Donald Trump, who made more than 100 threats to investigate, prosecute, or imprison the "enemy within," has nominated Kash Patel to be FBI Director. Here's what he's promised to do:
Here is Trump’s nominee for FBI Director Kash Patel calling for “offensive operations” to jail Americans who they consider “the enemy.” “We will go out and find the conspirators... Yes, we are going to come after the people in the media."
— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen.bsky.social) November 30, 2024 at 7:02 PM
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I was reminded that, very early on in the first Trump administration, Benjamin Wittes wrote that the least tyrant-proof part of government is the Department of Justice. To make the point, he quoted Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who also served as U.S. Attorney General (emphasis mine).
What every prosecutor is practically required to do is to select the cases for prosecution and to select those in which the offense is the most flagrant, the public harm the greatest, and the proof the most certain.
If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his case, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm—in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.
Wittes goes on to point out that the safeguards against this ultimately "reside in an institutional culture at the Justice Department, and that is precisely the sort of thing a tyrant leader can change."
So, if confirmed as FBI Director, Patel will be able to prosecute/sue/harass anyone Trump deems to be an "enemy within."
Wittes concludes that, "There is, in fact, only one way to tyrant-proof the American presidency: Don't elect tyrants to it."
Oops, too late for that.
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