Crime is Now Legal (At Least for Trump’s Friends)

Welcome to Doomsday Scenario, my regular column on national security, geopolitics, history, and—unfortunately—the fight for democracy in the Trump era. I hope if you’re coming to this online, you’ll consider subscribing right here. It’s easy—and free:

A lot of attention has come in recent days to the sheer size of the corruption racket surrounding the president and the White House. The New York Times did a great piece this weekend about how Trump is pillaging the presidency, and Evan Osnos — the current reigning king of reporting on oligarchs and the super-rich — this week has a New Yorker piece about “Donald Trump’s Politics of Plunder.” As one lobbyist told Evan, Trump’s influence-selling behavior in office is “outer-borough Mafia shit.”

But the spreading corruption around the presidency doesn’t stop with the president.

There’s also a broader, equally worrisome trend playing out at the margins of the national headlines: Day by day, we’re seeing the Justice Department effectively decriminalize and wave away crimes by Trump’s friends and instead selectively focus investigatory resources on Trump’s adversaries and enemies.

This is textbook authoritarianism, a classic example of what one-time Peru president General Óscar Benavides captured in his adage: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”

We’re seeing near-daily examples now of how “crime” and investigations are being weaponized for political ends.

On the friends side, just this week, we’ve seen Donald Trump pardon a Virginia sheriff caught on hidden cameras accepting $75,000 to provide local businessmen with law enforcement powers and also pardon two reality stars caught in a $30 million fraud scheme. That follows earlier, troubling examples — like the Justice Department dropping corruption charges against New York mayor Eric Adams as part of a deal to gain cooperation on immigration roundups and a pardon of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, as well as a Tennessee state senator convicted of campaign finance fraud.

Few examples of this corruption are more clear, though, than the May 13th Onion headline “Sean Combs Asks For Quick Trial So He Can Get To Part Where Trump Pardons Him,” which was then followed up three days later by reporting from Rolling Stone showing that angling for a Trump pardon was exactly what Sean Combs is trying to do.

When Donald Trump was elected and Kash Patel named to head the FBI, one of the immediate alarms I sounded was about what the politicization of the bureau’s leadership and mission would mean for its public corruption portfolio:

Now we’re seeing what that corrupting influence looks like in practice.

The Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, which oversees corruption investigations and prosecutions, has already been cut from two dozen prosecutors to just four to six, effectively paralyzing the office. Then, earlier this month, NBC News and the New York Times reported on how the FBI is “disbanding” its elite public corruption team, known as “CR15,” at the Washington Field Office and pushed out the special-agent-in-charge who oversaw the team. (These are the agents, for reference, who helped special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s efforts to overthrow the 2020 election results, known by the codename “Arctic Frost.”) Then, days later, the Washington Post reported that the Justice Department was proposing to let prosecutors indict members of Congress more freely, removing a routine nation check that tried to ensure such charges weren’t politically motivated. 

Put those developments all together and it’s clear that the FBI and the Justice Department are basically winding down routine investigation of public corruption nationwide. Instead, the only “corruption” that will be investigated going forward will be politically motivated cases.

We didn’t have to wait long to see the fruits of these changes: Just hours after the Washington Post report, the interim New Jersey US Attorney — Trump’s former criminal defense attorney Alina Habba — filed obviously politically motivated and dubious charges against a New Jersey congresswoman. Last month, she also announced she was investigating the governor and state attorney general for equally dubious reasons.

But it’s not just the wildly inexperienced Habba who is trying to, shall we say … trump up … charges on the president’s enemies. In one particularly strange example, Ric Grenell — the online-troll-turned-MAGA-official installed as the president’s head of the Kennedy Center — said he was planning to refer the theater’s debt load and deferred maintenance for possible prosecution. “It’s criminal,” Grenell told President Trump and the center’s board. “We’re going to refer this to the U.S. attorney’s office here.” As the New York Times archly wrote, “It was not immediately clear what officials thought might be criminal, or why they thought it merited the attention of federal investigators.”

Actual “criminality,” though, is no longer the point — the point of these investigations going forward will be silence and punish those who step out of line or dare to stand up to the MAGA crowd.

Meanwhile, the FBI and other national security agencies are working hard to crack down on unfriendly leaks, including using (unreliable) polygraphs more widely, and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino announced yesterday that the bureau is reallocating agents to look into a variety of past politically-chosen cases, like the leaking of the Dobbs decision. Bongino’s announcement comes, by the way, after weeks of mounting pressure from MAGA activists that the FBI isn’t being weaponized enough — that the duo of Bongino and director Kash Patel haven’t sufficiently delivered on punishing Trump’s adversaries.

To say that this is incredibly dangerous territory for the country is an understatement. The most pure expression of a democracy is one where crime is investigated and prosecuted without fear or favor — and the path we’re now embarking upon as a nation is not only one that will have ruinous consequences for the rule of law but incredibly corrupting ones for the free market as well. Companies that are sufficiently Trump-friendly — and, for instance, donate to his “library” — will get a license to break the law along with their political alliance. MAGA activists and adherents will be able to crime as long as they stay sufficiently loyal. The world is upside down.

To see this new world of injustice, one doesn’t need to look any further than one of last week’s most insane headlines: The Trump administration, on behalf of the US government and US taxpayers, agreed to pay $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot dead by Capitol Police when she stormed the Capitol as part of the January 6th insurrection.

Thanks for reading — if you have any evidence of corruption that’s going unpunished in this administration, and/or want to add me to your own classified group chats, I’m vermontgmg.14 on Signal. That’s my normal username, everywhere, with an extra Vermont: the 14th state.

GMG

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