Reacting to another attempt to get a grand jury to issue an indictment of New York Attorney General Letitia James on fraud charges that fell flat on its face, the Department of Justice under Donald Trump appointee Pam Bondi was leveled on MS NOW on Friday morning.
Late Thursday, the DOJ once again came up empty-handed in its pursuit of one of Trump’s main antagonists, who, unlike the DOJ, was successful when she convicted the president of business fraud, only to have an appeals court rule the financial penalty was “excessive.”
Thursday’s failure to get a true bill from the grand jury comes just two weeks after a judge tossed similar mortgage fraud case against James because the prosecution by Trump appointee and real estate lawyer Lindsey Halligan was deemed unlawful.
Reporting on the latest blow to the DOJ, “Morning Joe” co-host Jonathan Lemire expressed disgust with the efforts to get James when there is little to no evidence of a crime.
“But the president and his team want to persist. They say they’re going to go back at Letitia James. We don’t know if they’ll go back yet,” Lemire explained before adding, “So it has been, to this point, pretty Keystone Cops. But yet at the same time, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that these things keep falling apart, at least for now, that this remains an extraordinarily dangerous abuse of power, I would argue, of presidential power and blurring the lines entirely between the West Wing and the Department of Justice to try to enact some sort of legal punishment against the president’s perceived foes.”
Bulwark editor-in-chief, and MS NOW contributor Sam Stein agreed.
“Yeah. I mean, this is embarrassing, obviously,” he replied. “Let’s just call it what it is, this failure to get an indictment from the grand jury.”
“Remember, they had already failed to get several other indictments in several different cases,” he recalled. “This isn’t like Major League Baseball, where if you go, you know, one for three, it’s a success, right? This is bad stuff.”
“On top of that, it’s a huge waste of resources,” he pointed out. “But obviously the problem here is that they completely gutted the Eastern District of Virginia’s department because they were pressing so hard to bring charges against Letitia James and [ex-FBI Director] James Comey that all the actual real lawyers in the office said no, and then they quit or were fired.”
“And I think we need to step back a little bit, because obviously this is an abuse of power, and it’s just using the Justice Department to go after your foes.”
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