“Trumping” the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C.

Donald Trump has the opposite of the “Midas touch”:  He diminishes everything he comes into contact with. 

It is hard, for example, to think of a single individual who has emerged from an association with Trump with an enhanced reputation.

Take Rudy Giuliani.  He was once “America’s Mayor.” Now he will be forever remembered as the shyster hawking crazy conspiracy theories outside the Four Seasons — a garden shop he thought was going to be a fancy hotel. 

Think also of Jeff Pence, Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions, Jim Mattis, Rex Tillerson, John Kelly.  On and on.  These are all people who were once praised by Trump and then later condemned by the same man.  It does not seem to bother Trump’s supporters that the man with such a keen eye for talent hired all of these people who were later proven to be “idiots” or “cowards” or worse. 

Think of the Kennedy Center:  Attendance numbers have plummeted since Trump took over control. 

Think of the U.S. Supreme Court.  According to the Pew Research Center, less than half of all Americans now have a favorable view of the Court.  This is close to a three-decades low.   

Think of the state of civil discourse in the country.  Grace, subtlety and class are all out.  Cruelty and crudeness are both acceptable.  So too is racism.  And we are now a nation divided in two camps, each of which hates the other.

On a still larger scale, think of our country’s standing internationally.  After all, we are a country that elected a vain, petty and narcissistic buffoon, susceptible to praise and flattery, who acts like a 7th grader with a crush whenever he is in the presence of Vladimir Putin.

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Not surprisingly, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. is now suffering the same effect. 

This is one of the most respected prosecution offices in the country.  Jobs there are extremely difficult to get.  Its lawyers are viewed as the crème-de-la-crème. 

Not for long.  With many prosecutors being fired, transferred or demoted, and many others leaving in discouragement and disgust, the primary purpose of the organization appears to be to prosecute Trump’s personal enemies. 

Settling political scores through selective prosecution runs counter to every single canon of prosecutorial ethics that has ever existed.  Maybe I am naïve, but I am still surprised that every lawyer and every judge on both sides of the aisle is not calling out this behavior. 

The U.S. Attorney’s office is becoming so incompetent that it cannot even secure a conviction in a case in which the defendant is captured on camera – and then admits to – throwing a ham sandwich at a law enforcement officer. 

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Contrary to its previous practice, the U.S. Attorney’s Office is now formally charging almost every case that comes in the door.  This strategy for getting tough on crime might appeal to the unsophisticated. But, as with the “ham sandwich guy,” it will have the opposite effect. 

The office is now wasting its resources – and the resources of the court and everyone else involved in the criminal justice system – on cases that have no business being in court. 

Win/loss records for defense attorneys are already skyrocketing. 

The U.S. Attorney’s Office is also overcharging cases.  A Door Dash driver who runs a stop light and then fails to pull over immediately would once have been charged with a traffic infraction. 

Now that same person is being tackled by a horde of law enforcement officers from multiple agencies, all stepping over each other to issue him a traffic ticket, and then charged with Felony Fleeing of a Law Enforcement Officer.

The person’s fate is now decided by a jury of his peers, not a DMV hearing examiner. 

D.C. juries are wise to this.  They will acquit him, just as they acquitted the “ham sandwich” guy.

And, asking the defendant to plead guilty to the lead charge without any discernible benefit, they are making unreasonable plea offers to resolve the cases short of trial.  

This means more trials.  It means discouraged and overworked government lawyers who are stretched too thin to comply with their discovery obligations and to fully prepare.  It means more cases that are dismissed for discovery violations.  It means more defendants who are acquitted at trial. 

The system is breaking down.  The center cannot hold. 

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On a personal level, it has been painful to read about smart and decent prosecutors being demoted, transferred or fired. 

I worked with both Carlos Valdivia and Samuel White, the two prosecutors who were suspended for referring to the people who attached the Capitol on January 6, 2021 as a “mob.”

White, for example, is a smart and decent man who taught me a lot about firearms during breaks at a gun trial we had together.  Subsequently promoted to a supervisory position, his only offense, as far as I can tell, is that, as the first line supervisor whose name was included on the filing, he either read or did not read the sentencing memo that Valdivia drafted. 

Apparently it did not occur to White that the people who attacked the Capitol building in 2021 can only be referred to “patriots.”  This is Orwellian.

And I have already seen evidence that the quality of new hires at the U.S. Attorney’s Office is plummeting.  After all, what self-respecting lawyer would ever want to be associated with this trainwreck?

For example, I won a motion to suppress hearing earlier this week against a brand-new prosecutor who was worse than many of my opponents during trial advocacy classes in law school.

I am not exaggerating:  The prosecutor had no clue.  The judge and I both had to struggle to keep a straight face during the proceedings.  And when the judge cut off my argument to rule in my favor (“I have heard enough’), the prosecutor sat there with an open mouth, not even realizing that he had just lost the case.  “May I ask,” he stammered finally, “what the Court has suppressed?” 

Defense attorneys will be winning many more such cases in the future.  That is not being tough on crime. 

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As someone who has now devoted his life to the law, it has been painful to see the destruction of the Department of Justice and, more broadly, our legal system that has always been the envy of the world. 

Because that is what Trump does:  He breaks things. 

Trump, the biggest whiner and biggest victim in our country’s history, complained incessantly during the Biden Administration about the “weaponization” of our criminal justice system against him.

To quote Linda Ronstadt:  Poor, poor, pitiful me.

Now Trump publicly announces whom he believes should be prosecuted – James Comey, Letitia James, John Bolton – and his spineless minions heed the call. 

His supporters do not see the hypocrisy in all of this.  More likely, they see it and do not care. 

You have to wonder what kind of extraordinary self-rationalizations Pam Bondi, Jeanine Pirro and others must undergo to maintain their self-respect. 

For example, Pirro stated after the “ham sandwich guy” was acquitted that “law enforcement should never be subjected to assault, no matter how ‘minor’”. 

Serving a man who granted an across-the-board pardon of the people who assaulted many police officers during the storming of the Capitol building, Pirro does not appear to have much self-awareness or sense of irony.    

An expression my mother always loved:  Rules for thee but not for me. 

Woe to us.  Woe to our country.  And shame on the people who continue to support this man.