For a few hours, we didn’t know why several top prosecutors, including the recent acting head of the office, Joe Thompson, resigned from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota in the wake of the shooting of Renee Good. As David Kurtz explains here, it appears to have been a reaction to freezing local authorities out of the investigation into Good’s death combined with an order to open a criminal investigation into the activism of Good’s widow, Rebecca Good. So we know what this was about, or we’re as close as we’re going to get to knowing. But often in these cases, we don’t ever find out the full picture. Or we don’t find out precisely why the person resigned. I’ve been thinking about this. And the whole terrain is similar to the gravitation surrounding other big scandals. At the beginning, at least, you can’t really see what’s at the center of the scandal, but you can see the force of the gravity around it. There’s something similar to these firings
Because of a mix of press atrophy and, far more, the gutting of the investigative agencies, there is so much we do not know about what’s happening inside the government, the corruption going on in the government. Think of the magnitude of the Trump family’s involvement in the crypto trade, the open channel it’s created for bribery, how tightly bribes in the form of political contributions or “investments” are tied to pardons. We don’t know all the details of the corruption, but we see some of its effects.
Something similar is happening among federal officials: We see these resignations happening across the government — a bunch right now, sure, but it’s an ongoing thing. And each of these examples are sort of like explosions deep under the ocean. They are hidden from view, but you can imagine scientists, or maybe militaries, would have sounding devices to monitor for such things. Or maybe they’re like the shockwaves created by the rough motions of tectonic plates, which are picked up on sensors for a Richter Scale. These resignations across the DOJ, across government, are something like that: signals about public corruption, the details of which we won’t necessarily learn.
When a career DOJ official abruptly resigns you can basically be sure that something deeply wrong and quite possibly corrupt and criminal has happened. That’s even more the case in the growing number of instances where it’s actually a Trump appointee who quits.
One of the great lessons of the second Trump administration is the way that it is possible to all but eliminate public conversation and public awareness about public corruption by decapitating key elements of state power. Basically, you eliminate the inspectors general in the various departments and agencies and you put the Department of Justice under direct and corrupt control. Another critical assist comes if you can suborn or corrupt key news organizations. But that’s not necessary. There is lots of good public corruption reporting right now. Great stuff the Times and other papers have done on the Trump crypto scams, the pardons and more. But as long as there’s no chance of criminal investigation or action, these facts really don’t matter. Our civic minds are trained to believe that things become valid and real when reporting triggers an investigation. Until then it’s just facts and details. There’s a natural trajectory: reporting builds a record, and then the record is the basis of an investigation. Then the progress of the investigation becomes the focus of more reporting and public disclosure. If you can decapitate the investigatory agencies, the whole ecosystem of investigation and accountability becomes like a car that can’t ever get out of second gear. You assume that axing the investigators just means no one will be criminally accountable. Actually it means much more than that: the whole system of public accountability and disclosure breaks down.
This is one of the reasons that something like the DOJ-in-Exile project is so important. But I’m tentatively optimistic that the country is starting to get its bearings about how to think and account for public corruption, attacks on the state itself, even while critical departments like the Department of Justice are in corrupt hands. The resignations are a key, maybe the key signal. They’re signals, like undersea explosions or perhaps a beacon signal from another world — like SETI looks for — that is observable, even if we can’t yet see the full picture directly or know the details.