Jeanine Pirro at the Tampa Convention Center in Tampa, Florida on July 23, 2022 (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
With Todd Blanche having made the transition from acting U.S. attorney general to permanent U.S. attorney general following a 50-49 confirmation vote in the U.S. Senate, President Donald Trump continues to push the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for federal prosecutions of his foes. And according to Salon's Amanda Marcotte, Trump is ramping up this pressure despite setbacks in the lower federal courts.
"As the courts keeps getting in the way of Trump's desire to persecute people he doesn't like," Marcotte notes in Salon, "the pressure to find a way to cheat the laws guarding human rights is only intensifying."
According to legal analyst Liz Dye, who hosts the "Law and Chaos" podcast, a lack of evidence won't discourage Trump from pushing for a federal prosecution if he really has it in for the target.
Dye told Salon, "U.S. attorneys are being pressured to bring politically motivated cases based on shoddy or even fabricated evidence, with the predictable result that the cases implode on impact with the court system, sometimes spectacularly."
Marcotte points to the David Hearn case as a glaring example of Trump pushing for a federal prosecution despite a lack of evidence.
"The most recent high-profile example is the attempt by U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro to prosecute David Hearn, a former Olympian who was accused of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial," Marcotte observes. "As it turned out, Hearn was being used as a scapegoat to hide Trump's embarrassment over ruining the pool by hiring poorly qualified cronies to renovate it. Pirro eventually had to admit that the case was without merit and dropped it, even though doing so meant a well-publicized dressing-down from Trump at the White House."
MAGA firebrand and former Fox News host Pirro is known for being a hardcore Trump loyalist. Yet after the federal prosecutor determined that there was no evidence against Hearn and dropped the case, Trump angrily berated her and made it clear that he isn't giving on a possible Hearn prosecution.
"The failed attempt to prosecute Hearn was just the latest in a series of high-profile prosecutions of people Trump hates for criticizing him or attempting to hold him accountable, including against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James," Marcotte observes. "In a recent column for the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie observed that 'the principal aim of President Trump's second term is revenge.' Worse, most everyone Trump fixates on is innocent of wrongdoing. Their only 'transgression' has been upholding the law, criticizing the president or, in many cases, simply being of a race or class of people he doesn't like. But Trump, Bouie argued memorably, also wants revenge on the American people 'for rejecting him in 2020 and dealing a grievous blow to his ego.'"
