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.
Then came word that the Trump DOJ is in “conversations” (how do these conversations go exactly?) with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan about dropping charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams. This is a criminal prosecution that is already underway and apparently going quite well. By all indications, they’ve got Adams dead to rights and the prosecutors have plenty of cooperators. Most notable: Adams is a Democrat.
Now he’s not any Democrat, of course. Adams has always been a bit Trumpy. And as I’ve noted a few times over the last couple months, we could and should expect him to get a lot Trumpier since sidling up to Trump would seem to be his best and quite likely only way to stay out of prison. I wrote a number of times that we should expect New York to become a free fire zone for ICE since that was the one obvious ask. It takes nothing away from the brutality and suffering caused by Trump-ICE immigration raids and round-ups to note that at least for now there is a heavy emphasis on performative drama. The administration, the press and in a very circuitous way even the former Biden administration itself have worked together to give the impression that no one was getting deported during the last four years and Trump just fired up the engines again. In fact, fiscal year 2024 saw more deportations than in any year since 2014, exceeding the number in Trump One’s peak year of 2019. But they’re running them now in more conspicuous ways, shipping deportees out in military cargo planes as opposed to the cheaper, old fashioned way.
New York City is the center of all Trump’s dreams and grievances. It is another way in which he coincides, albeit from very different points of origination, with the GOP ID. It’s hard to imagine a tableau more appealing to him than having the nominally Democratic mayor of the city admitting that Trump was right all along and inviting ICE in for bouts of wilding across the city.
My only mild surprise here is that Trump is moving so quickly. I’d figured that he’d give Adams 2025 to demonstrate his worth then come in to short-circuit the prosecution after that or pardon him after the jury comes back. What’s novel here is that you don’t have to be a Trump ally any more to get protection from the law. You can open communications to become an ally after you get into trouble. And people are already responding to the new rules. The parents of disgraced crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried have begun sounding out Trump allies and lawyers about a pardon for their son who only just started his 25-year prison sentence, according to an article in Bloomberg News. They hardly come from traditional Trump stock. They’re both professors at Stanford Law School.
It’s probably best to see their efforts in the context of the rapidly expanding Trump payment culture. We got a nice view of it in that glimpse of the new relationship between Trump and Mark Zuckerberg when the incoming president told Zuckerberg that a settlement payment (eventually agreed at $25 million) would be necessary to allow Mark to be “brought into the tent.” CBS/Paramount is now also trying to reach an agreement on a similar cash payment to the President.
A payment to Trump’s personal account to be “brought into the tent” isn’t the same as a cash payment for a pardon. But in the world of Trump they are probably best seen as slightly different versions of the same process. After all, coming into the tent is fundamentally about regulatory protection which in many of the most important ways is also centered in the Justice Department.
It’s not too much to say that if you’ve got the money or the influencer bullhorn and you’re not asking for a Trump payment plan, you basically want to stay in jail.
[Disclaimer: Unbossed and unbowed, no billionaires were used in the creation of this editorial product.]