New AG faces impossible task —delivering Trump's retribution fantasies

The New Times reports that President Donald Trump’s real problem with former AG Pam Bondi was not Bondi.

“President Trump’s pick to replace Pam Bondi will face the same conundrum that every attorney general he has hired and fired has confronted: It is hard to steer the Justice Department when the president is grabbing the wheel and stepping on the gas,” reported the Times.

That’s a nice way of saying Trump is putting despot demands on a U.S. system that contains fail-safes against despotism. Times writers Alan Feuer and Glenn Thrush get to the meat of the matter further down.

“Mr. Trump is searching for a tougher version of Ms. Bondi but the fault lies not in the shirking weakness of those he has called upon to execute his will, but rather in the impossibility of his request — to bring criminal charges against political targets with little to no evidence or legal justification.”

For now, Trump seems content to let his former personal criminal defense attorney, Todd Blanche — who failed to protect Trump from a hush money conviction involving a sex industry worker — fill Bondi’s old role. But while Trump may feel his old personal lawyer can successfully put his interests over the independence of the DOJ, the Times reports Blanche has a low grasp of legal matters and a quiet personality built more for background work.

“… [T]he name atop the Justice Department’s organizational chart matters less than the overbearing presence of a president whose demands for retribution against his enemies have become so frequent and extreme that even his most obsequious appointees have fallen short,” reports the Times.

“It’s certainly not about the willingness or the loyalty of any one person to carry out the president’s orders,” said Mimi Rocah, a former federal prosecutor who is writing a book about the current state of the Justice Department. “It’s more that there are limits on the president — courts, grand juries, lawyers and investigators who understand norms and ethics — that have started getting in his way.”

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