Early last week, Donald Trump fired one of his own federal prosecutors: Byung J. “BJay” Pak, a Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney in Georgia, was abruptly ousted because Trump expected Pak to chase his baseless voter-fraud conspiracy theories. When the prosecutor failed to satisfy the White House’s political agenda, he had to go.
Under normal circumstances, this would be a rather dramatic presidential scandal, with Trump once again politicizing federal law enforcement and retaliating against a prosecutor for failing to play along with Trump’s anti-election schemes.
But with much of the political world’s focus elsewhere, Pak parted ways with Team Trump, replaced by a Trump-approved successor, Bobby Christine. The trouble for the White House is, Christine appears likely to disappoint, too. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported yesterday that the new U.S. attorney for northern Georgia can’t find evidence of election fraud, either. In fact, on his first day, he reviewed two possible fraud cases, but dismissed them as meritless.
“I would love to stand out on the street corner and scream this, and I can’t,” said Bobby Christine, according to an audio recording of the call obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “But I can tell you I closed the two most — I don’t know, I guess you’d call them high profile or the two most pressing election issues this office has,” he said. “I said I believe, as many of the people around the table believed, there’s just nothing to them.”
As it turns out, the federal prosecutor expected to find the opposite.
“Quite frankly, just watching television you would assume that you got election cases stacked from the floor to the ceiling,” Christine said. “I am so happy to find out that’s not the case, but I didn’t know coming in.” The article added:
…Christine met with the FBI, GBI and the Department of Homeland Security on his first day in Atlanta to get briefed on election cases, he said. So far, Christine said the election cases were overblown, and cited the two cases he closed last Wednesday. “In my opinion, there is no there, there,” he said. In other words, Trump fired Pak because Trump believed the Republican federal prosecutor was failing to take seriously evidence of election fraud. Trump then tapped Bobby Christine for the job, only to discover that Christine also can’t find evidence of election fraud. Let’s not forget the larger context: Trump and his followers have acted with certainty that fraud ran rampant in Georgia. It’s partly why Trump has lashed out wildly at the state’s Republican governor, Republican lieutenant governor, and Republican secretary of state, each of whom have had the audacity to tell the truth about their own state’s election results. And now, two of Trump’s own handpicked federal prosecutors in Georgia have come to the same conclusion. Reality has a tendency to be stubborn.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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