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Beyond Trump's Latest Crazy Pardon, Glimpses Of A Post-Trump America

Beyond Trump's Latest Crazy Pardon, Glimpses Of A Post-Trump America

Trump 2.0 continually impresses everyone for its craziness. The latest venture into the absurd was Trump’s preemptive pardon of Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), who had been indicted on charges for accepting bribes from foreign actors.

The pardon is not especially surprising, since Donald Trump finds a corrupt politician as irresistible as he might have found an attractive woman in his younger days. The Trumpian absurdity part of the story is that Cuellar immediately turned around and said that he wants the prosecutors investigated. In Donald Trump’s America the greatest crime is enforcing the law against a Donald Trump ally.

Who knows where Cuellar’s request will end up? Most immediately, he apparently went to Jim Jordan, the head of the House Judiciary Committee with his case. This likely means some serious hyperventilation and screaming, but not much else.

It’s not clear that anyone in the Justice Department will pick up on Cuellar’s insistence that prosecuting him should be a crime and start investigating their colleagues. The refusal of Justice Department lawyers to carry through blatantly political prosecutions has been a source of encouragement. This shows both that they have a bit of a moral compass, and also that they are thinking of a post-Trump world, where a clown show prosecution of a Trump enemy is not something good to have on your resume.

The refusal to prosecute was very public when Trump’s pick for acting United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Lindsey Halligan, could not get any of the career lawyers in the Justice Department to sign off on the prosecutions of former FBI director Jame Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. She had to take up the task herself even though she had never prosecuted a case before. Such refusals are likely playing a role in the Justice Department’s refusal to date to press an antisemitic prosecution of liberal billionaire George Soros or whack job conspiracy indictments of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Rats Leaving the Ship

It’s not just Justice Department lawyers who can give us some hope of a post-Trump world where democracy survives. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, recently said that he was refusing to make a contribution to Trump’s ballroom monstrosity because he was concerned how a post-Trump Justice Department might view it.

This comment should be taken very seriously. JP Morgan is by far the largest bank in the country, which Dimon has run for two decades. Also, Mr. Dimon is an astute businessman who clearly puts business above politics. Early in 2024 he gave Trump a pseudo-endorsement when he famously said that he thought the economy would do fine regardless of whether Trump or Biden won. That he is now thinking of a world with a normal Justice Department is huge.

It’s not just Dimon who is thinking about a world beyond Trump. A near record number of Republican members of Congress have announced their retirement. Some, most notably Marjorie Taylor Greene, are not even finishing out their terms.

It’s understandable that many would be unhappy with their jobs. Most of them are not morons. They know they are being asked to repeat inane lies in support of Donald Trump and whatever whack job thing he says or does. That can’t be lots of fun.

On top of this, politicians do understand election results. They see a shift of double-digits away from Republicans in elections across the country. They also see the polls showing Trump’s popularity going through the floor. That does not sound like a good environment to seek re-election even when Trump has gerrymandered districts to favor Republicans.

Collapsing Conspiracy Theories

Trump also has the problem that many of the MAGA team’s guiding lies are coming undone. The most notable one is the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Many Trump backers really believed that Donald Trump was the white knight who was going to smash the child trafficking pedophile ring being run by Hillary Clinton and other evil Democrats.

Now that he is sitting in the White House, he is doing everything possible to keep secret the files related to the country’s most notorious child sex trafficker. Trump’s denials of his ties to Epstein are becoming ever more absurd. Only the most extreme cult members can find them credible at this point. Trump was clearly a close friend of Epstein’s and likely partner in at least some of his activities.

And it’s not just the child sex trafficking conspiracy that’s sinking under the weight of reality. Trump’s FBI team managed to finally nail down a suspect in the January 6th Capitol pipe bomb case. (Congrats to them, seriously.)

The top levels of the MAGA cult, including current deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, had been pushing whack job conspiracies about how the pipe bombs were part of an FBI inside job. Now it seems that the suspect was just another January 6th insurrectionist supporting the stolen election story. The big question now is whether he qualifies for Donald Trump’s blanket pardon of his mob.

The other Trump conspiracy at risk is the story of Jack Smith’s weaponization of the Justice Department. The Republicans are boasting about how they have subpoenaed Smith to testify in secret hearings where they can then publish selected excerpts from his testimony.

Smith has volunteered to testify in public. Republicans are scared to death to let Smith speak in public and let everyone hear about his by the book investigation of Donald Trump’s effort to overthrow the government. For the moment, Smith’s public testimony has not been a major demand from Democrats, but there is always the possibility some members of the party could wake up.

Healthcare and Affordability: Reality Still Matters

Finally, the Trump gang does have to deal with some real-world problems that are not going away. Health insurance premiums are about to rise a lot for tens of millions of people, unless Trump and the Republicans in Congress do a 180 and agree to extend the subsidies for the exchanges under Obamacare.

Wages for millions of workers, especially low-paid ones, are also not keeping pace with inflation. Trump might insist that tariffs don’t affect prices, but they do. We just got new data on import prices for September, showing again that exporters are not eating the tariffs. The labor market has also weakened substantially, with the unemployment rate for disadvantaged groups like Black workers and young people rising sharply.

And even Trump’s big issue, immigration, is not going well for him these days. While most Americans might have been happy to see the pet-eating rapists and murderers sent back to where they came from, it’s clear that violent criminals are a tiny fraction of the people being nabbed by ICE. The overwhelming majority are people who have committed no criminal offense whatsoever or a minor offense like shoplifting.

No one thinks we are safer as a country when they see ununiformed masked men grabbing gardeners and food truck operators off the streets. The hardcore racists might applaud this sort of crackdown on people guilty of not being white, but thankfully, even a majority of Trump voters don’t fall into this category.

Trump’s Caribbean war crimes are also not playing well. Using advanced weaponry to blow up small boats that are thousands of miles from the U.S. does not make sense as a drug interdiction strategy. Killing survivors from the initial strikes makes even less sense. The whole thing becomes even more absurd when Trump issues a pardon to a notorious drug trafficker who the Justice Department spent years investigating and convicting.

MAGA Is Melting Down

It’s too early for big celebrations, but it does look like the wheels are coming off the Trump juggernaut. When the AI bubble bursts, likely taking crypto with it, and Trump’s rich buddies become considerably less rich, the rats will all start fleeing.

But we can’t sit around and wait for the big crash, which could still be some time in coming and likely won’t be all at once. We need to bolster the forces of democracy every way we can. That means supporting defectors, even if they might be awful people, and doing whatever we can to resist. Look forward to seeing everyone at No Kings III.

Dean Baker is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the author of the 2016 book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Dean Baker.

Peripatetic Patel Is Vacuuming Up Taxpayers' Cash On FBI Jet Trips

Peripatetic Patel Is Vacuuming Up Taxpayers' Cash On FBI Jet Trips

FBI Director Kash Patel is committed to making the most of his time as the unlikely, unqualified head of the nation’s law enforcement agency.

No, he’s not building big cases or figuring out better ways to keep people safe. Instead, Patel is making the most of the perks of his job. Well, not perks, really. More like just a straight-up misuse of government resources.

You may recall that, despite being the nation’s top law enforcement official, a job one would think required a lot of hands-on attention, Patel has not seen fit to fully relocate to Washington. Instead, Patel likes hanging out in Las Vegas in a house owned by a timeshare tycoon pal. He’s also down with staying in Nashville, where his girlfriend lives.

Must be tough managing a house in Vegas, a girl in Nashville, and a job in Washington, right?

Well, not if you just use the FBI jet, which also frees you up to get to your fave sporting events. So why not slurp up some taxpayer dollars to use that FBI jet to go on a date to see your girlfriend sing at a wrestling match at Penn State? Better still, it was a hella dumb thing called “Real American Freestyle,” a professional wrestling promotion co-founded by none other than Hulk Hogan.

Aren’t you glad that your money went to this?

The girlfriend in question, Alexis Wilkins, is ostensibly a country singer, but most of her output seems to be singing at events like this garbage and Turning Point USA gatherings. But Patel really, really loves to see her sing, apparently, so he seems to have taken the FBI jet from Virginia to State College and then back to Nashville.

It’s always nice when you can give your girlfriend a ride home, right? And even better if that ride home is on a private jet paid for by the taxpayers.

Despite all this, Patel is putting out the word that he works so hard every day. He’s too modest to say so, of course. So his extremely pliant deputy, Dan Bongino—yes, the guy so bad at his job that he now has a co-deputy babysitter—went on Fox to insist that Patel works 13 hours per day, getting to the office at 6 AM and not leaving before 7 PM.

This is as much of a lie as the one about how President Donald Trump works all day, every day, long into the night, when we all know what he’s really doing is watching television and drinking Diet Coke.

In reality, much like the man who appointed him, Patel has already cut down on the briefings he will attend, in part because he just can’t make it to the office by 8:30 AM. Well, yeah—he’s got to get there from Las Vegas or Nashville or wherever. You can’t expect him to be on time every day.

Aside from his lazy grifting, Patel is also a terrible boss, threatening polygraphs and firing people with the remotest connection to someone Trump doesn’t like.

Well, if Patel loses his job at any point, he can fall back on his merchandising skills. If you’re in need of a tacky sweatshirt with a graphic that is a mashup of Trump and The Punisher, Patel has you covered with his K$H hoodies.

It’s always good to have a side gig, though kind of unusual when you’re the FBI director. But his terrible clothing is just another way to show a cult-like devotion to Trump, which will probably keep him (un)gainfully employed by the federal government for the next few years.

Ten Fundamental Flaws In The Case Against James Comey

Ten Fundamental Flaws In The Case Against James Comey

The indictment of former FBI director James Comey is momentous, and in the worst possible way: it stands alone as a corruption and derogation of the rule of law unlike anything Trump, Bondi, Bove, or Blanche have perpetrated so far. I have been shouting from the rooftops that prosecuting a defendant without sufficient evidence, at the insistence of a President acting for reprisal and revenge, is the ultimate abomination. The combination of lacking bona fide proof and political reprisal from the top is virtually unprecedented, even compared to the worst corruptions of the DOJ under Nixon. In my view, this is the single most shameful act in the Department of Justice’s history.

It may or may not be that the Comey atrocity co-exists with a number of legitimate prosecutions. But week by week, we see reports that Bondi—serving Trump and indifferent to career DOJ professionals—is hollowing out the Department. Indeed, some sources suggest mass defections may be in the offing in the Eastern District of Virginia if the Comey case proceeds.

But given the gravity of the betrayal of everything the Department stands for, those other prosecutions don’t change the core problem. It may be that divorces or auto accidents are handled fairly in courts in Russia, Hungary, or Turkey. But if an enemy of the president can be charged with a federal crime the Department knows it can’t prove, then the Department is rotten to the core.

And of course, Trump has promised that Comey will not be the last target of his vengeance—not because of any crime (he doesn’t closely track who did what)—but because people worked on impeachments or prosecutions of him. And while reemphasizing those prosecutions doesn’t excuse wrongdoing here, it should be noted that those impeachments and prosecutions were entirely valid and, in many views, righteous responses to historic legal violations.

We must now hope the case becomes a total humiliation for the Department and for Trump—both as a forceful rebuke of this conduct and as a deterrent against similar injustices against others on Trump’s long enemy list.

I am going to adjust my Substack schedule this week because of the Comey indictment. Normally, I publish one or two in-depth pieces weekly. But this week I’m all in: I’ll publish five shorter Comey-focused pieces on Substack:

  • Monday: The 10 fundamental legal flaws with the Comey prosecution
  • Tuesday: The case’s vulnerability to dismissal before trial
  • Wednesday: Might Halligan face professional sanctions?
  • Thursday: Might Halligan, Bondi, or even Trump be called to testify?
  • Friday: Did Trump commit a High Crime or Misdemeanor?

Together, these will (I hope) clarify the pressure points and weak spots in this most dishonorable prosecution. I invite you to follow along and absorb legal and practical lessons that may well determine the fate not only of Jim Comey but of the American justice system. If you enjoy the content, please consider becoming a paid subscriber—it’s our sole support: no ads, no investors, no legacy media—just you. Thanks for considering.

The 10 Glaring Flaws with the Comey Indictment

  1. Materiality. The primary charge is that Comey “did willfully and knowingly make a materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement” before Congress. Materiality is a required element, and the government must prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

In the indictment PDF (which is publicly available), the government offers no clear theory explaining how the Senate’s investigation would be influenced by whether Comey truthfully stated he had authorized a leak. Should a judge determine that no reasonable juror could find materiality, the case cannot stand—even if a jury later finds otherwise, a court can set aside a verdict if it is unreasonable.

  1. Falsity. The charging document attributes to Comey a “false statement” that he hadn’t authorized a leak. That phrasing doesn’t match exactly what he said in 2020—he said, “I stand by the testimony you summarized that I gave in May of 2017.” That statement, on its face, is not false, and legal precedent holds that you cannot prosecute a statement that is literally true, especially when posed with ambiguity.
  2. Vagueness of the Question. A reasonable witness could reasonably not discern what the questioner meant, which is problematic under the Due Process Clause in criminal prosecutions.

Among the confusing elements of Senator Cruz’s questioning: it seems he intended to contrast Comey’s statements with McCabe’s, yet reports suggest the government might instead base its theory on a leak by Daniel Richman. That shift creates a disconnect between the question posed and the theory of falsity being advanced.

  1. Richman’s Status. The indictment’s theory may rely on Richman acting “at the FBI.” But Richman’s role as an unpaid Special Government Employee reportedly expired in 2016, and no public record has confirmed a new appointment for 2017. This raises a serious issue about whether he legally qualified for that description at the relevant time.
  2. Very Weak Evidence. One indictment count was rejected by the grand jury outright. The remaining two passed by a 14–9 vote among 23 jurors, which is a bare majority. That slim margin is far from strong evidence that 12 jurors would conclude guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
  3. Halligan Appointment Legality. After the interim appointee’s 120 days expired, the local federal court should have made the selection (per prior precedent). Under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act (FVRA), the Acting U.S. Attorney must qualify under strict criteria (e.g. having served 90 days in the agency). Halligan does not appear to meet these requirements; legal commentators argue this raises serious doubt about the legality of her appointment.
  4. Prosecutors’ Memo. Reportedly, career DOJ prosecutors in EDVA prepared a memo arguing against bringing charges—citing weak evidence. If that internal memo becomes public, it could severely undercut Halligan’s justification, bolster motions to dismiss, and lead to possible sanctions.
  5. Halligan in the Grand Jury. It is reported that Halligan personally presented the case to the grand jury—despite minimal DOJ experience. If true, that is highly unusual and raises risks. The transcript of her presentation could contain procedural errors or prejudicial statements that defense counsel will exploit.
  1. Staffing. Press accounts suggest that many EDVA AUSAs declined to work on the case. If true, the Department may need to bring in outsiders, which in a district with a “rocket docket” advantages local familiarity. If Halligan and DOJ cannot recruit credible prosecutors by arraignment (Oct. 9), it will mark a severe internal crisis.
  2. Trump’s Role. The most conspicuous feature of this case is Trump’s demand for prosecution. He replaced a U.S. Attorney who refused to pursue meritless prosecutions, installed Halligan soon thereafter, and told aides to indict long before a coherent theory emerged. Trump’s personal vendetta looms over the entire case.

And while the indictment would be equally vicious and improper in any event, it remains essential to remind the public that past prosecutions and impeachments of Trump were legitimate. Framing those as reasons to pursue “reprisal” prosecutions is factually and legally incoherent.

Trump’s unapologetic use of DOJ as his personal tool is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Everyone sees it. His recent claim that revenge played no role only invites further suspicion. In particular, Trump’s reprehensible autocratic conduct will ground a selective prosecution motion that is near certain to come. That motion rarely ever succeeds, but it is on the strongest footing I ever have seen in this case. I’ll be writing about it more in subsequent days.

Taken together, these ten fatal flaws make it highly likely that the Comey prosecution will be disastrous. A few caveats: many of the tripwires depend on court intervention. All are legally proper. But a humiliating defeat would also fuel MAGA talking points about judicial activism, which could blunt some outrage. Second, a collapse of the case could be catastrophic for Halligan’s career—and further expose the malpractice of Bondi and Trump’s DOJ team.

More to come this week as I dive deeper into the most raw authoritarian prosecution in DOJ history.

Reprinted with permission from Harry Litman.

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