STUNNING ATTACKS ON LAW AND PRESS FREEDOM CANNOT BE ACCEPTED QUIETLY

...Congressional Republicans, do your damned jobs!

The atrociously autocratic behavior of by our wannabe dictator/king and increasingly fascist president last Friday at the headquarters of the Justice Department (DOJ) was predictable, but stunning nonetheless.

He attacked the very existence of a rule of law, called for his political rivals and the lawful prosecutors of his crimes to be prosecuted and jailed. He assailed (again) news organizations and threatened the right to a free press.

He did all this as his prom date, Attorney General Pam Bondi. fawned with approval, and said: “We will never stop fighting for him and for our country.”

Bondi was a 2020 election denier who had worked for trump to overturn the 2020 election. Then – and now – she has made it clear that she works for trump, not “the American people.” She’s full-on MAGA.

Trump arriving with his Prom date for his speech at the Justice Department on Friday. Photo Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times

As POLITICO reported,

President Donald Trump on Friday walked into the Department of Justice and labeled his courtroom opponents “scum,” judges “corrupt” and the prosecutors who investigated him “deranged.”

With the DOJ logo directly behind him, Trump called his political opponents lawbreakers and said others should be sent to prison.

“These are people that are bad people, really bad people,” the president said in a rambling speech that lasted more than an hour….[he] repeat[ed] his false claims about the 2020 election being stolen…“The people who did this to us should go to jail.”…Trump vowed to remake the Justice Department and retaliate against his enemies, some of whom he called “thugs.”

It was…a stunning show of disregard for decades of tradition observed by his predecessors, who worried about politicizing or appearing to exert too much control over the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency. Trump, instead, called himself the “chief law enforcement officer in our country” and accused the DOJ’s prior leadership of doing “everything within their power to prevent” him from becoming the president.

And trump called these guys “political prisoners who have been grossly mistreated.” (Photo by Brent Stirton/Getty Images)

He condemned the prosecutions of the real thugs — the J6 rioters — describing them as “political prisoners who have been very badly mistreated.”

Since this debacle, trump has continuued his assault on the rule of law. He has pulled security clearances from multiple large law firms who have lawyered for his rivals…just today he called for the judge who ruled against his deportation of alleged gang members to be impeached.

In a twist of irony Chief Justice John Roberts scolded trump for that, saying there was no place for that and that the appeals courts are there to handle such disgreements. Right, that Roberts, the one who delayed trump’s immunity case by eight or nine months and then declared trump above the law.

Nice try, John, but “the Roberts Court” is going down in history as the one that ushered in fascism, with decisions like Citizens United and Shelby County and of course these trump cases.