The ex-president's insatiable appetite for revenge has quickly morphed into a structured system. Over the past year, the president's anger and whims have assumed the form of administrative measures in a manner analogous to earlier repressive governments. Government figures who do not cooperate are summarily fired and substituted by supporters. Critical officials who confront him encounter indictment, court proceedings and penalties. Opponents have been categorized under administration memoranda as “unpatriotic”, “anti-Christian” and “anti-capitalist”, and menaced with legal action as “terrorists”.
The Justice System Transformed
All case involving prosecution of critics and leniency for loyalists displays its own unique characteristics. However, regardless of their particular form, they exemplify expressions of what has emerged as a systematic technique. Those incidents are not coincidental. His purge of Department of Justice prosecutors and Federal Bureau of Investigation officials, coupled with his placement of supporters in senior posts, commenced rapidly, soon assumed a consistency, and has now been molded into a regime. The justice department and the Federal Bureau have been transformed into ideological organizations under his explicit command to implement his wishes. Injustice has been rendered normal. It constitutes the apparatus of revenge.
Leadership is preoccupied with punishing the leader's alleged adversaries than they are with safeguarding our national security.
Inside the Structure
The origin of this mechanism has been exposed in the court filing of multiple former top law enforcement agents submitted in September in the judicial system in DC against FBI director an administration figure and justice department head a key figure for illegal termination in “a campaign of revenge against Plaintiffs for what the accused judged to be a refusal to show adequate allegiance”. In the complaint that a former acting director, the previous temporary head, recounts a conversation in which Patel “publicly acknowledged the unlawfulness of his behavior”.
Driscoll had tried to shield agency personnel from being fired, the lawsuit states. Patel advised him that “White House figures” – perceived by Driscoll to be the White House and federal prosecutors – had directed him to dismiss everyone who they identified as having been involved in a legal probe against the president. The document goes on: “The director clarified that he had to fire the personnel his bosses told him to dismiss, because his ability to keep his own role was contingent on the dismissal of the agents who worked on matters involving the President. He commented that there was no way he or the official could do to stop these or any other firings, because ‘the agency sought to incarcerate the leader in prison and he recalls it clearly.’” When he advised Patel he was violating the bureau's own regulations, the director supposedly said “he knew that and he knew the character of the immediate dismissals were almost certainly illegal”.
Broad Effects
After Patel's reported confession to him, the justice department and the Federal Bureau have been weakened and reorganized for Trump's system of punishment. Six of the bureau's high-ranking agents were dismissed or forced out in the first days of the government. Roughly numerous professional attorneys at DoJ have accepted a “deferred resignation program”. A minimum of seven DoJ lawyers, including those in the southern district of New York, stepped down in protest over what they viewed as partisan influence in withdrawing the legal action against the local official, a political figure, in return for his collaboration with the administration's ICE roundups of migrants. The anti-corruption unit of the department, which handles ethical violations, has been diminished to minimal staff. The rights protection unit has been decimated: 70% of its staff has left. A third of executives at the department have quit. The section implementing environmental law has lost 50% its supervisors.
Favors and Penalties
In the Adams case, the acting US attorney for the NY office, she, stepped down in objection against what she described as the “quid pro quo”. Tom Homan, the president's “border czar,” was present as the agent with Adams on a media outlet to declare: “If he doesn't come through, I'll be back in the city.”. And, a former official, previously the senior DoJ official and a ex-lawyer, who brokered the agreement, was awarded an judicial position, a possible springboard to the highest court.
The president's immunity for crimes carried out while in government, awarded by the unprecedented judgment of the GOP-led on the judicial body, thus blocking his prosecution over the Capitol riot and preserving his public standing for the presidential race, is the cornerstone on which he depends to defend his supporters. With such immunity, he has been freed to permit wrongdoing. The consequence of the supreme court decision permeates his government and the Republican Party completely. The legal case has metastasized. In the words of Richard Nixon's White House counsel John Dean said about the Watergate
