Running a Criminal Enterprise from the Oval Office Requires Uprooting Those Anti-Corruption, Deep State Insubordinates*
This post began as satire . . . .
Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, who represented FOTUS in his New York state trial that resulted in 34 felony convictions, is largely responsible for implementing changes within the DOJ. Those changes include rewriting the history of Jan. 6 from within and helping the agency eradicate all FBI agents and prosecutors who weaponized the DOJ against those peaceful protesting patriots and, of course, against Trump himself.[i]
Career prosecutors at the Department of Justice, including those dedicated to prosecuting public corruption from inside the Public Integrity Section (“PIN”),[ii] defied Emil Bove, their acting boss’s command to dismiss last year’s public corruption indictment of New York Mayor Eric Adams (D) in the Southern District of New York (SDNY).
Unpersuaded by the thick lipstick Bove had layered onto what even casual observers saw was a monstrous pig, high-level prosecutors called both the Adams indictment and Bove’s mandate to dismiss it with conditions exactly what they are: textbook examples of the kinds of (alleged) public corruption they swore to prosecute “without fear or favor.” FOTUS’s border czar Tom Holman and Mayor Adams removed all doubt the transaction was quid pro quo corrupt, revealing its essential components, and did so on Fox of course, to raucous laughter and approval.
With all signs pointing to an administration fully devoted to quid pro quo corruption, calling out Emil Bove and the manifestly illegal transaction he orchestrated between the DOJ and Adams did not bode well for these disloyal, deep-state, anti-corruption insubordinates. Standing on personal integrity and principle — and their sworn oaths — over loyalty to a wannabe dictator is intolerable to an administration devoted to building and sustaining a criminal enterprise, especially the one headquartered in the Oval Office.[iii]
The first act of defiance came from Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon. Despite Bove’s recent lip service to principles that have historically guided the administration of justice at the DOJ — which he and others are quickly transforming to arcane truisms — Sassoon had the audacity to mention things that are becoming anathema to Trump’s DOJ. (As Rachel Maddow often suggests, pay attention to what they do and not what they say.) Sassoon declared:
“When I took my oath of office three weeks ago, I vowed to well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I was about to enter. In carrying out that responsibility, I am guided by, among other things, the Principles of Federal Prosecution set forth in the Justice Manual and your recent memoranda instructing attorneys for the Department of Justice to make only good-faith arguments and not to use the criminal enforcement authority of the United States to achieve political objectives or other improper aims. I am also guided by the values that have defined my over ten years of public service. . . . [A]s you may know, I clerked for the Honorable J. Harvie Wilkinson III on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and for Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. Both men instilled in me a sense of duty to contribute to the public good and uphold the rule of law, and a commitment to reasoned and thorough analysis. I have always considered it my obligation to pursue justice impartially, without favor to the wealthy or those who occupy important public office, or harsher treatment for the less powerful.”
Sassoon spent eight pages dismantling Bove’s claims that the Adams indictment was politically motivated weaponization of the DOJ and its dismissal without prejudice — while the DOJ held over Adams’s head the threat of re-indictment if he didn’t do the administration’s bidding — was remotely in the interest of justice. In further defiance, Sasson pointed out:
· how dismissal of the Adams indictment “will amplify, rather than abate, concerns about weaponization of the Department.”
· SDNY was prepared to go before a grand jury to seek a superseding indictment of the mayor to add conspiracy to obstruct justice because he — allegedly — had destroyed evidence and instructed others to do the same and to “provide false information to the FBI” on his behalf.
· during the meeting with Bove and counsel for Adams to negotiate “what amounted to a quid pro quo” transaction, Bove “admonished a member of [Sassoon’s] team who took notes during the meeting and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting’s conclusion.”
Danielle Sassoon’s Resignation Letter to AG Bondi; see also SDNY Acting U.S. Attorney Resigns Over Order to Drop Adams Charges (Tyler McBrien, Lawfare, February 13, 2025).
Sassoon’s lesson in ethical principles of criminal prosecution in the DOJ could not have been difficult to compile, although her letter was an elegantly crafted act in defiance that left the administration with no choice but to rid itself of her. After all, Bove’s failed attempt to mask the obvious quid pro quo transaction between the DOJ and Adams was as bush league as the shockingly amateurish and disastrous speeches Vice President ‘I’m Not Trump’s Successor’ Vance and Secretary of Defense ‘It’s Just Aromatic Apple Juice’ Hegseth gave at the Munich Security Conference this past week. See JD Vance attacks Europe over free speech and migration; Discordant Ukraine statements from Trump team leaves allies anxious.[iv]
The lead prosecutor on the Adams case in the Southern District of New York, Hagan Scotten, penned a missive to Bove to correct the latter’s mistaken claim that Scotten had also “refused [Bove’s] order to move to dismiss the indictment against Eric Adams without prejudice, subject to certain conditions, including the express possibility of reinstatement of the indictment.” Scotten was never asked to dismiss the indictment, he explained. He went on to outline for the Acting Deputy Attorney General basic principles of public corruption. “No system of ordered liberty can allow the government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives.”
In slightly less euphemistic terms than those Sassoon used in her eloquent letter to Attorney General Bondi, Scotten identified for Bove what should be obvious to both upper management at the DOJ and every first-year law student:
“[A]ny assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way. If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”
Scotten used that opportunity to tender his resignation. Resignation Letter From Hagan Scotten (emphasis added).
Good riddance.
After Sassoon balked and Bove excoriated her for insubordination and accepted her resignation, he turned to career prosecutors inside the Justice Department including PIN to initiate the quid to Adams’s induced quo. That resulted in a predictable cascade of honorable resignations by career prosecutors who, inexplicably to the morally corrupt DOJ leadership, stood on personal integrity and principle — and their oaths — over loyalty to a wannabe dictator in what some have characterized as the “Thursday Afternoon Masacre,” a play on Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre.”[v] “John Keller, the acting head of the Public Integrity Section, refused to drop the case and resigned, two sources said. Three other members of the section also resigned. Kevin Driscoll, the acting head of the department’s Criminal Division, which oversees federal criminal cases nationwide, also refused to drop the charges and resigned.” Federal prosecutors in New York and Washington resign after refusing to drop Adams charges.
That’s seven.
Good riddance.
The DOJ ultimately found a lawyer “willing” to sign the papers to dismiss Adams’ indictment. See In Moving to Stop Adams Case, Career Lawyer Sought to Stave Off Deeper Crisis (Devlin Barrett, Adam Goldman, Glenn Thrush, and William K. Rashbaum, The New York Times, February 17, 2025) (Bove gathered together the lawyers in the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section and, under threat of termination, instructed that they had one hour to decide which one would be signing the motion to dismiss corruption charges against New York Mayor Adams; longtime PIN member Ed Sullivan stepped forward and agreed to sign the document to save his younger colleagues from being fired, believing that — and attempting to salvage some credibility of the section that was prosecuting 200 public corruption cases across the county — was the greater good).
America’s strengthening oligarchy is, by definition, quid pro quo corrupt. Nothing is on the merits; nor is it utilitarian; transactions are collusive, not arms-length; decisions are made; laws and regulations are enacted, repealed, or ignored; investigations are quashed; lawsuits are dismissed; detractors and opponents are silenced; business is conducted; and contracts are entered on a simple, transactional basis (sorry for all the passive voice):
Those with the money and those with the power intersect in ways that secure and produce for themselves and each other more wealth and power, and they transform one into the other in what is known among insiders as the “0.01 percenters circle jerk.”[vi] Decisions are made based on what’s in the billionaires’ interest. The Unique Danger of a Trumpist Oligarchy (Franklin Foer, The Atlantic, November 2, 2024) (“A corrupt cabal of billionaires [have entangled] themselves with the Trump administration and form[ed] a double-barreled threat to the American system”); The American Oligarchs Have Arrived to Destroy US Democracy (Thom Hartmann, Common Dreams, October 30, 2023) (“Oligarchy is corrosive. It destroys trust and confidence in government. It breeds cynicism and discontent. If not challenged, it will swallow us whole”); Oligarchs Already Own Much Of US — Can They Buy Democracy? (Sebastian Smith, Barrons, January 16, 2025).
A blatant recent example is the State Department’s plan to spend $400 million on “armored” vehicles — some (certainly not me) are calling Swasticars — manufactured by the company whose largest shareholder is the same guy who spent $277 million to buy the presidency and congressional offices for other MAGAs. Art of the Deal: The Trump Administration Might Just Spend $400 Million on ‘Armored’ Teslas (that deal might be on hold, for now). I’m reasonably sure the State Department did not send out a contract for bid.
Last week I posted “Conflicts of Interest So Big They Can Be Seen From Space.” That post focused on Musk’s extensive conflicts of interest as he has undertaken DOGE with his pubescent team of incel hackers. Two days later, The New York Times published an article describing Musk’s growing conflicts of interest and his and Trump’s efforts to reformulate the federal government around them based on, you guessed it, what’s in the oligarchy’s interest — not yours or mine. According to the article, the authors have “spent the past year investigating Elon Musk’s business with the federal government.” The introductory paragraphs summarize one branch of the criminal enterprise being conducted from inside the oval office:
“President Trump has been in office less than a month, and Elon Musk’s vast business empire is already benefiting — or is now in a decidedly better position to benefit.
“Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man who has been given enormous power by the president, have been dismantling federal agencies across the government. Mr. Trump has fired top officials and pushed out career employees. Many of them were leading investigations, enforcement matters or lawsuits pending against Mr. Musk’s companies.
“Mr. Musk has also reaped the benefit of resignations by Biden-era regulators that flipped control of major regulatory agencies, leaving more sympathetic Republican appointees overseeing those lawsuits.
“At least 11 federal agencies that have been affected by those moves have more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions into Mr. Musk’s six companies, according to a review by The New York Times.
“Trump firings hit agencies with oversight of Musk’s companies. Staffing changes, including the firing of several top officials, have affected agencies with federal investigations into or regulatory battles with Elon Musk’s companies.”
In conclusion, the authors describe a scenario that falls perfectly within the criminal enterprise’s ability to silence dissent and detractors:
“On Monday, Mr. Trump fired the head of the Office of Government Ethics, an independent agency. The office had pending requests to investigate Mr. Musk based on allegations raised by Democrats in Congress last week that Mr. Musk’s role as a federal government official creates an unavoidable conflict of interest.
“The letter, signed by 12 House Democrats, said: ‘The American people deserve assurances that no individual, regardless of stature, is permitted to influence policy for personal gain.’”
Elon Musk’s Business Empire Scores Benefits Under Trump Shake-Up (Eric Lipton and Kirsten Grind, February 11, 2025) (emphasis added).
The end.
R.VanWagoner https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner publishes. https://richardvanwagoner.medium.com/subscribe
*My brother the very talented fiction writer and novelist, Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, deserves considerable credit for offering both substantive and technical suggestions to https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner. Rob’s second novel is a beautifully written suspense drama that takes place in Utah, Wyoming, and Norway. This novel, The Contortionists, which Rob himself narrates for the audio version, is a psychological page-turner about a missing child in a predominantly Mormon community. I have read the novel and listened to the audio version twice. It is a literary masterpiece. The Contortionists is not, however, for the faint of heart.
**Richard J Van Wagoner is my father. His list of honors, awards, and professional associations is extensive. He was Professor Emeritus (Painting and Drawing), Weber State University, having served three Appointments as Chair of the Department of Visual Arts there. He guest-lectured and instructed at many universities and juried numerous shows and exhibitions. He was invited to submit his work as part of many shows and exhibitions, and his work was exhibited in many traveling shows domestically and internationally. My daughter Angela Van Wagoner, a professional photographer, photographed more than 500 pieces of my father’s work. The photographs of my father’s art reproduced in https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner are hers.
[i] See Who is Emil Bove, the lawyer behind Trump’s revamp of the US DOJ? (Luc Cohen, Reuters, February 5, 2025). Bove, who represented Trump in the New York election fraud case in which a New York jury convicted FOTUS of 34 felony counts, took the lead in reshaping the DOJ in what appears to be largely in Trump’s image. “Bove has moved swiftly to restructure the DOJ’s stance on January 6 cases. In a memo issued Friday, he ordered the dismissal of all prosecutors hired on a probationary basis to handle cases related to the Capitol riot. Additionally, he directed top federal prosecutors across the country to compile a list of all personnel, including FBI agents, involved in the investigation.”
[ii] “The Public Integrity Section (PIN) oversees the investigation and prosecution of all federal crimes affecting government integrity, including bribery of public officials, election crimes, and other related offenses. PIN investigates and prosecutes some of the most sensitive, complex, and contentious public corruption cases handled by the Department, including cases involving elected and appointed officials at all levels of government. PIN also serves as a source of advice and expertise for federal prosecutors and agents regarding the handling of public corruption cases nationwide, and plays a key role in developing Department policy concerning public corruption and election crime investigations and prosecutions. PIN handles cases in Districts across the country, either on its own or in partnership with the local U.S. Attorney’s Office.”
[iii] In December 2018, I posted, Trump’s Picture Pops Up When You Google “RICO,” Too. A December 15, 2018 Washington Post article by David A. Fahrenthold, Matt Zapotosky and Seung Min Kim, maintained that “Mounting legal threats surround Trump as nearly every organization he has led is under investigation. The cascade of inquiries threaten to dominate his third year in the White House.”
[iv] Trump is abandoning Ukraine and will not come to its rescue or the rescue of any NATO member “whose forces backstopping a settlement get attacked by Russia.” With that comment, and others by Hegseth, Trump is telegraphing that the United States is soon to withdraw from the 75-year alliance that has helped keep the international order in balance, something FOTUS began during his first administration. See Trump threw Ukraine under the Russian bus. NATO could be next (Nicholas Grossman, MSNBC, February 16, 2025).
[v] In 1973 President Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox who, as part of his investigation of Watergate and its coverup, had subpoenaed recordings Mr. Nixon was uncomfortable turning over. The attorney general resigned in lieu of complying with the order. Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox. Ruckelshaus also refused and resigned. Nixon then ordered United States Solicitor General Robert Bork Jr., to fire Cox. Bork proved to be a loyal soldier and pulled the trigger on Cox. President Nixon promised as quid pro quo Bork’s appointment to the United States Supreme Court. Resigning in disgrace soon thereafter, however, Nixon was unable to perform his part of the bargain, but his fellow Californian Ronald Regan did. In 1987, the United States Senate rejected — Borked — President Reagan’s nomination of Bork to the Supreme Court by 42–58. Anthony Kennedy was confirmed in his place 97–0. Karma can be a bitch.
[vi] I made that up.