The descent is going faster and faster by the day.
Trump has spent months chipping away at the barriers that have longprotected the Justice Department from political interference. But now federal prosecutors and legal observers are bracing for what comes next as he escalates that effort rapidly.
Veteran lawyers in a Virginia U.S. attorney’s office fear that the ouster of their bosslast week — after a White House push to prosecute two of the president’s political foes — could portend even more overt efforts by Trump to dictate the outcome of investigations.
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“I just want people to act. They have to act,” Trump told reporters outside the White House Saturday evening, adding, “We have to act fast.”
Did he say they have to act? Did he mention anything about acting?
Former Justice Department officials said they are stunned by what they see as the acceleration and increasing audacity of Trump’s demands.
Or in other words the acceleration of Trump’s dictatorship.
Just in the past week,the president and members of his administration threatened to prosecute critics for what they described as “hate speech,” which is itself not illegal under federal law. They floated the notion of charging Democratic donors and organizers under federal racketeering statutes. And on Friday, they forced out Erik S. Siebert, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, after he opted not to pursue indictments against New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) and former FBI director James B. Comey, citing alack of evidence that they had committed crimes.
Dictator behavior. Not a dress rehearsal but the thing itself.
On Saturday, Trump capped off those rapid-fire developments with an extraordinary directive, delivered publicly over social media, instructing Attorney General Pam Bondi to swiftly prosecute Comey, James and other political rivals and back U.S. attorneys willing to get that job done.
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“This is unlike anything we’ve ever seen,” Schiff told MSNBC on Sunday. “Nixon had his enemies list, but it wasn’t so exhaustive and blatant as this, where he was ordering in front of the whole country, the Justice Department to go after his enemies.”
Those were innocent times.
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