The Justice Department further confirmed on Wednesday that it’s beholden to the new President by moving to dismiss the prosecutions against two Trump employees charged alongside him in the Mar-a-Lago records case.
In a filing, a DOJ lawyer named Hayden O’Byrne asked the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to dismiss the case.
O’Byrne’s styled himself as “United States Attorney.” There does not appear to be a Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorney serving in the seat.
The Mar-a-Lago records case was brought by former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team in 2023, and charged Trump with unlawfully retaining national defense information. Smith’s team dropped the case against Trump after he won the election, and fought unsuccessfully to release a draft of a report into the matter to leading members of Congress. Judge Aileen Cannon for the Southern District of Florida injected herself into the situation after Trump’s attorneys asked her to do so; the 11th Circuit failed to rule, allowing release of the report to be delayed until the start of Trump’s term. Another section of Smith’s report, focused on the January 6 case, was released to the public.
It wasn’t clear that Cannon had any authority to become involved in the dispute around the report: she had already dismissed the case, which Smith’s team appealed, leaving it before the 11th Circuit.
Now, with the same legal team that defended Trump against the criminal cases in charge of running the DOJ, all that was left of the prosecution were the charges against Walt Nauta, Trump’s valet, and Carlos de Oliveira, Mar-a-Lago’s property manager. The two faced charges of mishandling classified information and of helping Trump obstruct justice.
The 11th Circuit will need to approve the motion to dismiss the case before it can formally conclude.
But the motion to dismiss the case marks another notch in demonstrating how events that would have been a serious scandal in Trump’s first term are now treated as commonplace by nearly all of the actors involved. Michael Flynn was charged by the DOJ in Trump’s first term, before prosecutors attempted to drop the charges. That episode then spawned a multi-month effort by the district judge in the case to understand why the charges were dropped.
Similarly, the DOJ under Attorney General Bill Barr moved to lessen a sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone. That also prompted a scandal around whether the DOJ was improperly helping out the President’s friends.
Now, it’s taken as a given.
It isn’t clear why those charges weren’t dropped before TFG took over, and the report released. They knew there wouldn’t be any further prosecution.
I don’t think it would have mattered, Cannon was going to deny the ability to release anything until after Jan 20th and the whole thing would have disappeared. This way, it shows the corruption of the Trump DoJ, whoever did this might end up in trouble in the future for going along with what’s obviously a corrupt deal.
People complained about “complicity in advance”, this is a case where the DoJ followed the law and its rules all the way through. They had a rock solid case against these two, no doubt they would be convicted, so it’s a corrupt deal that the charges were dropped. And, it goes back to Cannon’s corruption as well.
We just have to hope that someone leaks the report, there will be copies out there so all it takes is some pissed off former DoJ employee who has a copy. We also have to hope that justice will be done in the future, but that’s gong to depend on Americans stepping forward and stopping all the illegal behavior and fixing things…we will have to wait and see if that’s going to happen. I’d like to think people understand what it looks like when a group tries to undermine a government and take it over, but I’m not so sure that’s enough for the average American to care anymore.
Projecting self righteousness is at the heart of the con. Works everywhere in real life too. Also, that’s what they’re selling at that fucked up tax free church.
Long shot, but can the four congressional leaders who were barred from seeing the report request to see it now that there is no active case? Can’t hurt to ask. Supposedly there is information in there that could be relevant to Kash Patel’s confirmation hearing.
You stupid fucks are beholden to “We the People”.