Quinta Jurecic writes:

The Justice Department is entering a hyperaggressive new era, cutting legal corners in service of getting President Trump the headlines—and revenge—he wants. Last month, Trump pushed out Attorney General Pam Bondi, reportedly because he was unhappy with her failure to secure legal victories against his enemies. Todd Blanche, for now the acting attorney general, seems to be campaigning for Trump’s nomination to replace Bondi: On his watch, the department has announced a spate of new prosecutions and submitted a bizarre court filing channeling Trump’s voice to argue for the construction of a White House ballroom. Under any other president, DOJ’s recent activity would represent an astonishing abuse of power. Even by the standards of the second Trump administration, these actions are absurd, and unusually dangerous.

The indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the left-leaning antiextremism group that has long been a bête noire of the American right, heralded this new era. The SPLC had been “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred,” Blanche alleged, standing next to FBI Director Kash Patel and flanked by two posters tallying funds allegedly spent by the organization to pay informants within extremist groups. (Trump took things even further, insisting on Truth Social, “If it is true, the 2020 Presidential Election should be permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect!”) This is far more than the indictment can actually show—though the document is written coyly, in a way that almost encourages the reader to find more in it than DOJ states outright. What DOJ alleges is that the SPLC sent funds to informants and used shell companies to disguise the source of the payments, presumably so that the informants’ relationships with the SPLC would remain obscured from their fellow extremists.

DOJ has one small problem: It’s not clear that any of what the indictment describes is illegal. Paying informants is not a crime, and the government has provided no evidence that the SPLC’s donors were duped about the SPLC’s practice of sending such payments, which is the foundation of the wire-fraud allegation. The indictment also charges the organization under a statute that prohibits lying to influence a bank, but it explains neither what DOJ understands the lies to have been, nor what the SPLC was supposedly trying to persuade the bank to do. (This is sort of like charging someone for drunk driving without ever stating that they were drunk.) The case, Kyle Boynton, a former prosecutor at DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, told me, is “a new front in the prosecutorial misconduct this department is willing to engage in to get an indictment returned.” [Continue reading…]