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Universe Of Fantasy: A Tour Of Trump's Alternate Reality Government

Donald Trump is surely the most prolific and brazen liar ever to occupy the White House. From day one of his first term, when he confabulated wildly about the crowd size at his inauguration, he has fabricated nonsense so promiscuously that people—supporters and antagonists—have just come to assume you can’t trust what he says.

But in the last few weeks, Trump and his administration seem to have broken through the lying speed of light, emerging into a whole new universe of bullshit. From the daily diet of blatant lies, fibs, and fabrications, they’ve taken up occupancy in a stratosphere of crazy, as if arriving through a wormhole from the other side of the universe. They’re now regularly peddling assertions that boggle the mind and leave commentators speechless—provoking a “what planet are you from?” kind of response.

What these claims provoke is less indignation than bewilderment—a sense of “I don’t even know where to begin.” In the last few days, two of the country’s most sure-footed cable hosts basically threw up their hands confronting Administration statements that vaulted over false or even ridiculous to the utterly bizarre.

On CNN, Kaitlan Collins—trying to make sense of yet another sweeping claim about what the Justice Department had or had not “authorized”—responded with exasperation: “None of what they’re saying lines up with the actual record, and I don’t know how else to say it.” (Over the weekend, Collins responded to Trump’s asinine tirade calling her “stupid and nasty” with grace and good humor.)

A day later on MSNBC, Nicolle Wallace offered a similar response as she confronted the latest round of reality-defying explanations from senior officials. “This is just not connected to reality as the rest of us understand it,” she said, before adding, almost incredulously, “I mean… what are we even talking about here?” Her guest Miles Taylor stepped in: “They’re describing events from a universe where facts operate under different rules.”

Consider some of these recent extraterrestrial dispatches that Trump and his senior aides have propounded, each one so unhinged that analysts hardly know where to begin.

• The Halligan Fantasy

The Administration continues to treat Lindsey Halligan as a fully empowered United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, despite a federal judge’s ruling (that the Administration has yet to appeal) that her appointment is invalid. The DOJ is behaving as though the ruling never happened: they continue to sign her name on indictments, even though the court has said such documents are a legal nullity—no different than if they were signed “Mary Poppins.”

• The Illusory Exculpation of Pete Hegseth

Trump now claims Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been “exculpated” for the deadly September 2 boat strikes. Exculpated by whom? There has been no investigation or formal findings, and only the slightest beginning of a closed-door congressional inquiry. Hegseth has miles to go before he is out of the woods for the stain of the killings on the country, which Senator Adam Schiff on Sunday called “unconstitutional” and “morally repugnant.”

How about: And the first step on that path is the release to the public of the already infamous video of the strike that Hegseth claims he didn’t order but quickly adds that he “would have made the same call myself.”

• The Signalgate “Total Exoneration”

Hegseth’s separate claim—that the acting inspector general’s review of the Signalgate fiasco “totally exonerates” him—holds no water anywhere on the planet.

In fact, the IG found Hegseth endangered U.S. service members by transmitting imminent-strike details over an unsecured Signal chat on his personal phone, including information mirroring SECRET/NOFORN data from a CENTCOM briefing. For his part, Hegseth refused to sit for an interview, submitting only a nonresponsive written statement, the core claim of which was: “I took nonspecific general details which I determined, using my sole discretion, were either not classified, or that I could safely declassify, and created an “unclassified summary” of the USCENTCOM strike details to provide to participants of the Signal chat.”

But the IG found the details weren’t “nonspecific” at all—they tracked classified operational information. And although Hegseth claimed he could declassify the material, the IG explicitly said he could not determine that Hegseth ever exercised that authority. It is, in effect, a defense that says: the disclosure was permissible because I believed I had the power to make it permissible. More to the point, even if he had borrowed and waved Trump’s magic Mar-a-Lago declassifying wand, it would have no bearing on the finding—as inculpatory as you can imagine for a sitting Defense Secretary—that he risked putting service members in danger. Far from exonerating him, the explanation restates the problem.

• The Hepatitis-B Reversal

The Administration’s flirtation with the idea that the hepatitis-B vaccine is “not recommended” in newborns contradicts decades of CDC guidance and a more than 90 percent reduction in childhood hepatitis-B. The reconstituted ACIP panel making this move was hand-selected after RFK Jr. removed the prior members. This is medical policy by wormhole: the consensus stays the same, the data stay the same, but the conclusion suddenly flips. Public health experts predict catastrophic results—particularly for poorer newborns—and a resurgence of child-onset hepatitis B.

• The “Morally Distinguishable” Bomber

The Administration’s touting of the arrest of the January 5 bomber, Brian Cole, raises the obvious question: what distinguishes the would-be bomber from the marauders of January 6, whom Trump pardoned on his first day in office? It can’t be the potential for violence: Cole’s bombs didn’t go off, while Trump’s clemency extended to thugs who attacked Capitol officers with stun guns and nerve gas.

Here is the Planet Mongo argument Hegseth offered on Fox News for the distinction—echoed by other Administration officials: “Look, the people who were unfairly targeted have been pardoned. The bomber hasn’t been — and that tells you something.”

Everyone follow that? The difference between the January 6 pardoned marauders and the pipe-bomb suspect is that the pardoned 1000+ were pardoned. That might be a cogent response somewhere, but it isn’t on planet Earth.

And Pam Bondi’s recent answer—or more precisely, her refusal to answer—drove the point home. Asked point-blank how Cole differed from January 6 defendants, she simply ducked the question, pivoting to unrelated talking points. They’re going to need something better as the case proceeds—unless, that is, Trump hews to his otherworldly logic and pardons Cole.

• The Fantasy Economy

On the central promise that likely delivered him a second term—fixing an economy he has instead allowed to wobble and stall—Trump continues to offer the alternate-universe characterization that the economy is “flourishing,” waving away indicators of strain, volatility, and falling household confidence.

• And this just in – the FIFA Peace Prize

Finally, there must be a planet somewhere in which the notoriously corrupt soccer organization FIFA enjoys the moral authority of the Nobel Committee on Earth. Wherever that may be, Trump has proudly received the first-ever peace prize for his “historic leadership.” There is the complication that no committee actually awarded this supposed FIFA Peace Prize. FIFA doesn’t give peace prizes. It doesn’t have a peace-prize committee. It has no mechanism for conferring honors outside the world of soccer. The prize exists entirely because Trump said it did. But such critical logic is so, well, earthbound.

Taken individually, any of these might be chalked up to the familiar Trumpian stew of bluster and improvisation. As an ensemble, they represent something else entirely. This isn’t lying in the usual political sense. It is governing from an alternate reality—one in which legal authority, factual accuracy, and empirical verification are dispensable trifles.

And that is what provokes the shift in reaction among commentators. They are no longer challenging claims as much as expressing bewilderment at the absence of any shared factual universe.

The problem, of course, is that a democracy requires such a universe. Trump has always strained against that baseline, but now he and his Administration increasingly operate in a space where the laws of logic bend and the lines never cross. The rest of us—courts, Congress, journalists, citizens—are left trying to stitch reality back together in a world where the government no longer recognizes it.

The only workable response begins with declining to play by the rules of their distant planet. First, call out the move—not just the mistake. These are not ordinary falsehoods. They are claims wholly untethered from evidence, law, or logic, and the point is to overwhelm, not persuade. Institutions should say plainly when a statement has no factual substrate at all.

Second, refuse to litigate the fabricated premise. Wormhole politics depends on forcing opponents to disprove fantasies—“prove Halligan isn’t authorized,” “prove the survivors weren’t traffickers,” “prove the bomber isn’t morally distinct.” The proper move is to reject the burden-shift and insist that the Administration supply actual evidence before the claim enters serious discourse.

Holding a government to account is work enough without having to chase its claims across the universe to an entirely different planet.

Harry Litman is a former United States Attorney and the executive producer and host of the Talking Feds podcast. He has taught law at UCLA, Berkeley, and Georgetown and served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Clinton Administration. Please consider subscribing to Talking Feds on Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Talking Feds.

Comey Prosecution Appears Doomed After Federal Judge Eviscerates Halligan's Conduct

Lindsey Halligan has had some very bad days since Donald Trump attempted to shoehorn her into the position of United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia with marching orders to bring him the scalps of Jim Comey and Tish James. But yesterday was her worst day, and it points to far worse ones still to come.

The cause of her miserable Monday was a meticulous and blistering memorandum opinion from Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick in United States v. Comey. The 24-page decision eviscerated her and the entire prosecution.

Fitzpatrick’s opinion lays out a sequence of investigative, procedural, and constitutional failures so fundamental that they threaten the viability of the indictment itself. The judge details a cascade of basic yet grave errors by a U.S. Attorney and a Department of Justice that have veered miles off the rails.

The catalog is long, and it culminates in a finding that Halligan misinstructed the grand jury on points of law so elementary that any first-year law student in a prosecutorial-tactics class would know to avoid them. That same student, it bears noting, would have had more relevant experience than Halligan, who was plunked into the highest job in the office and then proceeded to appear solo before the grand jury despite having had exactly zero experience as a federal prosecutor.

Combine that preposterous assignment with the political imperative to deliver indictments for the Maximum Leader in cases that were themselves threadbare, and you had the perfect setup for overreach and blunder in the grand jury room. Unsurprisingly, that is precisely the trap Halligan walked into. It is hard to see her professional reputation emerging intact.

The opinion traces the misconduct back to Trump 1.0 and the 2019–20 “Arctic Haze” investigation. FBI agents obtained warrants to search devices and email accounts belonging to Columbia Law Professor Daniel Richman, James Comey’s longtime attorney and confidant.

Richman’s role as Comey’s lawyer should have set off immediate alarm bells, because of the extreme risk to a prosecution of viewing, much less using, documents covered by the attorney-client privilege. That is why as a general rule, no member of an investigative or prosecutorial team may review attorney-client privileged material; that responsibility lies with a separate “taint” team of uninvolved attorneys and agents.

But Fitzpatrick found that the agents charged with the initial review went far beyond the warrant’s limits. Worse, they held onto that material long after the investigation had closed and failed to conduct any meaningful privilege review despite knowing Richman represented multiple clients, including Comey. Most remarkably, Comey—the privilege holder himself—was never included in the screening process. And notwithstanding a court order to seal and refrain from reviewing nonresponsive material, the government effectively treated the entire trove as fair game for rummaging—a practice the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent.

That was the landscape when Halligan was rushed into service, after the previous nominee, Erik Siebert, told DOJ leadership that the case could not be brought under DOJ guidelines. That assessment, implicating a core duty for any federal prosecutor, amounted to a fireable offense in Pam Bondi’s Justice Department.

From there, as Fitzpatrick documents, things descended into chaos. Facing an imminent statute-of-limitations deadline on a newly imagined charge, the government went back to the Richman materials without seeking any judicial authorization. Fitzpatrick understatedly called the maneuver “highly unusual.” A new warrant would have required the government to define a relevant timeframe, establish probable cause for the new charges, and—critically—implement protections for privileged material. None of that occurred.

The next misstep was yet more jaw-dropping. The FBI agent assigned to search the extracted Richman materials was expressly told to look for communications between Richman and Comey—communications that were, by definition, presumptively privileged. He found them, printed them, and handed them to another agent, who recognized their privileged nature. Yet that recognition did not trigger a taint protocol, a recusal, or even a pause. Instead, Agent-3, who had been exposed to what Fitzpatrick describes as at least a “limited overview” of privileged content, went on to testify as the sole witness before the grand jury. Every word of his testimony may have rested on tainted material.

Then came Halligan’s performance before the grand jury. Fitzpatrick identified two separate statements she made that were “fundamental misstatements of the law that could compromise the integrity of the grand jury process.”

The statements themselves are redacted, but Fitzpatrick describes their contours. In the first she suggested to the grand jury that Comey might not have a Fifth Amendment right not to testify at trial—or that, at a minimum, the trial jury would be instructed not to draw any inference from his silence. It is hard to imagine a more basic or consequential legal error.

And she was not done. Halligan also told the grand jury it could rely on information not presented to it when determining probable cause and assured the jurors that the government had more—and perhaps better—evidence elsewhere.

It is difficult to imagine a prosecutor in the pre-Bondi DOJ who could have committed errors this basic and prejudicial and remained employed—or, at the very least, not been shunted off to an obscure corner where further harm was impossible. But in this DOJ, Halligan’s amateurism, combined with her anything-it-takes approach to serving Trump, is her most prominent qualification.

Things only deteriorated from there. The grand jury initially rejected Count One of the proposed charges—an unusual event. The rejection so unsettled Halligan that she botched the presentation of the returned indictment to the court. This has prompted sharp questioning from both Fitzpatrick and Judge Currie, who is overseeing a separate motion arguing that Halligan’s appointment was unlawful and ineffective.

Halligan has submitted a declaration swearing she had no contact with the grand jury after deliberations began. Fitzpatrick, reviewing the timeline, plainly does not buy it. His conclusion is stark: either Halligan is “mistaken” about when she learned the grand jurors had rejected Count One, or “the Court is in uncharted legal territory in that the indictment returned in open court was not the same charging document presented to and deliberated upon by the grand jury.” Those are two astonishingly bad options for Halligan.

By the end of the opinion, Fitzpatrick lists no fewer than eleven grounds supporting the defense’s request for disclosure of grand jury materials. They include possible Fourth Amendment violations; willful or reckless misconduct by investigators; mishandling of privileged documents; tainted testimony; constitutional misstatements; and profound irregularities in the indictment’s return. The cumulative impact is a judicial finding that Comey has shown a rare “particularized and factually based” basis to challenge the indictment’s validity—the exact showing Rule 6(e) requires. Findings like this are extremely uncommon.

For Halligan, the opinion marks a moment of extraordinary vulnerability. Even before it, she faced serious legal and ethical concerns: doubts about the legality of her appointment; sanctions in prior litigation; a reported unwillingness to follow DOJ protocols for politically sensitive investigations; and, above all, her willingness to sign on to reprisal prosecutions against Trump’s perceived enemies in defiance of everything DOJ once stood for.

None of this should shock us, or, for that matter, Halligan. She accepted the role of pretend prosecutor, tasked with bringing plainly illegitimate cases on Trump’s say-so. Now the case has metastasized, and it is far too late to turn back. Trump may well shield her from criminal liability with a pardon, but he cannot protect her professional reputation, which is irretrievably wrecked, or spare her from a bar discipline process, which is already underway.

Most importantly, the case Halligan volunteered for—which I have called “the single most shameful act in the Department of Justice’s history”—now appears to be in a death spiral. The only remaining question is which court and which legal tool will finish it off. And when that happens, the fallout will land squarely on Lindsey Halligan.

Halligan's Retribution Prosecutions Of Comey and James Are Falling Apart Fast

Acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Lindsey Halligan is not having a good time.

Sure, indicting people because President Donald Trump said so was probably a bit of a rush, but now she’s stuck with two high-profile cases where the only help she has is prosecutors borrowed from other districts, since no one in her office would agree to handle these travesties.

While Halligan is running these cases on a shoestring, former FBI Director James Comey is going HAM and filing motion after motion to get rid of both Halligan and the indictment she secured against him.

He’s assembled a giant team of high-powered, experienced attorneys, and they are absolutely burying Halligan in a flurry of motions —an excellent strategy against an inexperienced prosecutor. Now, Halligan has to respond to all of these, and meanwhile, time marches on. Both Comey’s case and Halligan’s prosecution of New York Attorney General Letitia James are on the rocket docket, so Halligan has to simultaneously prepare for two big trials scheduled just a few weeks apart in January.

Comey had already filed two earlier motions to dismiss, one based on Halligan being illegally appointed and one alleging vindictive and selective prosecution. This week, he added three more.

First, he filed a motion to force the government to disclose the grand jury proceedings. Normally, grand juries are entitled to a “presumptionof regularity,” meaning the actions of the grand jury are presumed to be reasonable. But if a defendant can point to significant irregularities, they can get access to the grand jury materials.

Here, Comey points to two significant irregularities. First, it appears there may have been a tainted witness—an FBI agent who may have had access to privileged material between Comey and his attorneys, which would be covered by the attorney-client privilege. If the agent provided the grand jury with attorney-client information in an effort to buttress the indictment against Comey, that’s a big problem.

Additionally, Comey alleges that Halligan kept the grand jury well into the evening instead of sending them home after they refused to indict Comey on three counts. She then presented the two-count indictment and kept the jury until nearly 7 PM. Comey wants access to those proceedings to see if Halligan basically told the jury they couldn’t leave until they indicted him.

That might sound fanciful and ridiculous in a normal case with a normal prosecutor—a long-shot complaint. But this is no normal case, and Halligan is no normal prosecutor, so it’s not hard to imagine her thinking it’s totally appropriate to hammer a grand jury until she got what she wanted.

He’s also filed a motion for a bill of particulars. A defendant is supposed to know the basis for the charges against them so they can prepare for trial. But the indictment Halligan presented has literally no information about the factual basis for charging Comey. So, Comey is asking for all of it, and let’s face it: We know that whatever Halligan has as material supporting her fact-free indictment is probably pretty sparse.

If that wasn’t enough, Comey also filed a motion to dismiss the indictment “based on fundamental ambiguity and literal truth.” That’s a mouthful, but what it’s about is Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s mangled, multi-part questions to Comey, creating confusion as to what, exactly, he was asking Comey about. The “literal truth” part is precisely what it sounds like—that Comey says he was literally truthful when responding to Cruz. Of course, if Comey was truthful, the whole indictment falls apart.

Meanwhile, in the Letitia James case …Halligan charged James with fraud over lying to her bank to get a better mortgage on a second home, but then renting it out in violation of the “Second Home Rider” contract. But there is language in her contract that says she can use the home “including short-term rentals.” In fact, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac say that a second home rider means the property “may be rented out on a short-term basis.”

James’ grand-niece lives in the home and testified to a different grand jury convened by Halligan that she had lived there for many years without paying rent. But then Halligan didn’t put the grand-niece before the grand jury that ultimately indicted James. That looks a lot like Halligan withheld material—that could have shown James’s innocence—from the grand jury that ultimately indicted James.

Halligan is overmatched and, honestly, seems to think her job ended after she secured indictments. Even though she’s gotten Justice Department attorneys from other jurisdictions to help out, that assistance can’t remedy the deficiencies in her indictments.

These experienced defense attorneys are not going to let up, and by now, Halligan has to feel like a mouse being batted around in a cat’s claws.

How long do we give her before she quits? Of course, if either of these indictments gets dismissed, Halligan might be purged by the same people who installed her in the job.

Perhaps she’ll go back to her previous job in the administration, where she got to singlehandedly remove any material from the Smithsonian museums that made white people sad, like exhibits about slavery.

She’s not qualified for that either, of course. But it’s got to be easier than her current thankless gig.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Irredeemable Justice: Letitia James' Indictment Tolls The Depth Of Corruption

With the indictment of former FBI Director Jim Comey—on spurious charges, against the judgment of career prosecutors, and solely to satisfy the President’s personal vendetta—the Department of Justice crossed over to a new low.

But now, with the indictment of New York Attorney General Letitia James—and more reprisal indictments on the immediate horizon—it’s become clear that the corrupt abuse of the law to go after Trump’s adversaries is a principal mission of this Department of Justice. Far from a one-off, it’s the Department’s new business model.

I’ve explained before why bringing cases at the President’s insistence—not as acts of justice, but as political reprisals against his enemies—is as abhorrent a violation of the Constitution and DOJ norms as we’ve ever seen. It offends both the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause, flouts the Principles of Federal Prosecution that have served as the bible for federal prosecutors for generations, and betrays the most basic notions of impartial justice in any democracy.

Any prosecutor knows this to her marrow. It is the literal antithesis of the DOJ’s watchword of justice without fear or favor. That principle used to separate us from the corrupt justice systems that serve the personal whims of tyrants like Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Our history has seen a few instances of presidents targeting citizens out of personal animus—Richard Nixon’s bitter obsession with Daniel Ellsberg comes to mind, which in fact became the genesis of Watergate. But none of them remotely approaches the open and shameless campaign Donald Trump has launched: a series of directives to his Justice Department, backed with the threat of discharge, to indict his enemies for no reason other than that they are his enemies.

Exhibit A (and it will literally be that in upcoming motions in both the Comey and James cases) is Trump’s own “private” message to Attorney General Pam Bondi, which he accidentally made public. It built to a frothing conclusion:

“We can’t delay any longer—it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice and indicted me (5 times!) OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

“Justice,” in Trump’s hands, plainly means punishment—punishment through the corrupt use of the criminal system—because these perceived antagonists brought righteous cases against him. In other words, they did their jobs and followed their oaths.

A recent survey by Emily Bazelon and Rick Hasen of fifty top D.C. lawyers—many former senior DOJ officials and evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats—found complete unanimity: every single respondent believes that Trump and Bondi have used the Department of Justice to target political enemies and reward allies.

Every single one.

As one respondent put it, “[w]hat’s happening is anathematic to everything we’ve ever stood for in the Department of Justice.”

Every single one. It’s beyond stunning—and for alumni of the Department, beyond heartbreaking.

There isn’t another side to the argument. Every actor in the system—from defense attorneys to Justices on the Supreme Court—recognizes what is happening. The only question is how the criminal justice system should respond.

The specifics of the James case are almost comically small-bore. James is charged with falsifying mortgage or rental information on a handful of forms—or at least, that appears to be the charge. As with the Comey indictment, the actual document is so elliptical as to be baffling. Both are sketchy and amateurish by DOJ standards, particularly for cases against such prominent defendants.

The apparent core allegation is that James bought a home for her great-niece to live in with a mortgage loan requiring her to use the $139,000 three-bedroom house as a secondary residence, not a rental property, but that she later treated it as an investment.

Even taken at face value, the claims are thin, and intent in particular will be hard to prove. The great-niece reportedly testified to a Norfolk grand jury that she has lived in the house rent-free the entire time. Yet the grand jury that U.S. Attorney Lindsay Halligan hastily convened last week never heard from her.

More generally, because of contradictory statements on different forms and labyrinthine lending regulations, the government will have a hard time proving intent—that James knowingly engaged in a “scheme to defraud” by misrepresenting the property’s use.

Courts have interpreted the intent requirement stringently, as requiring that the defendant knowingly engaged in a fraudulent scheme and specifically intended to deceive or cheat a financial institution in order to obtain money or property. With the cross-cutting evidence and confusing body of regulations, that’s a real hurdle.

But considering the difficulties of proof is really beside the point. The deeper issue isn’t evidentiary at all—it’s constitutional.

Even if we assume, for argument’s sake, that somewhere in the sheaf of mortgage documents there is a single false statement, and that the government could somehow prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, the critical legal point remains: it doesn’t matter.

That’s because a selective prosecution is a constitutional violation that requires dismissal, without regard to whether the government can prove a crime.

Under the Supreme Court’s two-part test, selective prosecution requires showing (1) that the defendant was singled out from among similarly situated individuals, and (2) that the decision was driven by an impermissible factor such as politics or personal reprisal.

Notice that the test does not depend on the strength of the case. The constitutional injury—the violation of due process and First Amendment rights—is the same either way.

By that measure, James’s claim is, if anything, even stronger than Comey’s.

On the first prong, prosecutions for perjury of Comey’s alleged sort are vanishingly rare, leaving the standards amorphous. The administration can at least argue that Comey’s prominence warranted heightened scrutiny.

Not so with James. U.S. Attorney’s Offices have limited resources and prosecute only a fraction of chargeable cases. Each office maintains guidelines setting a minimum threshold of loss or harm before a case merits prosecution. Even accepting the government’s theory in full, James’s case would involve a loss of just $18,000—the difference between the mortgage rate she obtained and what she supposedly should have paid. That is pocket change in federal terms, far below DOJ’s own charging thresholds. Such irregularities, if pursued at all, are resolved administratively, not criminally.

That makes the first prong of James’s claim mathematically airtight: others who allegedly commit comparable “frauds” are not charged.

And that leads directly to the second prong—motive. There has to have been some reason beyond the merits that James was charged.

The Comey indictment provides that reason. It shows that political reprisal has become the DOJ’s new organizing principle. Every fact demonstrating the impropriety of the Comey case applies with equal force here. In James’s case, the animus is even clearer: years of vitriolic attacks from Trump and his allies calling for her prosecution—rhetoric that began nearly a decade ago.

Every selective prosecution, apart from working a horrific injustice on the defendant, corrodes public faith in equal justice and leaves an indelible stain on the Department of Justice. When citizens see the criminal code wielded as a political cudgel, they lose faith not only in a single case but in the justice system itself. That cynicism may prove the most lasting damage of all.

Letitia James will very likely beat these charges—the case is weak, sloppy, and above all brazenly political. But the rank, corrupt misuse of the federal prosecutorial power exacts a cost even if the courts do the right thing.

The integrity of the Department of Justice is a core aspect of the rule of law. It now has been shattered, and the collateral damage to the rule of law itself is inevitable.

Not that Trump cares a farthing about any of that. He will keep skating from one wrecked case to another, claiming vindication or shifting blame as each collapses. He’s already extracted a pound of flesh—the anxiety, the reputational hit, the legal bills. For his enemies, that’s punishment enough.

Bondi and Halligan, though, may not skate so easily. They hold law licenses that obligate them to uphold ethical rules they’ve shredded beyond recognition. When the dust settles, their reckoning may be the only justice left standing.

The Framers’ Warning

The Founders foresaw this danger. Madison warned in Federalist 51 that the greatest threat to liberty would come not from foreign invasion but from “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands.” The Constitution’s structure—its separation of powers and independent judiciary—was meant precisely to forestall what Trump is now attempting: the conversion of the machinery of justice into a personal weapon of vengeance.

Hamilton, in Federalist 65, defined “the abuse or violation of some public trust” as the essence of political corruption. What greater abuse could there be than a President turning the criminal law into a means of retribution, and prosecutors into instruments of fear?

That is the terrain where the country now lives.

It’s also the territory leading in a straight line from constitutional rule to tyranny. The instances of democratic backsliding in the last 100 years predominantly begin not with tanks in the streets, but with the exploitation of legal mechanisms, transformed corruptly into instruments of power and vengeance for the personal benefit of a strongman tyrant.

The Department of Justice, once lionized as a bulwark against tyranny, has now been recast as tyranny’s first instrument. As all-in as Bondi, Halligan, and the rest have gone on Trump’s reprisal agenda, the Department is now beyond redemption. It falls to the rest of us—lawyers, judges, and citizens alike—to fight to restore the boundaries that the administration has annihilated.

Reprinted with permission from Talking Feds.

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