Politics

Republicans accuse Democrats of weaponizing the DOJ. The facts tell a different story.

Published

2 years ago

November 12, 2024

Republicans accuse Democrats of weaponizing the DOJ. The facts tell a different story.

This is an adapted excerpt from the Sept. 26 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”

On the face of it, this week has not been a great week for New York City. Eric Adams has become the city’s first sitting mayor to be criminally indicted.

But the charges are also, in a strange way, reassuring. They show we have a functioning federal government that still holds the rule of law to be a bedrock, sacrosanct thing — particularly in the Department of Justice.

Just take a step back and look at the DOJ that Joe Biden inherited from Donald Trump. During his time in office, Trump tried constantly to subvert federal law enforcement and convert it into a political tool of the president. That’s especially true of the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, arguably the country’s most influential federal prosecutor’s office, and the one that just indicted Adams.

The charges against Adams show we have a functioning federal government that still holds the rule of law to be a bedrock, sacrosanct thing.

When Trump became president, Preet Bharara was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. We’d later learn that Trump was regularly calling Bharara, trying to cultivate a personal relationship that made the U.S. attorney so uncomfortable that he reported the contacts to his bosses at the DOJ and eventually refused a call from the president.

Less than a day after Bharara refused that call, he was fired. Trump’s personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, would later brag that he convinced Trump to fire Bharara by reportedly telling the president, “This guy is going to get you.”

It was a pattern Trump would replicate over and over again as president. Whether it was firing FBI D irector James Comey after Trump asked him to drop the criminal investigation into then-national security adviser Michael Flynn, or having his attorney general, Bill Barr, fire yet another U.S. attorney for the Southern District, Geoffrey Berman.

In 2020, after Berman prosecuted former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and opened several other investigations into people and banks in Trump’s orbit, he was dismissed by the then-president.

Trump was constantly pushing for prosecutions of his perceived enemies, including Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. Barr also distorted and mischaracterized the Robert Mueller report on the Trump campaign’s Russia contacts. And he appointed special counsel John Durham to investigate those FBI investigators who had looked into Trump and Russia.

We’ve blocked much of this out, but Trump was constantly spending his time as president trying to manipulate the DOJ to do his bidding.

That pressure culminated in his attempted coup after the 2020 election, when Trump considered naming Jeffrey Clark, a mid-level DOJ lawyer, as attorney general so Clark could use the department’s good name to send out a letter saying the election was rigged and get state legislators to overturn the election.

We’ve blocked much of this out, but Trump was constantly spending his time as president trying to manipulate the DOJ to do his bidding.

Now, compare that to the Biden DOJ under Attorney General Merrick Garland. A Department of Justice that has bent over backward to be independent of the White House. They appointed a special counsel — a Republican — to investigate Biden’s own handling of classified documents.

They’ve prosecuted a string of high-profile Democratic officials, including Adams, now former Sen. Bob Menendez, Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, and even Biden’s last surviving son, Hunter Biden, who is awaiting sentencing on charges that even Trey Gowdy, the far-right former congressman and prosecutor thinks are pretty ludicrous.

It is entirely possible that Biden will leave the presidency and never see his son outside of prison again. This is the administration that Republicans say has politically weaponized the DOJ when the opposite is actually true.

This is a point the current U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williamsmade when he announced the Adams indictment.

“The Southern District of New York remains committed to rooting out corruption without fear or favor. And without regard to partisan politics. We are not focused on the right or the left. We are focused only on right and wrong,” Williams said on Thursday.

This is how the DOJ is supposed to work, pursuing justice even when there is zero political benefit in it for Democrats. But here’s the thing: if Trump wins this could all change. These institutions could be put in the hands of his creepiest authoritarian sycophants, like Republican lawyer Mike Davis who is rumored to be in the running for a top DOJ post.

Last year, Davis promised to “rain hell on Washington, D.C.” and fire and indict “a lot of people in the deep state,” including Joe and Hunter Biden. “We’re gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo,” Davis added.

Davis says now he’s just trolling the libs, but Trump wants it to be policy. He’s said as much on the campaign trail.

“We will completely overhaul Kamala’s corrupt Department of Injustice and turn the Injustice Department back into the best law enforcement agency on the planet,” Trump said at a rally in September.

Davis promised to “rain hell on Washington, D.C.” and fire and indict “a lot of people in the deep state,” including Joe and Hunter Biden.

Guess who reposted a clip of those comments on social media? Mike Davis did, with a single word of comment: “Amen.”

Trump is promising to manipulate the American justice system to fit his political needs. And thanks to the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, Trump would have carte blanche to do it as part of his “official duties.”

So I, for one, am grateful for Adams’ indictment and the signal it sends. It shows the rule of law still holds up … for now.

Politics

World Cup fuels ticketing reform demands

Published

3 minutes ago

June 21, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Demands are growing for a political reckoning over ticket scams at the World Cup — and beyond.

The National Independent Venue Association and Fan Alliance, organizations representing and advocating for entertainment venues and artists respectively, sent a joint letter to Congress on Thursday, calling on lawmakers to ban speculative and ghost tickets, cases where resellers flog tickets they don’t actually have.

The letter — addressed to Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer — includes nearly two dozen accounts of fans who say they were scammed out of thousands of dollars trying to get tickets to the World Cup, which began last week. The groups are also asking fans to share their own stories with elected officials via the Fix the Tix Fan Action Center that launched last week.

“Every one of these stories erodes the public’s faith that consumers should and will be protected from fraud,” NIVA Executive Director Stephen Parker and Fan Alliance founder Donald Cohen wrote. “We urge Congress to work with us to prevent fraud like this in the future and finally enact ticket resale consumer protections that will protect Americans and ensure affordability.”

The letter flagged fans like Dacy Gillespie, who bought World Cup tickets for her sons on Christmas, only to learn on match day — months later — that the seller couldn’t deliver them. And Skylie Shore, who Parker and Cohen said spent well over $6,000 on tickets to the Scotland-Haiti match on June 13, but was forced to wait outside the stadium because she couldn’t access them as fans marched in on gameday.

“These examples reveal a consistent pattern: consumer deception, speculative ticket sales, and broken-hearted American families at the hands of resale ticketing companies like StubHub,” Parker and Cohen wrote.

In a statement, StubHub spokesperson Jack Sterne said that the platform does not allow speculative ticket sales, and blamed FIFA for users’ difficulty in accessing their tickets.

“We understand that attending the World Cup represents a significant investment in time and money, and we take our responsibility to every fan who books through our platform seriously,” Sterne said in a statement. “Many of the issues fans are facing trace back to the event organizer’s technology infrastructure, newly announced transfer restrictions, and a new app that was launched just a month ago.”

In response, FIFA said in a statement that the organization “can guarantee the validity and delivery of tickets purchased through its official platforms” and that FIFA.com/tickets “is the official ticket sales channel” for the tournament.

NIVA and Fan Alliance are urging congressional leadership to place universal price-gouging limits on ticket resale, enact stringent fines on perpetrators and a violation-reporting mechanism for ticket scams, and require secondary ticketing platforms to produce data on ticket fulfillment and consumer complaints.

The groups are not the only ones monitoring for evidence of shady ticket practices. Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway issued a consumer guidance in advance of the tournament, urging match-goers to beware of fraud and promising to hold offenders accountable. And the FBI in May put out a public service announcement, warning fans against purchasing tickets on copycat websites modeled on FIFA’s.

“With the World Cup coming to Kansas City, excitement is high and, unfortunately, so is the potential for fraud,” Hanaway said in her statement. “Missourians should be able to enjoy this once-in-a-generation event without fear of being deceived. My office will hold accountable anyone who seeks to exploit our families, and we stand ready to assist anyone who encounters suspicious activity.”