The Justice Department becomes the Just Us Department under Trump

When New York City’s Eric Adams was a mayoral candidate four years ago, he made an effort to appeal to the city’s progressive base. He declared in 2021, for example, “I don’t want or need the support of Tucker Carlson, or anyone else who perpetuates racist, anti-immigrant propaganda.”

This year, however, Adams decided it’d be smart to sit down for an interview with Carlson.

It was part of a larger and unsubtle effort. After the Democratic mayor was indicted by federal prosecutors on corruption charges, and after Donald Trump won a second term in the White House, Adams started trying to curry favor with the incoming Republican administration in its allies. Plenty of observers drew a rather obvious conclusion: The mayor appeared to be angling for either a presidential pardon or a dismissal of his case.

University of Michigan law professor Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney and an MSNBC legal analyst, noted a couple of weeks ago that “it would be a bad look” for the Justice Department to drop a major public corruption case after the mayor showed “public support for Trump.”

She was right, of course, but it appears the Trump administration was unconcerned with appearances. NBC News reported:

Under normal circumstances, prosecutors back off an indictment when they have concerns about the merits of the case, the reliability of the evidence, or the likelihood of a conviction. In Adams’ case, however, the Justice Department instead pointed to Adams’ upcoming re-election bid — why that would be relevant remains unclear — and the mayor’s willingness to work with the administration on matters related to immigration and crime policy.

McQuade told The Wall Street Journal that the developments send the message that “public officials who support Trump’s agenda will get out of jail free.”

And that’s ultimately what makes the Adams story so significant to a national audience: The president and his political appointees at the Justice Department not only appear to be letting politics guide prosecutorial decisions, they also don’t appear to be making much of an effort to hide their motivations.

The transition is effectively complete. The Justice Department is now the Just Us Department.

• The Adams case collapsed one day after Trump pardoned former Gov. Rob Blagojevich, an ex-con whose crimes are synonymous with corrupt Illinois politics, but who also aligned himself with the president.
• Trump’s Justice Department recently abandoned charges against the president’s former co-defendants in the classified documents case.
• Federal prosecutors recently abandoned the criminal case against a former Republican congressman who’d already been found guilty of corruption by a jury.
• Trump’s Justice Department also took steps to abandon a criminal investigation against an incumbent Republican congressman.

All of these developments, of course, coincide with an aggressive campaign to purge federal law enforcement of prosecutors and FBI officials who worked on cases that the president doesn’t like. The efforts are ongoing, and according to the president’s own public comments, they’re likely to get worse.

Taken individually, the disparate stories are scary and infuriating. But taken together, an even more unsettling image comes into view: They’re not disparate stories. They’re the same story.

As Oscar Raimundo Benavides, Peru’s fascist dictator in the 1930s, famously put it, “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”

What’s more, none of this is a secret. Indeed, by all appearances, the brazenness is part of the point: It seems Trump and his team want the political world to know that those expecting to find favor with federal law enforcement should play ball with the White House and its agenda.

Similarly, the president and his operation also seemingly want prosecutors to know that if they file cases against those aligned with Trump, the only people who’ll be punished are those who try to enforce the law.

The New York Times’ David French recently noted, “There’s a very real question as to whether federal law will apply to Trump’s allies at all during Trump’s term. The atmosphere of impunity may be like nothing we’ve seen in our lifetimes.”

The message to those aligned with the White House couldn’t be clearer: They can do as they please, without regard for legal limits, knowing that the president — himself a convicted felon — has created an accountability-free zone for himself and those who agree to follow him.

The result is a crisis unlikely any in modern American history.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.