What’s Really Behind Trump’s Corrupt US Attorney Scheme

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

Only Loyalists Need Apply

A new and ironic development in the first-of-its-kind legal challenge to President Trump’s U.S. attorney scheme gives me a chance to pull back the lens a bit to show the full scope of the corruption involved and why it matters.

The lawsuit by fired U.S. Attorney Roger Rogoff of Seattle that I wrote about at length yesterday has been re-assigned to Judge Stanley Bastian, an Obama appointee from outside the district, since the federal judges who appointed Rogoff have a stake in the case.

One irony of Bastian hearing the case is that he is chief judge in the Eastern District of Washington, which has had its own recent U.S. attorney issues. The Trump administration has used one of its patented blue-state workarounds in Bastian’s district to install a U.S. attorney without Senate confirmation or allowing federal judges to appoint an interim U.S. attorney.

It started when acting U.S. Attorney Richard R. Barker, a career prosecutor, resigned last July from the Justice Department rather than sign off on an indictment of ICE protesters. (Barker’s successor scaled the case against the protestors way back, dropping most of the felony charges to misdemeanors if the defendants stayed out of trouble for 18 months, the New York Times reported.)

“I knew there was no place for me in the Justice Department if I was being asked to bring felony charges against these protesters in a way that would compromise my integrity,” Barker later told the NYT. “This was not an organized conspiracy. It was a protest where people were exercising their free-speech rights.”

Barker was succeeded as acting U.S. attorney by another career prosecutor, Stephanie Van Marter, who lasted only a month. She was succeeded in August by Pete Serrano, the mayor of Pasco who had no apparent prior experience as a prosecutor.

That is when things started to get even more squirrelly.

Serrano’s statutory 120-day term ended in December. By statute, the judges of the district could have appointed Serrano to remain on past the 120 days. They did not. Whether that was an affirmative decision by the judges reflecting a lack of confidence in Serrano or simply a failure to act isn’t clear, but I’m not sure there’s much of a difference between those two scenarios.

At that point, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi engineered a workaround that as of March she had used in at least nine other districts around the country, mostly in blue states, including in high-profile postings like the Los Angeles U.S attorney’s Office: Bondi named Serrano a special attorney and made him the first assistant U.S. attorney, which without an acting or interim U.S. attorney in place effectively means he has remained the top prosecutor in the district without Senate or judge approval.

The workaround has been used mostly in cases where the interim U.S. attorney has exceeded their statutory term and judges have ruled that they’re unlawfully serving in the post, Politico noted. In Serrano’s case, Bondi acted before he had overstayed his 120 days. President Trump has not nominated anyone for the permanent position in Spokane. The plan seems to be to keep Serrano, like other similarly entrenched top prosecutors, in place indefinitely.

The underlying motive for the scheme goes back to Trump’s frustration with the Senate’s blue-slip tradition, which essentiallygives senators veto power over U.S. attorney nominations in their own states. When you’re turning the Justice Department into a tool of your White House, non-loyalist U.S. attorneys simply won’t do.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) has been public in her opposition to Serrano and to the workaround to entrench him in place: “The Trump administration is attempting a transparent end run around the Constitution and Congress by appointing Pete Serrano to a position he is not qualified to hold after the Eastern District declined to extend his tenure as U.S. Attorney.”

It’s against this backdrop that Judge Bastian will be hearing Rogoff’s legal challenge to Trump’s scheme. In Rogoff’s case, the district judges acted and unanimously appointed him as interim U.S. attorney, but Trump fired him in less than an hour, the fourth such termination of judge-appointed interim U.S. attorneys around the country.

Trump’s scheme in all it various forms is intended to keep blue-state U.S. attorneys from being too independent, too autonomous, and too un-beholden to the Trump White House. There is great utility in having loyal and compliant U.S. attorneys in blue states as Trump targets Democratic elected officials and other political foes for retribution. See, for example, the next two items below.

The Retribution: Midterms Edition

The Trump White House has come up with an inventive new way to sic the Justice Department on Democratic elected officials ahead of the midterm elections, Bloomberg reports: “DOJ’s National Fraud Enforcement Division, which Vice President JD Vance established in January, is building out a team exploring how politicians and state officials facilitate the misuse of taxpayer dollars — either by actively participating in or failing to prevent schemes under their watch, said three people familiar with the effort.”

The Retribution: Jack Smith Edition

House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent a criminal referral against former Special Counsel Jack Smith to the Trump DOJ yesterday, accusing him of perjury in testimony to Congress in December, the NYT reports.

Smith’s lawyers immediately rejected the allegation that Smith committed perjury and accused Jordan of making a “spurious claim.”

The pattern here is now tediously obvious and has gone on since at least the Benghazi investigation more than a decade ago: House Republicans launch politicized investigations against civil servants, Democrats and other foes of President Trump and march their targets into a perjury trap on the Hill. At the same time, they use their investigations to gin up fodder in the form of documents, emails, and other communications that they leak to right-wing media.

What’s new is that House GOPers now have a Justice Department run out of the Trump White House that is eager to play along.

Must Read: AF1 Leak Probe Edition

Like orcas pulverizing a sunfish, the NYT has eviscerated the Trump DOJ for subpoenaing its reporters in a new filing that comes ahead of an important hearing scheduled for this afternoon in federal court in Manhattan.

The unusual and unprecedented use of subpoenas to reporters as an early (rather that last ditch) investigative step in the Air Force One leak investigation has come under intense scrutiny as a threat to a free press and civil liberties.

As I explained earlier this week, the Trump DOJ conceded to the judge that it made major legal missteps in how it handled the case. In the new filing, the NYT seizes on those admissions, with a level of aggressiveness and urgency rarely seen in a such a major case, and urges U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian not to let the Trump DOJ get away with just putting the subpoenas on hold for two weeks, as prosecutors had suggested, but rather quash them today at the hearing.

The filing takes the form of a letter, which makes it an easier read. It’s worth your time.

Blanche Lavishes Alaska for Murk’s Vote

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is pulling out the stops in lavishing Alaska with goodies in an effort to win undecided Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s vote for his confirmation to the permanent position, Politico reports.

The 5th Circuit Pulls a Wild Move

In an important new development in the legal fight over the Trump administration’s unprecedented policy of mandatory detention of undocumented immigrants without bond hearings, it wasn’t just what the 5th Circuit did but how it did it, Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck writes: “[T]he Fifth Circuit went out of its way to grant the federal government an unprecedented form of unexplained emergency relief without deigning to explain why such relief was remotely appropriate.”

On a Slow Boat to Venezuela

For those keeping track, the slow-rolling contempt of court inquiry against the Trump administration in the original Alien Enemies Act case is still crawling along. The full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is re-hearing the case after a three-judge panel cut U.S. District Judge James Boasberg off at the knees. The Trump DOJ filed its appellate brief yesterday. Oral arguments are scheduled for Sept. 29.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Financial Times: “The Trump administration has collected more than $13bn in revenues from Venezuelan oil sales this year, according to FT calculations, but has said almost nothing about what has happened to the money.”

The Latest Trump Attack on Higher Ed

The Trump administration’s ongoing attack on colleges and universities is now merging with its corrupt tendencies to create an alarming new scheme to divert the pipeline of government funding for “life sciences” research into the private sector, with an ostensible focus on AI, robotics, and nuclear energy.

The scheme combines weakening higher ed with the politicization of scientific research while opening new pathways for corruption and self-dealing. What’s not to like?

Graphic of the Day

NYT: How Trump Is Getting Richer in Office

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