Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. Attorney for the District of Wyoming, Darin Smith, is an estate planning lawyer who has never tried a federal or state case. But he does boast the most important qualification — at least for this Department of Justice — to uphold law and order: he participated in January 6. While Todd Blanche and Kash Patel struggle to explain how Jim Comey building a seashell display on vacation amounts to a true threat to commit political violence, they are moving forward with installing a guy who marched with rioters who battered a cop and threatened to kill Mike Pence as the top federal law enforcement official in Wyoming. He’s already the interim U.S. Attorney, and says he never entered the Capitol itself, so the Senate is poised to move ahead and make this permanent.
It’s nice to hear that he didn’t personally partake in smearing feces on the Capitol walls or build any gallows, but he did show up for a protest for the explicit purpose of disenfranchising voters, so… still not great.
But Smith is only one of a package of proposed prosecutors. Huffington Post explains:
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Another nominee in the mix is Phillip Williams, who is up for a U.S. attorney post in the Northern District of Alabama. Like Smith, he’s never tried a criminal case. He previously criticized federal law enforcement for having “hunted down” Jan. 6 rioters, and accused them of “prosecutorial abuse, many, many times over.” He also compared their prosecutions to the Salem witch trials of the late 1600s, when people were falsely accused of witchcraft.
See, now, the problem with that comparison is that we only had rumors about what Goody Proctor got up to, but WE ALL GOT PICS OF THIS SHIT:
Not to mention video of rioters busting through gates and pummeling police.
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Rounding out a trio of election deniers up for plum assignments is former GOP congressman Dan Bishop, slotted for the a U.S. Attorney post in North Carolina. He was also at the Capitol on January 6, but on the inside, voting to overturn the election results despite the lack of any credible evidence that the results weren’t true and valid. And, of course, when you want a law and order type, you obviously want someone who watched a mob attack the building threatening to murder officials and then goes ahead and votes to validate their antics. It’s all right though, because Bishop has said that “the left” was behind January 6.
Which must be news to Smith.
The structural problem here is bigger than any of these three yo-yos personally. U.S. Attorneys wield enormous power because deciding who gets prosecuted with the full force of the federal government, and how aggressively, is the whole ball game for many defendants. It’s a tremendous amount of discretionary power in the hands of lawyers better suited to setting up trust funds than running a prosecutorial office. And attending January 6 many not disqualify someone from being a citizen in a democracy, but it absolutely should disqualify them from passing judgment on who has and has not committed a crime.
The Trump administration has been normalizing these bottom of the barrel picks for over a year. From the early days of January 6 fluffer Ed Martin through the whole Lindsey Halligan debacle, this Justice Department prizes loyalty over competence. And in Trumpland there’s no greater badge of loyalty than January 6th bona fides.
Alas, HuffPo reports that GOP Senators “all but shrugged” when asked about the nominees. So, congratulations on your new jobs, guys!
Senate Moves Forward With 3 Wildly Unfit Nominees To Be Trump’s U.S. Attorneys [Huffington Post]
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.