Two words have sparked a firestorm in Washington since the election.
“LAWYER UP.” Those words have been viewed millions and millions of times since Tuesday. And they’ve led to a supposed split among Democrats.
On one “side” is Hakeem Jeffries, the likely incoming Speaker, who says the American people don’t want Democrats to “get even” with the Trump administration; they want them to get things done because life is too expensive. On the other “side” is Robert Garcia, the likely incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, who posted those two words after the returns came in. Cable news has spent two days treating these men as rival camps.
It’s a fake fight. Jeffries is saying Democrats won’t go hunting — arbitrarily — for enemies to punish in a revenge quest, like Trump has. He’s not saying the U.S. Congress will ignore the largest blitz of alleged criminal conduct in the history of the nation’s capital. Indeed, it seems that the people pushing the “move on” line the hardest are Trump allies who can feel a subpoena coming, including Trump himself who suddenly seemed open to working with Democrats “for the good of the country” — but only if they’re not “destructive,” in which case he’s pledged scorched earth against them.
He’s scared. It’s not hard to see why.
There are literally hundreds of documented episodes of alleged corruption in Trump’s Washington, including scandals involving self-dealing, theft of taxpayer dollars, bribery, extortion, foreign influence over elected officials, the sale of pardons, and far more. The only reason none of it has been investigated is that the president has the Justice Department and FBI firmly under his thumb.
But now we’re supposed to move on? Under what conceivable theory does a change in the sheriff’s office mean all the criminals in town get absolved of their crimes? The new sheriff got the job because of the crime wave.
The past two years have seen literally historic allegations of wrongdoing. You don’t have to take my word for it. Federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration in hundreds of cases, finding that they violated the law or the U.S. Constitution itself. In immigration detention cases alone, they’ve ruled against it nearly 20,000 times — 20,000 times — and many of those judges were appointed by Republicans or by Trump himself. They’ve found that he violated the First Amendment by stripping security clearances from his enemies as “political retribution.” They’ve ruled that he violated the Fifth Amendment by deporting people without due process, trying, as one judge wrote, to “read an entire provision out of the Constitution.” They’ve called his blacklisting of law firms that represented his critics a “shocking abuse of power” under the Sixth Amendment, and labeled his order ending birthright citizenship a “blatantly unconstitutional” assault on the Fourteenth Amendment.
And that’s before you get to the money. For our documentary CORRUPTIONLAND, we reviewed 100 episodes of alleged corruption in Trump’s Washington, and together they implicate more than a third of a trillion dollars in federal funds, contracts, and deals. You want me to believe Americans are ready to shrug off a heist of that magnitude? Doing so would be an admission that the rule of law means nothing and that crime is perfectly fine as long as your party holds the White House. No. Never.
To be fair, it would be a mistake for Democrats to pick out Trump henchmen they dislike and go looking for crimes to pin on them. That’s exactly what the president did to James Comey, Letitia James, me, and plenty of others, and it was the idiot’s inversion of how justice works — so nakedly political that even his own chief of staff tried to limit the time Trump spent “score settling,” reportedly giving him a 90-day shot clock on his revenge campaign before he needed to focus on governing. (Apparently, the shot clock still hasn’t expired.)
There’s a world of difference between that and a Democratic Congress opening probes into credible allegations of criminal conduct… and following the facts wherever they lead.
Does anyone object to reopening the Epstein investigation, in which some 1,400 women and girls were abused? Does anyone object to looking into the suspiciously timed trades placed by people who seem to have known what the president was about to announce? Does anyone object to Congress asking whether pardons were bought, letting well-connected felons walk free and leaving their victims without roughly $240 million in court-ordered restitution? Does anyone object to finding out how the president’s family made billions in crypto while his own Justice Department disbanded the task force that polices crypto fraud?
The only people who object to that are the potential co-conspirators.
So the investigations are coming, and nothing in Washington can stop them. When the hearings start, I expect the “move on” people to start singing a different tune. If the January 6 investigation taught us anything, it’s that Trump’s lieutenants won’t stay loyal if they face prison time. To be clear, Congress can’t lock anyone up. But a future Justice Department can — and so can the states that receive criminal referrals from Congress.
While some are so devoted they’d gladly sit in a cell for a man who doesn’t care about them, many others can do math. The moment that prison becomes a real possibility, they’ll start talking. And they’ll talk fast.
Which is why we’re not waiting for January 3. Last night on DEFIANCE Daily, we announced a $10,000 grant to the Rule of Law Project, a group of former federal prosecutors and FBI agents who are collecting evidence of wrongdoing and providing it to Congress and the states. The group is led by 30-year Justice Department veteran Mark Blumberg, who is preparing to send investigators into communities to interview witnesses and pull records, then drafting memos and possible indictments for prosecutors at the federal, state, and local level. Blumberg calls it giving prosecutors “the gift of time.”
I call it karma. The people Trump purged from the Justice Department and the FBI (in an apparent effort to stifle investigations) are reassembling to initiate the criminal probes that should’ve begun the moment the corruption allegations started flooding in.
The debate is over. The investigations are about to start. The only open question is who flips first.
Now we have an army.
Your friend, in defiance,
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