Kash Patel and Pam Bondi are being nominated to purge the “Deep State” of all people who have not pledged fealty to Donald Trump. But there’s no reason to believe the DOJ or the FBI will be emptied. There are plenty of Trump loyalists in those agencies and have been from the very beginning.
Recall that James Comey revealed the “investigation” into the Anthony Weiner laptop just days before the 2016 election largely because he was aware that the NY FBI field office was full of Trumpers who were planning to leak the information. (He should have just let them and we could have called it the phony dirty trick it was. Instead it became front page news. two weeks before the election.)
Now we have more evidence of Trumpers in the woodpile. Philip Bump reports:
In early 2020, the coronavirus pandemic reached the United States, leaving state governments and the Trump administration scrambling to respond. Trump pushed for a quick return to normal, with his reelection bid looming. His subsequent disputes with medical experts and the increasing toll from the virus became central elements of the 2020 presidential campaign.
In late October, the New York Post reported that the Justice Department was seeking more information from several states with Democratic governors, suggesting that death tolls at nursing homes had been underreported. If true, this implied that perhaps the negative effects of the pandemic were a function of Democratic leaders instead of Trump — a potential asset to the president’s reelection bid.
On Tuesday, Reuters reported that this leak may have been specifically intended to have that effect. An assessment from Horowitz, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, found that three senior officials in the Justice Department informed the New York Post about the letters. One sent a text message describing the move as being “our last play on them before the election but it’s a big one.”
Horowitz wrote that these senior officials’ conduct “raised serious questions about the partisan political motivation for their actions in proximity to the 2020 election,” according to the Reuters report.
Ya think?
If the intent was to aid Trump’s reelection, it was obviously insufficient. But it continues the pattern: pre-election information that aids, rather than hinders, Trump’s political prospects.
It’s a pattern that is worth remembering as Trump returns to the White House. For all of his insistences that federal law enforcement is eager to take him down — insistences that depend heavily on dismissing the Jan. 6 and classified documents cases as invalid — there are also examples that very much suggest the opposite.
The Bulwark’s Tim Miller interviewed Ryan Reilly who has been covering the January 6th investigation and trials for the Huffington Post since it happened. Reilly told him that there was a lot of resistance among FBI and DOJ employees to that investigation and in some cases it may have ended up hindering it and causing delay.
This seems obvious to me. Law enforcement generally is conservative and I would guess many of them think that Trump’s “support” for knocking heads and immunity for rogue cops, not to mention his racism and xenophobia, is a positive. They don’t care that he broke the law because he’s a rich white billionaire who hates who they hate. He’s a role model.
I assume that the “purge” is going to be aimed at the straight arrows who believe in the rule of law. And there are probably fewer of them than we might think.