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This is an adapted excerpt from the Sept. 26 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
On the face of it, this week has not been a great week for New York City. Eric Adams has become the city's first sitting mayor to be criminally indicted.
But the charges are also, in a strange way, reassuring. They show we have a functioning federal government that still holds the rule of law to be a bedrock, sacrosanct thing — particularly in the Department of Justice.
Just take a step back and look at the DOJ that Joe Biden inherited from Donald Trump. During his time in office, Trump tried constantly to subvert federal law enforcement and convert it into a political tool of the president. That’s especially true of the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of New York, arguably the country's most influential federal prosecutor’s office, and the one that just indicted Adams.
The charges against Adams show we have a functioning federal government that still holds the rule of law to be a bedrock, sacrosanct thing.
When Trump became president, Preet Bharara was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. We’d later learn that Trump was regularly calling Bharara, trying to cultivate a personal relationship that made the U.S. attorney so uncomfortable that he reported the contacts to his bosses at the DOJ and eventually refused a call from the president.
Less than a day after Bharara refused that call, he was fired. Trump’s personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, would later brag that he convinced Trump to fire Bharara by reportedly telling the president, “This guy is going to get you.”
It was a pattern Trump would replicate over and over again as president. Whether it was firing FBI Director James Comey after Trump asked him to drop the criminal investigation into then-national security adviser Michael Flynn, or having his attorney general, Bill Barr, fire yet another U.S. attorney for the Southern District, Geoffrey Berman.
In 2020, after Berman prosecuted former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and opened several other investigations into people and banks in Trump’s orbit, he was dismissed by the then-president.
Trump was constantly pushing for prosecutions of his perceived enemies, including Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. Barr also distorted and mischaracterized the Robert Mueller report on the Trump campaign’s Russia contacts. And he appointed special counsel John Durham to investigate those FBI investigators who had looked into Trump and Russia.
We’ve blocked much of this out, but Trump was constantly spending his time as president trying to manipulate the DOJ to do his bidding.
That pressure culminated in his attempted coup after the 2020 election, when Trump considered naming Jeffrey Clark, a mid-level DOJ lawyer, as attorney general so Clark could use the department’s good name to send out a letter saying the election was rigged and get state legislators to overturn the election.
We’ve blocked much of this out, but Trump was constantly spending his time as president trying to manipulate the DOJ to do his bidding.
Now, compare that to the Biden DOJ under Attorney General Merrick Garland. A Department of Justice that has bent over backward to be independent of the White House. They appointed a special counsel — a Republican — to investigate Biden’s own handling of classified documents.
They’ve prosecuted a string of high-profile Democratic officials, including Adams, now former Sen. Bob Menendez, Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, and even Biden’s last surviving son, Hunter Biden, who is awaiting sentencing on charges that even Trey Gowdy, the far-right former congressman and prosecutor thinks are pretty ludicrous.
It is entirely possible that Biden will leave the presidency and never see his son outside of prison again. This is the administration that Republicans say has politically weaponized the DOJ when the opposite is actually true.
This is a point the current U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, made when he announced the Adams indictment.
“The Southern District of New York remains committed to rooting out corruption without fear or favor. And without regard to partisan politics. We are not focused on the right or the left. We are focused only on right and wrong,” Williams said on Thursday.
This is how the DOJ is supposed to work, pursuing justice even when there is zero political benefit in it for Democrats. But here’s the thing: if Trump wins this could all change. These institutions could be put in the hands of his creepiest authoritarian sycophants, like Republican lawyer Mike Davis who is rumored to be in the running for a top DOJ post.
Last year, Davis promised to “rain hell on Washington, D.C.” and fire and indict "a lot of people in the deep state,” including Joe and Hunter Biden. “We’re gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo,” Davis added.
Davis says now he’s just trolling the libs, but Trump wants it to be policy. He’s said as much on the campaign trail.
“We will completely overhaul Kamala’s corrupt Department of Injustice and turn the Injustice Department back into the best law enforcement agency on the planet,” Trump said at a rally in September.
Davis promised to “rain hell on Washington, D.C.” and fire and indict "a lot of people in the deep state,” including Joe and Hunter Biden.
Guess who reposted a clip of those comments on social media? Mike Davis did, with a single word of comment: “Amen.”
Trump is promising to manipulate the American justice system to fit his political needs. And thanks to the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, Trump would have carte blanche to do it as part of his “official duties.”
So I, for one, am grateful for Adams’ indictment and the signal it sends. It shows the rule of law still holds up … for now.