Editors at National Review Online criticize the president’s embrace of an objectionable legal strategy.
President Trump’s weekend social media post pressuring Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute his political enemies is an outrage against the Constitution’s guarantees of due process and equal protection under the law.
Sadly, it is also more of the same. Democrats paved the way here with the lawfare abuses on which Trump is doubling down.
It is not true, despite what progressives maintain (when a Republican is in the White House), that the Justice Department is “independent,” answering only to “the rule of law.” The Justice Department is part of the executive branch, subordinate to the president, who answers to the Constitution and the people. This makes for tension: prosecutors are professionally bound to follow the law but also are subject to the president’s directives.
The tension has been resolved over time by the norm that, while presidents guide the DOJ’s enforcement priorities as to subject matter (e.g., more emphasis on border enforcement, even if that means less on, say, public corruption), the administration of justice in individual cases proceeds without political interference — conducted by theoretically nonpartisan prosecutors, applying the law as written and checked by the independent judiciary.
Trump is grossly disregarding this practice.
As elucidated by the since-deleted post that he may have intended as a private message to Bondi, the president has been exhorting the AG to prosecute the Obama-appointed former FBI director James Comey, a principal peddler of the Russiagate smear that Trump was a Kremlin mole; Senator Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), who pushed Russiagate as the House Intelligence Committee chairman and led the two impeachments of Trump (over Ukraine in 2019 and the Capitol riot in 2021); and New York State Attorney General Letitia James, who tried to ruin Trump and his family financially with a massive civil fraud case — an abusive prosecution with no fraud victims in which the absurdly astronomical damage award was recently voided by an appellate court.
