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The Department of Justice has become a misnomer with Bondi at the
helm
One
year in, the depths to which DOJ has sunk was laid bare in an order on Lindsey
Halligan's claims in Virginia and in subpoenas issued against officials in
Minnesota.
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The
destruction done to the Department of Justice in the past year is hard to
overstate.
One
year into the second Trump administration, in two completely separate — and yet
related — matters, the depths to which the department has sunk was laid bare.
The
“charade” of Lindsey Halligan’s claimed appointment as the “United States
Attorney” in the Eastern District of Virginia “must come to an end,“ U.S.
District Judge David Novak — a Trump appointee from his first term in office
— ruled on Tuesday.
“At
the end of the day, Ms. Halligan’s [argument is] that she is free to act in an
unlawful capacity, because she disagrees that she does so unlawfully,” Novak
wrote. “But that’s not how our legal system works.”
Halligan
— the manifestly unqualified person who Trump decided he wanted installed as
the federal prosecutor in Northern Virginia to go after his perceived enemies —
has been an extreme embarrassment for the rule of law and would be
out of any job in the Justice Department if the Justice Department in the Trump
administration valued the rule of law.
But,
we live in a world where Pam Bondi is the attorney general of the United
States.
From
day one of her time in office, Bondi made it clear that any independence of
the Justice Department from the White House was gone. In a memo, she declared
that “the interests of the United States … and the overall policy of the United
States … are set by the Nation's Chief Executive,“ and that a lawyer who
refuses to sign on to briefs that advance “good-faith arguments” backing those
policies “deprives the President of the benefit of his lawyers.“
That
practice and the suggested motivation behind it have been proven out, as the
Trump administration has upended the Civil Rights Division and, as best summed up in The New
York Times in November, “President Trump’s second term has brought a
period of turmoil and controversy unlike any in the history of the Justice
Department.“
The ABA Journal followed up on that:
The Justice Department
has lost thousands of experienced attorneys since the start of the Trump
administration and has backfilled a fraction of the open jobs, with the process
snarled by a lack of qualified candidates, bureaucratic delays and hiring freezes,
according to people familiar with hirings in the department. …
The department’s
struggle to fill vacancies reflects a dramatic shift for a law enforcement agency that has long attracted
high-performing alumni from the nation’s top-ranked law schools and law firms.
In
short, DOJ is no longer DOJ as it has long been known.
All of
which brings us to Novak’s Tuesday ruling.
After
Halligan was purportedly appointed to be the U.S. Attorney and she indicted former FBI director James
Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, challenges to Halligan’s appointment
were brought. To keep the Eastern District of Virginia judges from deciding
whether the prosecutor for the district was properly appointed, Judge Albert
Diaz — the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
— appointed Judge Cameron McGowan
Currie (a senior status federal judge from South Carolina) to consider and
resolve the question of the validity of Halligan’s appointment.
Currie found that Halligan’s
appointment violated the Appointments Clause,
DOJ appealed, and Halligan in other cases
kept signing DOJ filings as the U.S. Attorney. When she did it in a case before
Novak, he ordered DOJ to provide an
explanation.
When
DOJ filed its response, I was honestly shocked, even
for this DOJ. I called it “over the top in
presentation and embarrassingly bad as to argument“ and noted, incredulously,
“The Attorney General of the United States and Deputy Attorney General put
their names on this!“
In
Tuesday’s order, Novak agreed on all fronts. From the start, he made it clear
that DOJ’s filing was inappropriate — stating that it fell “far beneath the
level of advocacy expected from litigants in this Court, particularly the
Department of Justice.”
As to
the substance, Novak noted incredulously that DOJ’s defense of Halligan’s
continued use of the title “fails even to mention Chief Judge Diaz’s Order” —
specifically the scope of Currie’s appointment and the forward-looking language
in it about Currie “determining … future motions concerning the appointment,
qualification, or disqualification” of Halligan.
Ultimately,
Novak found the Halligan is not and cannot hold herself out as the U.S.
Attorney. “Having been found by this Court to be unlawfully appointed, Ms.
Halligan lacks lawful authority to represent herself
as the United States Attorney before this Court,“ he wrote.
In his
conclusion, he declared:
No matter all of her
machinations, Ms. Halligan has no legal basis to represent to this Court that
she holds the position. And any such representation going forward can only be
described as a false statement made in direct defiance of valid court orders.
In short, this charade of Ms. Halligan masquerading as the United States
Attorney for this District in direct defiance of binding court orders must come
to an end.
Ordering
that the title be struck from filings in the case before him, Novak — citing
Halligan’s “inexperience” — refrains from referring her from disciplinary
action “at this time.“ And yet, he added that “should Ms. Halligan persist in
ignoring Judge Currie’s Orders and this Memorandum Order in any matter before
the undersigned, the Court will initiate disciplinary proceedings against Ms.
Halligan and any other signatory to an offending pleading.”
His
conclusion brought one more stark note:
All
because, as Trump wrote exactly four months ago
complaining about Comey and James not having been indicted, “JUSTICE MUST BE
SERVED, NOW!!!“
In a
sign that the lesson of the morning was very much not learned, The New York Times reported on Tuesday afternoon that
the rumored Justice Department subpoenas had, in fact, been served on the
offices of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey — as
well as on the offices of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, St. Paul
Mayor Kaohly Her, and Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty.
This
attack on state officials — including legal officers — is a sign not only that
the Trump administration has not learned the lessons of the pushback for past
transgressions of the rule of law but that, in
its second year, it plans to ramp up its disregard for the rule of law.
In short: The Justice Department’s injustices will continue — until they are stopped.
