing officials for disagreement, proceeding without a career attorney, getting shot down by a magistrate judge, case shopping after the disaster, hunting for FBI agents to harass career civil servants for managing properly congressionally appropriated funding, making derogatory public comments— and all without evidence.
Compare that to the Federal criminal cases against Trump. There is no record of internal warnings being ignored that the cases had no merit. There is no removing of officials for disagreeing with the case. No pleading was ever filed without a career attorney signing, just signed by a politico. No application was ever shot down by a judge. Indeed, the Mar-a-Lago warrants were judicially approved. Despite very aggressive lawyering for Trump, no finding of a prosecutor’s violation of Department policy was turned up; no matter had to be case shopped to other districts after falling apart in one district; no harassment by FBI agents with no court pleading to back them up; and no derogatory public comments ever made outside the pleadings the government filed.
Red flag count in the Trump cases: zero. Red flag count in this sorry episode: seven. If Trump’s corrupt DOJ will go through all of this just to grab properly appropriated climate funds, imagine what they are capable of with really bad stuff. We are in store for lots more actual weaponization in the coming months and years under this corrupt administration.
So easy for me to say that this will be continued.
