In Seeking Adams Dismissal, Trumps Appointees Use Legal System to Their Advantage
Since being sworn into office again, President Trump has granted clemency to the rioters who attacked the Capitol four years ago in his name and sought to purge the F.B.I.and the Justice Department of those who prosecuted them, and him.Trump appointees at the department dropped campaign finance charges against a Republican member of Congress and stepped back from investigating another Republican lawmaker who introduced legislation that would allow Mr.
Trump to serve a third term.Fulfilling a campaign promise to libertarians, the president pardoned Ross Ulbricht, who ran Silk Road, an online marketplace where illegal drugs were peddled.Mr.
Trump has long viewed the justice system as a battleground on which power is deployed for transactional political or personal ends.During his first term and more pointedly during his four years out of office, he saw himself on the receiving end of that dynamic.
And now that he is back in office, he is using his authority to reward allies and punish enemies.The demand by his appointees at the Justice Department for the dismissal of corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York over the objection of career prosecutors is just the most visible and consequential expression so far of the transactional nature of his approach to the justice system.In doing so, Mr.Trump’s team precipitated a serious crisis inside the department’s besieged unit responsible for investigating and prosecuting political corruption, and the Manhattan U.S.
attorney’s office.The astonishing move also drew Mr.
Adams, who had begun to cultivate a close relationship to Mr.Trump, closer to the White House — at a time when the president is trying to assert dominance over big-city Democrats who might resist his push for immigration enforcement.On Friday, hours before department officials signed off on a motion seeking the Adams dismissal, the mayor appeared on “Fox and Friends” with Mr.
Trump’s border czar, Thomas Homan, to say he was not �...