The emails—which The New Republic obtained in advance of their scheduled release Thursday—deepen our understanding of the adminisration’s extraordinary mishandling of Abrego Garcia’s case. They show in fresh detail how officials sought to create the impression that Abrego Garcia was a dangerous criminal before having any evidence to back up the claim, which has since proven to be unsupported.
But Trump refused to bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States for months—even defying a Supreme Court order to “facilitate” his return—and justified all this largely by citing his supposed MS-13 status. The administration finally brought him back in early June, only to bring new criminal charges against him for smuggling migrants.
But the whistleblower complaint also detailed internal deliberations over Abrego Garcia’s case, and this part is also damning. The newly released emails—submitted by Reuveni’s attorneys to Senator Dick Durbin, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, in response to Durbin’s queries—sharpen our knowledge of this part of the story.
In the March 31 exchange, James Percival, senior counselor to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, was debating with other top officials—at DHS, DOJ, and State—what could be said to the court about Abrego Garcia. One of those officials was Reuveni.
“If we can get a declaration to that effect, yes,” Reuveni answered. This meant the assertion could not be made without a facts-and-evidence-based declaration from ICE on Abrego Garcia’s status.
Subsequently in that chain, an ICE official (whose name is redacted) answered Percival’s question about whether it’s okay to call Abrego Garcia an MS-13 “leader.”
It never materialized. That ICE official did identify Abrego Garcia as a “verified member” of MS-13, based on a formal declaration which at this point had been provided by ICE.
But that ruling rested on “double hearsay,” on paperwork filed by a Maryland cop after Abrego Garcia’s 2019 arrest that cited an unnamed confidential source, and neither the cop nor the source were cross-examined. The cop was subsequently suspended and indicted for serious professional misconduct on an unrelated case.
Here’s Percival’s original email, courtesy of a document supplied by Durbin’s office:
And this is from the unnamed ICE’s official response to Percival (the “declaration” is the aforementioned ICE statement on Abrego Garcia’s status from top ICE official Robert Cerna):
This all looks even worse now that Abrego Garcia has confirmed that he was tortured and beaten there.
After all this, Reuveni refused to sign a legal brief that again charged Abrego Garcia with membership in MS-13, a brief Reuveni believed lacked evidentiary support, according to the complaint. Soon after, he was placed on administrative leave for “failing to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States.” His real offense was demanding that the administration stick to the facts on Abrego Garcia.
What’s more, right after that indictment was secured, another senior prosecutor in the Tennessee office abruptly resigned, reportedly due to concerns that this prosecution, too, was tainted.
The emails advance the story in another way. After the whistleblower complaint broke, DOJ dismissed Reuveni’s claims as “utterly false.” But as Durbin noted in a statement, these new emails “clearly substantiate” the complaint.
The White House’s unceasing legal and propaganda campaign against this one day-laborer from Maryland has constituted an extraordinary abuse of power. We are only beginning to scratch the surface of how corrupt it has been—and what we ultimately learn will surely get a whole lot darker.
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