Donald Trump publicly pressuring Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute his political enemies is a dramatic, impeachment-level scandal without precedent in the American tradition. But there’s a parallel controversy that’s directly related to the fiasco, which is every bit as important.
As NBC News reported last week, the White House was leaning heavily on Erik Siebert, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, for brazenly corrupt reasons: Team Trump wanted him to go after New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey, not because they’d done anything wrong, but because the president saw them as political foes.
This was, in and of itself, indefensible. It’s an obvious and outrageous abuse for a White House to push federal prosecutors to bring baseless charges at the president’s direction as part of a retaliatory scheme.
But Trump didn’t stop there. When Siebert’s office made clear that there simply wasn’t enough evidence to justify such indictments, Trump forced the prosecutor — whom the president had nominated just four months earlier — out of his job, taking the scandal to a new level.
Siebert, a former police officer who’d worked his way up through the ranks at the office over the past 15 years, enjoyed support from Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, as well as Virginia’s two Democratic U.S. senators.
The president didn’t care. “I want him out,” Trump declared on Friday afternoon, prompting Siebert to resign. Trump soon after wrote online, “He didn’t quit, I fired him!”
It was part of a flurry of outbursts in which the president characterized Siebert’s bipartisan support as a bad thing, adding that he considered the respected prosecutor “a Woke RINO, who was never going to do his job,” despite the fact he was a Trump nominee.
As MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian explained, “[T]he United States is confronting something we have never seen before: A president essentially ordering his DoJ to charge someone with a crime, regardless of whether the people whose job it is to evaluate the case think there is insufficient evidence.”
Or put another way, some presidents get rid of officials for being corrupt; this president forced out Siebert for not being corrupt.
After making a bad situation vastly worse, Trump managed to escalate things still further with his nominee to succeed the U.S. attorney whom he unjustly ousted. NBC News reported: Alongside the extraordinary demand to prosecute his adversaries, the president also named his former defense attorney, now a senior White House aide, to replace the head of a key prosecutor’s office he forced out a day earlier. The lawyer’s name is Lindsey Halligan, who represented Trump in his classified documents scandal. She would take over a larger prosecutorial office despite never having worked as a prosecutor. (Her background is in insurance law.) If her name sounds familiar, it’s not your imagination: The president had recently tapped Halligan to lead the administration’s campaign against the Smithsonian Institution. On Saturday, in a missive directed at the attorney general, Trump referenced his desperation to see some of his enemies prosecuted, before reminding Bondi that Halligan “likes you a lot.” Soon after, he added that he intended to nominate Halligan because she will “provide desperately needed JUSTICE FOR ALL!” (In context, he apparently meant justice for him.) This is a Senate-confirmed position, which means Senate Republicans will soon face yet another test — which they are very likely to fail. Watch this space.
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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