Mark Paoletta, who is helping plan the Trump administration’s Justice Department staffing during the transition, repeated his belief that Trump has the right to direct the department to charge, or not charge, anybody he likes.
“The President has a duty to supervise the types of cases DOJ should focus on and can intervene to direct DOJ on specific cases,” Paoletta argues in a long social-media post. “He is the duly elected chief executive and he has every right to make sure the executive branch, including the DOJ, is implementing his agenda.”
After the Watergate scandal revealed that Richard Nixon had influenced the Justice Department to conceal the investigation into a burglary his administration committed to spy on Democrats, Congress implemented reforms to wall the department off from political influence.
The rationale for these reforms is obvious. Nixon’s abuses hinted at the potential for the department as a partisan weapon. Indeed, taken to its limit, a president could use selective prosecutions to render all his critics criminals or targets of criminal investigations, while giving his allies carte blanche to commit crimes on his behalf. Those reforms closed a kind of procedural loophole big enough to swallow up much of the Constitution by permitting the president to run a virtual police state.
Now, there is a longstanding theory from some corners of the right that these reforms violate original constitutional principles, which, they believe, require the president to maintain total control over every action taken by the executive branch. How does this theory deal with the possibility of abuse? It insists that the voters constitute the main line of defense by denying the presidency to somebody who would be prone to abuse his control of federal prosecutions.
This seems like bad news, given that we just elected Donald Trump.
Paoletta, however, insists, “President Trump will not use the DOJ for political purposes, that is to go after individuals simply because they are political opponents.” Nothing to worry about here! Trump will use his discretion in a completely unbiased way!
The wee flaw in this method, of course, is that Trump is in the habit of declaring all his opponents to be criminals. An abridged list of the people Trump has deemed to have committed crimes includes: all three Democratic nominees he ran against, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Tim Kaine, Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, Robert Mueller, James Comey, and many, many other targets. So Paoletta’s assurance that Trump will not go after his opponents is not very reassuring given that Trump has no capacity to distinguish between a crime and the act of opposing him.
By the same token, he believes that any criminal prosecution of himself or one of his allies is inherently illegitimate. The dilemma is compounded by the fact that Trump has been surrounding himself with criminals and violating the law habitually his entire career. Even more automatic than his impulse to label his critics criminals is his tendency to insist his criminal allies did nothing wrong. This applies to corrupt politicians who merely support Trump, crooks who are attracted to him for obvious reasons, and even the violent insurrectionists who aided his coup attempt, and whom Trump has called “hostages” who are innocent victims of the left-wing justice system.
A major theme of the conservative rationale for giving Trump power is that he would be restrained by normal Republicans. But now the normal Republicans are saying that, when it comes to his most dangerous power, they cannot and will not restrain him.
