The list of missteps at Donald Trump’s Justice Department during the president’s second term is not short, but among the most unsettling developments is the frequency with which Main Justice has fired federal prosecutors as part of a brazenly partisan purge. Indeed, the full list of prosecutors caught up in the campaign against federal law enforcement because they worked on cases the White House didn’t like has been difficult to keep up with.

The partisan cleansing is ongoing. MS NOW reported this week:

At least four Justice Department prosecutors have recently been fired as part of the Trump Administration’s plan to publicly accuse the Biden administration of unfairly targeting anti-abortion protesters for their religious beliefs, according to two people familiar with the firings and a Justice Department spokesperson.

The firings are an extension of the DOJ’s so-called “weaponization” panel, which accused Biden-era prosecutors of targeting those protesting outside abortion clinics in ways that crossed legal lines.

The findings of the “weaponization” panel, however, were a bit of a joke. The cases cited as evidence of abuse actually led to jury-approved convictions; and there’s little to suggest the ousted prosecutors did anything other than enforce the law against activists politically aligned with the Trump administration.

The firings of the four assistant U.S. attorneys, in other words, weren’t the response to an abuse, they were themselves the abuse.

A few weeks ago, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche appeared at a Conservative Political Action Conference event and bragged about “all these people are leaving or getting fired” at the DOJ, concluding that Trump “has green lit all of this.”

Asked two weeks later about his response to allegations that Trump’s DOJ has fired people for “political reasons,” Blanche, a former Trump defense lawyer, replied, “If you were a prosecutor and you were trying to prosecute your boss, you have ethical duties as a lawyer that I think prevent you from continuing to work in that environment.”

Except, as the acting attorney general ought to understand, that’s a weak argument. For one thing, many of the DOJ officials who have been purged had nothing to do with the criminal charges Trump faced. For another, even those prosecutors who did work on Trump’s cases weren’t trying to prosecute their “boss;” they followed the evidence and helped bring felony charges against a private citizen.

It’s not their fault voters elected a convicted felon to the nation’s highest office.

As for Blanche’s future, he told NBC News this week that if Trump were to nominate him to succeed Pam Bondi, he’d make it a priority to “get rid of all the pure weaponization,” arguing that during the Biden administration, the DOJ’s headquarters “was turned into just a political arm of the White House.”

Given the degree to which Trump’s DOJ headquarters has been turned into a political arm of the Trump White House with Blanche’s support and encouragement, this might be the single most ironic comment of the president’s second term.

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From MS Now.