Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
President Trump’s lawlessness has just gotten worse on many fronts at once. We just learned that the Justice Department’s prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey has been undercut by a key witness, making it look even more corrupt. Meanwhile, Trump just called for the governor of Illinois and the mayor of Chicago to be thrown in prison. And when Mike Johnson was asked about Trump’s call for their jailing, the speaker evaded and dodged. It’s becoming jarringly clear that there’s very little in the way of defenses standing in the way of Trump’s escalating authoritarianism. And yet, at the same time, there is resistance developing inside places like DOJ. And that matters, even if it doesn’t seem like it at this fraught moment. How do we make sense of all these conflicting signals? We’re trying to dig through all of it today with Kristy Parker, who knows DOJ from the inside as a former federal prosecutor and is now counsel at the group Protect Democracy. Hey, Kristy, thanks for coming on.
Sargent: So let’s start with Trump’s deranged attack on Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. Here’s what Trump’s tweet said: “Chicago mayor should be in jail for failing to protect ICE officers. Governor Pritzker also.”
Kristy, this comes after the Illinois governor Pritzker has resisted Trump’s corrupt efforts to send the National Guard into Chicago. Trump is now in effect threatening to jail them for not acquiescing to his bidding. Your response to that?
Parker: Well, unlike the speaker of the House, it’s fairly easy for me to come up with a response to that. There’s absolutely no basis for the president to threaten to put the governor of a state or any other American in jail for simply resisting one of his policies. And even if there were some basis for investigating a person based on any of that, it would not be appropriate for the president to be announcing from his social media account that any person who has not been formally accused of a crime should go to jail. So that’s an easy one.
Parker: That’s right. It’s just another layer in his overall scheme of attempting to chill and squelch all of the opposition to him and his administration by deploying the levers of government power to punish people.
Sargent: Yeah. And we should be clear that the Illinois governor has strongly responded to this as well. He’s not getting pushed around by it. But the point is, this is a message to all other actors in the constitutional system from Donald Trump: if you don’t do my bidding I will threaten to prosecute and jail you.
I mean it’s just almost inconceivable. It’s so hard to really process it. It seems like there’s like this major degradation going on in which Trump is just trying to almost make it seem normal that he’s doing these things, just by doing them day in and day out, and yet they’re obviously highly abnormal and in fact, symptomatic of a deeply sickened system, I think. What do you think?
He does it all the time, to the point where people become used to hearing it. And I think what’s really important to do is to take a step back and ground ourselves in the fact that this is the United States of America. We have a Constitution. We have a democratic form of government based on the rule of law.
These are things that strike at the very heart of the system that we need to remind ourselves we still have and that is still operative in this country.
House Speaker Mike Johnson: Should the mayor of Chicago and the governor of Illinois be in prison? I’m not the Attorney General. I’m the Speaker of the House and I’m trying to manage the chaos here. I’m not following the day to day on that. I do know that they’ve resisted the introduction of or the offering of National Guard troops.
Parker: Well, I think it’s not too pessimistic when it comes to the Speaker of the House. Notable that the Speaker of the House decided to engage in the Senate filibuster tactic instead of answering the question that he was asked there. He didn’t want to answer the question.
So no, we’re not really seeing that right now from any of our elected Republican officials. And that is a large part of the reason why we are in the situation we are in right now, with these rampant abuses of power.
But the Comey case is telling a bit of a different story. He’s being prosecuted for supposedly lying to Congress. He just pleaded not guilty and his lawyer said he will seek to get the case dismissed as a vindictive prosecution. Kristy, can you walk us through what a vindictive prosecution is and the prospects for it succeeding here given the facts set?
Parker: Sure. So every person who’s accused of a crime in this country you know, has all of the rights afforded to them in the Bill of Rights and in the due process and equal protection clauses of the Constitution. So a vindictive prosecution is something that violates due process. And it’s a prosecution that is essentially a retribution for the subject doing something that they had a legal right to do. And here you could absolutely argue that the prosecution is Trump’s vindictive effort to retaliate against James Comey because Comey oversaw the 2016 investigation into Russian interference and potential collusion with the Trump campaign in the 2016 election. And he’s been calling for that long since before the facts of the particular case in which Comey is charged ever crossed anybody’s radar screen.
Parker: Well, so let me just start by saying that, you know, it’s important for people to understand that we don’t have a great sense of what it is that Comey is supposed to have specifically lied about to Congress. The indictment is very vague on that. You heard Comey’s lawyer reference that at the legal proceedings today, saying, you know, we don’t really have a clear sense of what my client is even being charged with here.
And what we’re hearing in this reporting is that Richmond has undermined completely any notion that Comey instructed him to give information. And in fact, according to the ABC report, he’s saying not only did he never tell me to give information about this particular case, he explicitly told me not to talk to the media about FBI cases.
Sargent: To your point, I think we should also note that Trump removed a top prosecutor from that office, which is the U.S. attorney’s office for Virginia’s Eastern District, precisely because he wouldn’t bring bogus prosecutions against Trump’s enemies. And Trump put in this handpicked stooge, Lindsay Halligan, and she’s the one who brought this case against Comey, even though, as you say, other prosecutors thought it was weak. So now that we’ve learned that the prosecutors are saying that the key witness is problematic, doesn’t that underscore just how corrupt Lindsay Halligan’s prosecution of Comey really is?
Trump then publicly forced out that U.S. attorney and then, whether it was meant to be public or not, in a statement on his social media account that was published to the entire country, he made it very clear to the Attorney General that he wanted Comey, Letitia James, and various other people prosecuted — that it needed to be done, that it needed to be done because he had been himself indicted by these people and that his credibility was being destroyed as a result of all of it.
So, you know, none of that looks normal. None of that looks regular. None of that looks anything like the Department of Justice that I served. And I think that you’re seeing that in the departures of all of these folks who understand their own ethical obligations not to bring baseless charges.
Parker: Well, right. And, of course, you know, no one is above the law, and any public official who, you know, abuses their office to do illegal things should be subject to criminal prosecution — as I and many others argued with respect to Mr. Trump.
So, yes, you know, when you link all of the things together that have gone on here, not two weeks ago but starting years ago, then yes, you know, this is — this every aspect of this is — is, you know, off the beam from what it is supposed to be. And again, I think you don’t need to look further than all of the people who have left their jobs as DOJ prosecutors in order to get away from doing something they clearly would believe would be inappropriate and legally unethical in this case.
Parker: I mean, again, the red lights don’t flash any brighter. The blue lights and red lights don’t flash any brighter than when federal prosecutors go to the point of saying, I’ll quit my job if they try to tell me I have to indict this case. I’m writing a memo saying why we can’t indict this case.
So again, when you’re getting that kind of reporting and you’re seeing it come to fruition with people walking out the office door because they won’t go seek an indictment, that really tells you all you need to know. Because, we’ve talked about this before — Trump was given broad immunity for abusing his power with respect to the Department of Justice by the Supreme Court. And he’s clearly taken that and run with it.
Sargent: Well, if you add all this together, you kind of have a split-screen effect. So on one screen, you’ve got someone like Mike Johnson committing a homina homina homina about something as extraordinarily corrupt as Trump essentially calling for the jailing of a governor and a mayor, which suggests that there really aren’t any bulwarks. The Republican Party won’t act as a bulwark against Trump’s lawlessness and abuses of power.
So what I wonder is, should we take some heart from this second screen? You know DOJ — is it really striking that we’re seeing this level of resistance? And can that level of resistance actually, you know, hold back some of the terrible things from happening?
But I do think we can take heart that people are paying attention to the fact that they have to protect themselves. Like, they have to think about whether what they are doing is legal and whether or not it is ethical. And they have to be willing to sacrifice their own careers and possibly put their own liberty in future jeopardy if they’re going to go forward with cases for which they just can’t find the evidence to prove a charge.
And I would tie that together with that even if you find people who will do that, they still have to get it past juries. They still have to get it past twelve Americans to unanimously say that these are crimes. And I think we’re seeing at the grand jury level already that even, you know, that a lot of grand juries are saying, no, you don’t even have probable cause for this, much less proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Sargent: Well, Kristy Parker, I am going to choose to feel optimistic and end on that note with you. Thank you so much for coming on with us today.
Parker: Thank you for having me.
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