Revenge Tour Collapsing Into Farce (Again)

When trump secured that ungodly re-election in 2024, one of the things we all knew - supporters and opponents alike - was that he would seek to punish the people perceived to have humiliated trump by exposing his scandals, his fraudulent acts, and his sexual assaults.

As much an open secret as anything else, hell the media called it "Trump's Revenge Tour" and documented the atrocities (via Quinta Jurecic at The Atlantic):

When Donald Trump appointed Lindsey Halligan to act as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, critics worried that he had tapped her specifically to bring prosecutions against his enemies. It didn’t take long for Halligan to prove the critics right. On September 25, she successfully persuaded a Virginia grand jury to indict former FBI Director James Comey. Yesterday, she secured an indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James. Whether those prosecutions will actually hold up under the scrutiny of judges and juries, however, is a different matter.

Presenting the case against Comey to a grand jury was the first time Halligan had acted as a prosecutor. Trump installed her at the U.S. Attorney’s Office after her predecessor, Erik Siebert, reportedly refused to move forward with the case against James and raised concerns about a potential prosecution of Comey. “There is a GREAT CASE, and many lawyers, and legal pundits, say so,” Trump wrote on September 20 in a Truth Social post addressed to “Pam”—which, The Wall Street Journal reported, was intended to be a private note for Attorney General Pam Bondi, not a public message on social media. After that post, the Justice Department began moving quickly against Comey and James. Other criminal cases, including one against Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, are in the works...

Just to note, whenever trump claims "many people say so" without providing actual names of who's saying so is him gaslighting (again) that whatever he's arguing for is perfect and legal... when it isn't.

So since that September, how have the persecutions of Comey and James progressed?

Welp. Turns out trump and his "many lawyers and legal pundits" were absolutely wrong as the judge threw both cases out due to serious procedural errors, namely Halligan's appointment was illegal to begin with (via Ryan Lucas at NPR):

A federal judge on Monday dismissed the Justice Department's criminal cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, finding that the acting U.S. attorney who secured the indictments against the two prominent critics of President Trump was unlawfully appointed.

The decision from U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie on the appointment of Lindsey Halligan as the top prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia marks a significant setback to efforts to go after the president's perceived political enemies.

In dual rulings, Judge Currie said "all actions flowing from Ms. Halligan's defective appointment," including the indictments against Comey and James, "were unlawful exercises of executive power and are hereby set aside..."

Trump tapped Halligan to serve as acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia after he pushed out the previous top prosecutor, who had expressed doubts about bringing charges against both Comey and James.

Halligan is a former insurance attorney who once served as Trump's personal lawyer before his return to office, when she joined his administration as a White House aide.

Halligan, who has no previous prosecutorial experience, was sworn in as acting U.S. attorney on Sept. 22. Three days later, she secured a two-count criminal indictment against Comey—just days before the statute of limitations expired...

Judge Currie dismissed these cases on a simple point of law that Congress set limits on when and how Presidents can appoint US Attorneys, but throughout the proceedings the courts exposed a series of errors, miscues, and illegal decisions from Halligan's office - as well as screw-ups from the rest of the Justice Department under AG Bondi - that could have easily shut down the prosecutions due to sheer ineptitude.

Marcy Wheeler over at Emptywheel has kept track of all the screw-ups, highlighting a few weeks back how the magistrate overseeing the evidence slammed the DOJ for mishandling the grand jury involved in Comey's indictments:

As Fitzpatrick describes, there were several errors. DOJ didn’t scope most of the communications seized in 2019 and 2020 (that is, a Bill Barr fuck-up). And then, they chose not to obtain a new warrant to access the materials for a totally different investigation...

Second, after being exposed to privileged communications, Miles Starr nevertheless still presented the case to the grand jury.

Third, Lindsey Halligan fundamentally mis-informed the jury, first by suggesting that Comey would have to testify at trial, and second by implying there was a bunch more evidence that would be used at trial (which might reflect taint from the privileged comms Starr knew of).

Fourth, she apparently did not re-present the charges the grand jury approved...

The way Wheeler and other legal pundits described it, these were mental errors from Halligan and her crew that even first-year law students learn not to commit when dealing with grand juries. But even Bondi - who does have experience as a state-level attorney general and a number of years as a prosecutor - should have known better, and even she screwed up adding her seal of approval to this entire clown show.

All of this is happening because trump cannot accept certain facts. The criminal and civil cases that he has railed against ever since the 2016 campaign - the investigation in Russia's involvement in US elections (what trump keeps denying as "the Russian Hoax"); the investigations into trump's questionable tax returns at the federal and state levels; the allegations of sexual assault/harassment of women; the matter of trump's illegal taking and mishandling of classified documents; trump's unproven allegations of the 2020 election results being "stolen"; the incitement to insurrection on January 6th - remains a thorn in trump's pride. he continues to deny any and all of those cases were legal, that he's innocent and everything he did/does is "perfect".

In order to play to his gaslighting narrative of innocence, trump has to sell the narrative that all of those cases were themselves illegal in the first place: the "Russian Hoax" was a Hillary Clinton scam; the fraud and tax evasions cases were partisan hack jobs; he has total ownership of government documents, those classified documents belonged to him; his behavior towards women was "normal" and "everybody who's a celebrity" does it; he "won" in 2020 because he never loses; the riot at Capitol Hill was "peaceful and legal".

To flip the narrative that he's the hero (and victim), trump has to accuse everyone else of being the real criminals.

We saw this before: trump's desire to whitewash his ties to Russia during the 2016 elections required him to push for a special prosecutor investigation into Hillary Clinton and her campaign, trying to sell the narrative that she and her cronies faked the entire thing. trump got his replacement AG William Barr - the previous AG Jeff Sessions refused to play along - to find a federal prosecutor John Durham to pursue the matter as special prosecutor. Durham proceeded to follow every conspiracy theory and half-baked lead trying to indict and convict various Clinton campaign officials... all of which either led to misdemeanor plea deals and lost court cases.

Durham's case was doomed to fail because trump's narrative - based on trump's own delusions of greatness and weave of lies he casts around himself - was all a lie. As Marcy Wheeler noted as Durham's investigation collapsed, there was no crime. Just trump's desire to deflect, deny, and denounce everyone else.

It was an Underpants Gnomes kind of case: 

1) Indict people to force them to plea deal and flip on bigger fish, 

2) ? ? ?, 

3) Profit!

Except there's no profit because there's nothing there to begin with.

We're getting the same thing now as trump pursues baseless charges against Comey, James, and even John Bolton - his own former National Security Advisor - all because they made trump look criminal (or worse, a loser). This is how trump views the entire legal system: a weapon only he can deploy against anyone who dares crosses him.

The only good news about all of this is that trump - and his lackeys like Bondi and Halligan, and other wingnuts in the Justice Dept. - is obsessing over the twisted reflections in his own addled mind. The courts - in spite of what the Far Right thinks of the law - require proof and relevancy to work, not rumor hearsay or fake accusation.

The bad news is that trump - and his lackeys Bondi, Halligan, and dozens of other wingnuts - will never admit he is in the wrong, and will double-down on these attacks and fake allegations until all he has left is to burn the entire judiciary to the ground for failing to uphold his lies.

Keep resisting, America. Keep to the facts. 

And Happy Thanksgiving, if you can enjoy that at least this harsh year.