An ex-federal prosecutor offers her perspective on the Democrats’ big midterm win and names two Trump officials she thinks Congress should impeach and convict for conduct in office that more than warrants it.
In her Substack, Joyce Vance writes that Senate Democrats are well placed to stop the president from putting unqualified federal judges on the bench, Supreme Court justices above all.
There will be no Justice Cannon or Justice Kacsmaryk under this arrangement, she writes. Congress has the means to put the brakes on presidential overreach by having the Article I branch of government wield the power of the purse. With oversight hearings and an insistence on answers, lawmakers can restore a measure of accountability.
Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, and Todd Blanche, the attorney general, are the officials she says should be removed from office. “That can’t happen soon enough,” she writes.
She is particularly hard on Blanche, charging him with an “unconscionable breach of the public trust while voting was in progress.” Citing Glenn Thrush at The New York Times, she points to a report that the Justice Department is ratcheting up its probe into the recruitment of an opponent bearing the same name as a Republican senator in Alaska.
According to two people with knowledge of the move, some 20 Democrats have been sent letters to let them know they could be targets. A target, she explains, is one against whom the prosecutor or grand jury has substantial evidence of a crime and whom the prosecutor deems a putative defendant. Put simply, prosecutors intend to indict them in most instances.
The dispatching of such letters, if they are what they seem, suggests the DOJ is ready to go after as many as 20 people in relation to the Alaska Senate race.
As for Blanche, Vance writes he has a history of letting prosecutors pursue charges without sufficient evidence to prove guilt. One has only to look at the third attempt to prosecute James Comey and the unsuccessful effort to indict Cassidy Hutchinson, whose case a grand jury rejected.
Vance argues that the timing of the letters made matters worse. There was no urgency that justified making such a move on Election Day, she writes, when prosecutors could have waited until voting was over. For her, removing Blanche would let Congress push back against the White House’s use of prosecutions against its enemies.
That would require more than a Senate majority. The House can impeach by a majority vote, but conviction requires two-thirds of senators present, and conviction results in removal from office.
