Trump DOJ Rolls Out New Payment Plans (Yeah, In That Way…)

I wanted to note some details in the rapid evolution of Trump’s misrule over the criminal justice system. It is old hat, expected really, that a Trump-run Justice Department won’t investigate, let alone indict, Donald Trump or any of his top deputies. We also saw in Trump’s first term that accomplices and key supporters will be pardoned or have investigations shuttered. But the dawn of Trump’s second term now sees the rollout of a host of new Justice products and payment plans.

This week, matters took a degree of a step forward (or backward, depending on your metaphor) when Trump had his acting U.S. attorney abandon the criminal case against former Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE). Fortenberry wasn’t some high-profile Trump ally. And his crimes weren’t particularly political or Trump-adjacent. He got caught taking laundered political contributions from a Nigerian billionaire and then repeatedly lied about it to the FBI. Pretty generic graft, pretty garden-variety political corruption.