One feature of the current moment is that there are so many things going on, so much corruption and wrongdoing that it is hard to focus on any one thing. What would otherwise be historic scandals blow by almost unnoticed. Today I wanted to zero in on a couple storylines we should all be following. 

One comes from the Broadview Six/Four case. I explained the outlines of the story here. It’s now being referenced in numerous federal cases to persuade judges to deny prosecutors the presumption of “regularity,” i.e. the foundational assumption that the government is following the rules and operating in good faith in its prosecutions. The end of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case is getting similar treatment. But there’s clearly a deeper scandal brewing here, especially with grand juries. It’s not clear to me how much of this is coming from explicit instructions from the DOJ to violate the rules or simply a climate of permissive lawlessness in which prosecutors start breaking the rules because they see their superiors doing the same. 

Josh Kovensky has a good piece up today on the collapse of the “Broadview Four” nee Six case in Chicago. What started off as yet another case of wild overcharging by the Trump Justice Department and politically motivated prosecution collapsed a week ago when a stunning level of prosecutorial misconduct was revealed in open court and all the remaining charges were dropped. The taint of the misconduct has already spread to other cases. The U.S. Attorney in Chicago, Andrew S. Boutros, has reacted with what he purports are important and until now neglected “reforms” to avoid anything happening like this again. (He has also been accused by one of the defense attorneys in the case of at least some level of involvement with the tainted grand jury.) But according to experts on grand juries, avoiding the levels of misconduct revealed in the case could have been done easily enough by just not breaking some of the most basic rules for how prosecutors must conduct themselves in grand juries.

It’s a galactic mess. But it’s also an example of the corruption of the Trump DOJ seeping down into depths of the Department.

In things I write here in the Editors’ Blog, I am both critical of mainstream news conventional wisdom and also interested in it as a political artifact in itself. Whether it is accurate, fair, quality journalism, it is a fact of the political geography on its own. So it’s important to understand, and I spend a lot of time trying to analyze and place it on that basis.

On that front I wanted to return to a point I’ve alluded to a few times recently, which is that just in the last week or so there’s been a shift in that elite news conventional wisdom toward what we and others have been saying for a couple months. And that is a new focus on the disconnect, really the chasm opening up between Donald Trump’s political fortunes and his political actions. It’s not simply that Trump isn’t adjusting or repositioning as a more conventional politician might. Trump’s never been that way. It’s out of character. But he’s accelerating into the most toxic parts of his presidency. In addition to general discontent about the economy and the very unpopular Iran War, he’s pushed things like his ballroom and his slush fund to the very top of the political agenda, even short-circuiting or delaying other parts of his agenda to further them.