Tag: pam bondi
Will The Epstein Scandal Force MAGA Rubes To Confront Reality?

Will The Epstein Scandal Force MAGA Rubes To Confront Reality?

The editors of the Wall Street Journal editorial page would very much like to see the Epstein matter resolved. Acknowledging that kooks who are actually in charge in Trump's Justice Department, they pine that perhaps "Ms. Bondi and Mr. Patel could call a news conference, provide context on the mentions of Mr. Trump, and explain why releasing raw files could do more harm than good."

The Journal editorial board is engaged in denial. Kash Patel and Pam Bondi cannot conceivably hold the kind of press conference the editors are fantasizing about because they, among others holding high government offices, are key propagators of the Epstein and other conspiracies. Conspiracies are their calling card. Only in the last few weeks has Trump become the victim of one.

FBI Director Kash Patel spread the fiction that the 2020 election was stolen by Italian satellites, claimed that Jan. 6 was an inside job, and proclaimed, "There's a lot of good to a lot of (Qanon.)" Attorney General Pam Bondi maintains that Trump won Pennsylvania in 2020; she was also one of a team of lawyers in Trump's first impeachment who circulated the idea that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered with the 2016 election, and she told the world in March that she had the Epstein files on her desk.

Even as the Epstein story was creating heartburn in the White House, Team Trump's response was to immediately turbocharge another conspiracy — that Barack Obama committed treason — to distract and feed the beast they have created.

The heart of the MAGA message is that Trump's opponents are not just wrong, but part of a vast conspiracy to commit pretty much the worst crime most people can imagine. As self-styled anti-censorship activist Mike Benz explained, belief in a widespread pedophile cult helped to birth the MAGA movement. "You trained us to go after this issue. We have been grown in a lab. Chemicals have been mixed together specifically to breed this particular type of person in the MAGA movement who would care about Jeffrey Epstein."

At this point, it's not even clear that those with access to the government's information can distinguish between their imaginings and actual facts. Bondi pulled hundreds of prosecutors and other Justice Department officials from work on other crimes to scour the Epstein files for the mother lode of revelations about a "client list" and the participation of major Democrats and Hollywood elites in Epstein's evil abuse.

To be clear, there is no question that Epstein committed terrible crimes, and his closeness to wealthy and powerful people is disturbing. But that's not what the MAGA forces conjured in their febrile imaginations. They had visions of a client list containing names like Chuck Schumer, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Nancy Pelosi, George Clooney and Hillary Clinton (as well as Bill, of course). A steady diet of slander and deception has led them to believe everyone in public life they disagree with on policy must be implicated in this repulsive conduct.

But after the weeks-long search, Justice Department investigators apparently found little more than what was already known, which led to furious finger-pointing. Bondi blamed Patel for withholding documents while FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino pouted that he was so worried about disappointing his mouth-breathing fans that he could not report to work. Then Bondi and Patel had the unenviable task of reporting to Trump that the most famous name their record searches yielded was his own — which is not surprising considering the 15-year Trump-Epstein friendship.

And so the MAGA revolution is eating its own.

Lest we get too excited and imagine that imminent revelations about Trump's participation in Epstein's crimes would spell his political downfall, let's recall that Trump was able to persuade Republicans in 2016 that he was best situated to take on the corruption in American politics because he had played the game himself.

There is no evidence that Trump is a pedophile. On the other hand, there is evidence that he took a very latitudinarian attitude toward Epstein's conduct, smirking about how they shared a love of beautiful women and that Epstein liked them on the "younger side."

Trump's later-concocted story about banning Epstein from Mar-A-Lago because he was a "creep" was an obvious post-hoc gloss. He and Epstein were close enough to jet back and forth between Palm Beach and New York together on Epstein's plane and to hold parties with "calendar girls" at which the two men were the only other guests. Does it seem in character for Trump to exclude someone for moral turpitude? No, their relationship ruptured because of a bitter competition over the auction of a Palm Beach estate ironically titled Maison de l'Amitie (House of Friendship).

The most cleansing outcome of this scandal would be for the MAGA faithful to be brought face-to-face with what lying, shameless lowlives the Trump crowd are. It would be a teachable moment if they were to see with their own eyes that the elaborate tales of pedophilia were all "boob bait for Bubba"; that it was all lies all the time. That, not pinning hopes of finding a smoking gun about Trump's behavior, is the very best reason to release as many of the files as possible.

Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the "Beg to Differ" podcast. Her latest book is Hard Right: The GOP's Drift Toward Extremism.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Furious Trump Barks At Reporter For Asking About Epstein Fiasco

Furious Trump Barks At Reporter For Asking About Epstein Fiasco

Donald Trump isn’t a fan of the media spending another minute on Jeffrey Epstein, his old acquaintance and a convicted sex offender.

The president jumped in when a reporter asked Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday to explain why there was time missing from roughly 11 hours of video footage released of the night Epstein killed himself.

“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” Trump asked rhetorically. “This guy’s been talked about for years.” He then criticized the journalist for not asking about the floods in Texas or other news.

“Are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable,” Trump added.

Bondi ultimately gave some semblance of an answer, explaining to the journalist that the Federal Bureau of Prisons resets the video every night.

“Every night the video is reset, and every night should have the same minute missing,” she said.

However, she added that her department was looking into the claims by checking that the missing minutes existed in other dates as well.

“We’re looking for that video to release that as well, showing that a minute is missing every night,” she said. “And that’s it on Epstein.”

These comments follow a MAGA-world implosion on Monday, after Trump’s administration released a report saying that not only did Epstein kill himself but also that there was no existence of a client list. In other words, the administration shut down the right-wing conspiracy about a supposed laundry list of celebrities and politicians who have committed sexual crimes.

The timing of that report is almost uncanny, given that just last month Trump’s former bestie Elon Musk told the entirety of X that they weren’t releasing the so-called Epstein list because Trump himself was on it.

“[Trump] is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public,” he wrote in a since-deleted post.

The administration has been dangling the Epstein carrot over their loyal MAGA followers for quite some time.

In February, they pulled another unsavory stunt by doing a spoof release of the “Epstein files.” As Daily Kos previously reported, Trump and his team gathered up as many MAGA influencers as they could at the White House, and gave them all cute little Epstein-themed binders with stickers and infographics that had, well … nothing new in it.

And now, just like last time, they’re delivering their voters a big pile of nothing.

This time, however, it seems to conveniently absolve everyone of any potential ties to criminality.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Why Pam Bondi Wants To Make Abrego Garcia Disappear

Why Pam Bondi Wants To Make Abrego Garcia Disappear

For the great sin of having been mistakenly transported to El Salvador, Kilmar Abrego Garcia has drawn the full wrath of the federal government, which seems determined to do whatever it can to punish and immiserate him.

The story, almost too baroque to believe, begins in bureaucratic error and ends in calculated cruelty. Abrego, a noncitizen who was legally present in the United States pending an immigration proceeding, was wrongfully deported to El Salvador after a series of cascading mistakes by federal authorities.

What followed was not a correction, nor an apology, but a concerted effort by the Department of Justice—led by Florida U.S. Attorney Markenzy Lapointe and spearheaded in the public arena by the ever-theatrical Pam Bondi—to discredit, disparage, and ultimately criminally charge Abrego with puffed-up offenses that now appear to have exaggerated his conduct.

Rather than acknowledge and correct its own injustice, the government went into a defensive crouch, proffering a shifting series of excuses for why Abrego deserved no sympathy. These ranged from:

  • arguing it was impossible to bring him back because he was under the sovereign control of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele;
  • portraying him as a serious terrorist who deserved to be deported (remember the photoshopped tattoos on a man’s fingers that Trump brandished?);
  • asserting they would not permit him back in the country under any circumstance, but would deport him elsewhere;
  • resisting disclosure of their own errors on the grounds that the information consisted of state secrets;
  • and finally, arguing in court that the mistake was minor and non-prejudicial—essentially, no harm, no foul.

All of the arguments were legally dubious, factually suspect, or both. More than that, the Administration brought to bear an unmistakable malice and obstinacy: locked in a dispute of its own making, it was determined to win at all costs.

This is not a case being handled on autopilot by a faceless bureaucracy. It bears the fingerprints of a political machine that—from the President on down—appears eager to punish anyone who embarrasses them, even (and especially) when the embarrassment results from their own misconduct.

Evolved systems of justice do not see criminal prosecutions as no-holds-barred personal battles.

The claim that Abrego hadn’t actually suffered anything legally cognizable, despite being stranded for months in dangerous and unstable conditions in CECOT prison, was particularly cynical. Just this week, Abrego’s lawyers alleged the opposite: that he, along with other prisoners, was beaten and tortured in prison, including being made to kneel overnight and denied bathroom access. This is the high-tech hellhole that the United States has paid El Salvador millions of dollars to house its deportees.

The DOJ, facing increasing legal pressure, did eventually bring Abrego back to the United States—supposedly via the heroic intervention of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But the Administration wasn’t bringing him back to reunite him with his family. Instead, it brought him back in shackles to face criminal charges.

It was a breathtaking inversion: the man wrongly deported by the government becomes the defendant in a case brought by that same government. The obvious theatrics were designed to pull victory from the jaws of defeat, to assert that the Administration had been right all along, and that Abrego is in fact among the “worst of the worst.”

At the center of this prosecutorial contortion is Attorney General Pam Bondi, playing her familiar Trump-era role: serving as both legal mouthpiece and media surrogate for Trump’s personal priorities. Bondi repeatedly attacked Abrego’s character in public and painted him as a dangerous criminal—straying far outside the four corners of the indictment and putting on a clinic of ethical violations.

The indictment that the feds returned before bringing Abrego back took an already known episode—in which state police did not charge him—and bulked it up with a conspiracy charge painting Abrego as a criminal mastermind.

To support that narrative, they secured the cooperation of the actual head of the operation by granting him a sweetheart deal that let him remain in the U.S. despite a long record of federal crimes, many involving immigration. The conspiracy Abrego is charged with began in 2009 even though the cooperator told them he didn’t meet Abrego until 2015. He also said Abrego had driven for him “on multiple occasions,” which hardly sounds like the level of culpability of a co-conspirator.

The use of that cooperating defendant to get at Abrego violated what used to be DOJ policy of not “cooperating down,” i.e., not using a more culpable defendant to get at a less culpable one. But whatever shreds of DOJ norms remain gave ground to the overriding imperative of winning the battle against Abrego.

Then, matters took a surprising turn.

The government moved to detain Abrego pretrial. The judge denied the motion, holding that the prosecutors couldn’t show that he posed any flight risk or threat to the community, and ordered him released.

DOJ promptly played perhaps its nastiest card: it told the court that as soon as Abrego was released, it would seize him and deport him to a third country.

So much for Bondi’s preening lecture about the need to convict Abrego and have him serve a federal sentence before deportation. Now, just as Abrego was able to consider the prospect of freedom for the first time since he was unlawfully seized and sent to El Salvador, the DOJ’s plan is to forgo the criminal trial and deport him immediately.

This prompted Abrego’s lawyers to take an almost unheard-of step that underscores just how Kafkaesque this case has become. They asked the court to keep him in custody—at least until the government could guarantee it wouldn’t deport him immediately upon release.

His fear was simple and chilling: that once outside the courthouse walls, ICE would swoop in and vanish him before he ever had a chance to mount a defense or tell his story.

That’s where matters now stand. The judge has agreed to keep Abrego in jail—separated from his family, but also from the clutches of ICE agents—while it hears his argument that he is entitled to stand trial and therefore must not be deported.

The government has consented to temporarily halting deportation—it doesn’t have much choice while Abrego remains behind bars. But his legal claim that the government can be forced to put him through a criminal trial rather than deport him is a steep uphill climb.

And that means that once his emergency motion runs its course, Abrego will likely again find himself on a plane—this time bound for some third-party country like South Sudan.

Apart from the puerile obstinacy of beating Abrego—of using the full power of the Executive Branch to make life hellish for one man who had the misfortune of being mistakenly deported—the government’s plan to deport him before trial serves another malevolent purpose.

Deporting Abrego ensures that much of the underlying record—both the suspect circumstances of his deportation and the details of the prosecution—remain sealed and buried. If he’s gone, there’s no trial. And if there’s no trial, there’s no public reckoning.

The indictment itself already reads like something of a stretch. And the factual record about what happened to Abrego in El Salvador—and the conditions of his detention—could prove deeply inconvenient for the government. Quietly deporting him to a third country would bury that evidence forever.

So here we are, with a criminal defendant entitled to be at liberty but pleading to be kept in jail, where it’s safer. A man who never should have been deported is brought back not to be made whole, but to be prosecuted. Then, when that fails, to be vanished again.

It’s a tortuous saga, and it may be tempting to view it as an aberration. But it’s not. It’s a window into a government that regularly confuses its own political and propagandistic ends with national security—and that treats every argument against it as an act of aggression that must be crushed.

They are in it not to faithfully execute the law, but to win. To punish enemies. To intimidate opponents. With the structural checks and balances of government increasingly disabled or acquiescent, it falls to us—the people—to call them on it, and to raise our voices in protest at every turn.

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 Substack.

US Attorney General Pam Bondi

Pam Bondi Shows How It's Not Done

In her press conference Friday announcing the unsealing of Department of Justice criminal charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Attorney General Pam Bondi put on a clinic—in how to make such announcements improperly.

Bondi overreached grotesquely, in ways that likely violated DOJ, bar association, and federal guidelines, and possibly the U.S. Constitution as well. In her excess of zeal, she tarred Abrego Garcia with external allegations and may well have undermined the prospects for conviction.

This is not Bondi’s first flagrant departure from appropriate conduct in informing the public about DOJ charges. It’s become her M.O. to throw around inflammatory charges against defendants combined with fulsome and legally irrelevant praise of President Trump.

She should, and likely does, know better. In other times, the Department’s disciplinary processes would come down hard on her. But taking a page from her patron, she has also neutered norms and rules designed to rein in abuses. For former DOJ staffers, it’s stunning and deeply disheartening to see the abuses come from the very top, and to witness a kind of bloodthirst for conviction replace the Department’s deep institutional allegiance to the presumption of innocence.

The presumption of innocence is a cornerstone not just of American law but of nearly all evolved criminal justice systems. It is a counterweight to the enormous power of the state and a bulwark against the prospect that the government could use the criminal law to punish opponents and suppress dissent. The idea is encapsulated in the famous maxim of the foundational legal expositor William Blackstone: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”

The presumption of innocence requires that prosecutors present their evidence in a court of law according to rules of evidence and other legal safeguards, including the burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. It follows that in publicly announcing charges against a defendant—which are not evidence but mere allegations—a prosecutor must restrict herself to the information set out in the grand jury indictment or other charging document, and must scrupulously characterize that information as government contentions, not proof.

That limitation, which is a matter of second nature to a seasoned prosecutor, gives rise to several independent strictures. Violating them potentially carries administrative, disciplinary, judicial, and even criminal penalties.

Among the most serious is the prohibition in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure (formally enacted by the Supreme Court with congressional oversight) on public disclosure of “matters occurring before the grand jury.” Once a grand jury has returned an indictment, the set of allegations in that document becomes public, and so a prosecutor may disclose those allegations. But by the same token, she may disclose only those allegations and must make it clear that they are simply allegations and that a defendant retains the presumption of innocence.

Then there are Department of Justice restrictions on media statements in the Justice Manual. These specify, among other things, that a prosecutor may only confirm basic public facts, such as court dates, and can never offer public statements about the strength of the evidence, character of the accused, or likelihood of conviction.

Departures from these DOJ guidelines are subject to discipline by the Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which investigates misconduct and makes findings that can lead to various recommended sanctions, including termination.

There are also separate ethical rules administered by state bar authorities that forbid lawyers from making out-of-court statements that present a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing a proceeding. Those are typically part of state-specific regulatory systems of ethical restrictions. In Florida, where Attorney General Bondi holds her bar license, these include a special requirement that a “Florida prosecutor must refrain from making statements that ‘heighten public condemnation of the accused’ unless necessary to inform the public and serve a legitimate law enforcement purpose.”

Finally, the prohibition on public commentary outside the four corners of the indictment has a constitutional dimension. Courts have suppressed evidence and even reversed criminal convictions for misconduct that violates a defendant’s right to the presumption of innocence—for example, improperly influencing the jury pool.

The transgression, and thus the prospect of court sanction, is greater when the inflammatory statement comes from a high-level government official. As the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals put it in a case growing out of Hurricane Katrina: “When statements come from high-level government officials such as a United States Attorney, they are more likely to be taken seriously by the press and the public and thus more likely to influence public opinion—and potentially, the jury pool.”

The bottom line, ingrained in the mindset of experienced prosecutors, is straightforward: when announcing criminal charges, stick scrupulously to the four corners of the indictment; emphasize that they are allegations and the defendant is presumed innocent; and never malign the defendant with extraneous incendiary characterizations—for example, by asserting, as AG Bondi did on Fox News in discussing the charges against state court judge Hannah Duggan, that she must be “deranged.”

In this case, the indictment itself—and in particular the conspiracy charge—gave Bondi plenty of material to paint Abrego Garcia in the most sinister terms.

The indictment has a central story, and it's one we've known about for some time. In 2022, Abrego Garcia was stopped by state troopers in Tennessee. He was driving a Suburban and there were nine other passengers, all Hispanic males, in the car with him. He told police that he was transporting the nine from one job site to another. The officers, who recorded the episode on their body cameras, suspected that he might have been transporting undocumented aliens, but they opted to let him go with a warning about an expired license.

That story is the dramatic centerpiece—really the only detailed drama—in the indictment. The rest of the document is cursory and elliptical. But it seeks to paint a picture of Abrego Garcia's criminal conduct that goes very far beyond—in time and kinds of crimes—the traffic stop.

The key is the government’s use of a conspiracy charge. Conspiracy law is a very powerful tool for prosecutors because it provides for liability among all conspirators for the criminal conduct of each of them. It does, however, require the government to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant agreed to participate in the conspiracy.

Thus, perhaps the key allegation in the whole indictment is in paragraphs 9–10, alleging that Abrego Garcia joined a 10-year conspiracy (from about 2016 to about 2025) to transport aliens within the United States.

That is the linchpin that lets the government load up the indictment with allegations of conduct from unidentified conspirators (CC-1 to CC-6 in the indictment). Some of the allegations have nothing to do with Abrego Garcia; others have nothing to do with the identified goal of the conspiracy.

Paragraph 26 alleges that CC-6 was involved in the killing of more than 50 migrants when the trailer they were in overturned in Mexico. Paragraphs 19–20 detail the money laundering part of the operation by CCs 3, 4, and 5. There is no mention of Abrego Garcia.

Use of conspiracy law to expand a defendant’s liability is fair game. But it depends on proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Abrego Garcia agreed to join the conspiracy. That may prove tricky. The indictment just states—without elaboration—that Abrego Garcia agreed with CC-1 to “work together to transport undocumented aliens for profit and private financial gain.”

The story, however, looks more complicated than that. According to news reports, CC-1 is a man named Jose Hernandez-Reyes, who is serving a 30-month sentence in Alabama for transporting undocumented migrants. He has been granted limited immunity to cooperate against Abrego Garcia. He supposedly told federal officers who visited him in April that he ran a Baltimore-based taxi service for transporting migrants and that he hired Abrego Garcia “on multiple occasions” to do the driving.

That hardly seems like a clear demonstration that Abrego Garcia agreed to join the overall criminal enterprise. It certainly leaves room for argument that he's more like a hired hand who helped out on multiple occasions.

We know that the chief of the criminal division in the Nashville U.S. Attorney's office where the case was brought resigned over the decision to charge Abrego Garcia. He was a career prosecutor who had served for 15 years. That sort of resignation is, first, incredibly rare—or was before the Bondi era—and second, an indication of something possibly very abnormal in the case approval process. Perhaps it was the decision to treat Abrego Garcia as a mastermind leader of the conspiracy with Hernandez-Reyes, rather than an occasional driver.

The bottom line, though, is that the concrete and detailed story of the Tennessee stop stands very far apart from the balance of the indictment, which is fairly flimsy and conclusory. It’s the big leg up of the conspiracy charge that enables the government to use the traffic stop to portray Abrego Garcia as a central player in a longstanding scheme of unlawful transportation of migrants—with stray allegations of gun-running, drugs, and sexual abuse thrown in.

Bondi was asked at the press conference why, since the grand jury had uncovered all the additional information involving guns, drugs, and sexual assault, the government didn’t charge Abrego Garcia with those crimes. This was her complete response: “We were clear to say that he is charged with very serious charges of alien smuggling, and again, there were children involved in that. You know—human trafficking, not only in our country but in our world, is very, very real. It’s very dangerous.”

In his famous speech, “The Federal Prosecutor,” Attorney General (and later Associate Justice) Robert Jackson wrote, “While the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst. The federal prosecutor can strike hard blows, but he is not at liberty to strike foul ones.”

The conspiracy charges against Abrego Garcia strike a hard blow—though, as noted, they may result in problems of proof for the prosecution. But the Attorney General’s remarks at her triumphant, pugnacious press conference repeatedly struck foul ones.

For starters, Bondi leveled wildly inflammatory charges against Abrego Garcia that strayed far from the four corners of the indictment. She asserted that the grand jury found that Abrego Garcia was a full-time smuggler of migrants, not a contractor (“They found that this was his full-time job.”). She said that he made over 100 trips and transported over 1,000 migrants. (Notice these allegations seem to contradict the account of Hernandez-Reyes, who told the feds that Abrego Garcia had driven loads of migrants “on multiple occasions.”) She told the press that the grand jury found that Abrego Garcia solicited nude photographs and videos of minors. She alleged that he had played a role in the murder of a rival gang member’s mother.

The indictment includes not a word about any of these incendiary allegations that indeed do make Abrego Garcia seem like an incorrigible criminal and one of the “worst of the worst,” as Trump has put it. In fact, Bondi’s repeated assertions about what the grand jury “found” are bizarre. Grand juries don’t submit ancillary findings in support of their indictments. All their allegations are contained within the indictment (which, typically, prosecutors draft).

And to the extent Bondi was relying on evidence that the grand jury heard but that did not wind up in the indictment, she would be revealing confidential grand jury information in violation of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. That is the sort of serious transgression that typically results in discipline of the attorney and potential dismissal of the case.

Bondi further peppered her comments with chest-thumping and hammy lines that again just have no place in a media briefing on a federal indictment. She dramatically proclaimed that Abrego Garcia had “traded the innocence of minor children for profit,” whatever that means. When asked what had changed since authorities declined to charge Abrego Garcia for the 2022 traffic stop, she answered, “What has changed since then is Donald Trump is now President of the United States and our borders are again secure,” which manages to be improperly political, nonresponsive, and bananas all at once.

She then asserted that the police work on the Abrego Garcia case had “stopped this international smuggling ring,” but Hernandez-Reyes has been in federal custody since April 8, after being picked up by Border Patrol agents on an unrelated charge. She came back repeatedly to the “disturbing” fact that there were children involved, and detoured to an unrelated case in which MS-13 allegedly groomed young children to be gang members. She said that Abrego Garcia not only had joined the conspiracy but played a “significant” role in it.

Bondi has regularly violated legal, ethical, and internal requirements in her public remarks about federal charges. But the Abrego Garcia press conference reads like an issue-spotter ethics exam for young prosecutors. Virtually every sentence contains one or more improprieties. Any potential juror that heard it, not to mention the public as a whole, would have to have been left with a sinister picture of Abrego Garcia as one of the “worst of the worst” that seems flatly discordant with the available evidence and bears little relation to the actual allegations in the indictment. It’s a truly disgraceful performance.

It’s not hard to discern Bondi’s motivation for splattering mud all over Abrego Garcia. He was the first migrant whom the Trump administration had to admit it had deported by mistake. His case has been the hottest flashpoint in a series of controversial deportations, and he has become the poster child for the Administration’s fecklessness and indifference to its own constitutional violations.

When faced with court orders to return him to the United States, the administration trotted out a series of lousy legal arguments and implausible factual accounts to try to evade their constitutional responsibility to bring him back. But they were only digging an ever-deeper hole for themselves, both in the courts and in public opinion, and their refusal to facilitate his return was becoming untenable.

The government insisted that it couldn’t and wouldn’t bring Abrego Garcia home so many times, that finally throwing in the towel was an embarrassment. The criminal charges are a face-saving measure, and the more they can paint Abrego Garcia as a savage monster, the more they can deflect attention from their own lawlessness and portray Trump as a strongman savior.

If this case goes to trial, I think it's likely that the government’s proof will not match its allegations, starting with Abrego Garcia’s supposed joining of the conspiracy. The cross-examinations of CC-1 and CC-2 figure to be bruising. The defense also has a strong story to tell of vindictive and politicized prosecution, and various ways to make hay of Bondi’s improper public comments.

For those reasons, I think the administration is likely to play hardball and bring all leverage it can to induce Abrego Garcia to plead guilty, probably to the one substantive count based on the 2022 traffic stop. They weren’t able to disappear him permanently into CECOT, but keeping his story—which is mainly a story of governmental misconduct and malice—from coming out would be the next best thing for the Administration. It would prevent Abrego Garcia and the justice system from turning the mirror on the Administration’s skein of overreach, arrogance, and evasion since March 15, when they shipped him to El Salvador by mistake. They would be able to bury the whole ugly mess, keep the most important parts of the story from coming to light, and preempt any efforts to hold the government accountable. That’s a foul blow to democracy.

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 Substack.

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