In recent days, Attorney General Todd Blanche and other Trump administration officials said they were monitoring public comments from congressional Democrats, looking for evidence of the party possibly crossing legal lines. That was extraordinary in its own right, although the nation’s chief law enforcement official appeared to hedge on the scrutiny at a Thursday afternoon press conference.

“There’s no ongoing investigations, criminal investigations, into words that incoming senators or congressmen have said,” Blanche told reporters despite the president’s recent insistence that the Justice Department “immediately” examine Democratic rhetoric, which he deemed “criminal.”

Of course, the key word in the attorney general’s statement was “ongoing,” and time will tell whether the Republican lawyer’s focus changes. But in the meantime, his boss apparently isn’t giving up.

“Will the Seditious Six ever be prosecuted?” Donald Trump wrote to his social media platform a few hours before Blanche’s press conference. “What they did was a great violation to our Country and its Constitution!”

Parts of the political world might have forgotten what he was referring to, but exactly one year ago this week, several Democratic military and intelligence veterans appeared in a video, in which they urged service members to reject illegal orders. This sparked apoplexy within the Trump administration, as if it were somehow outrageous to remind active-duty troops to follow the law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Trump helped lead the charge, insisting the Democratic lawmakers (who had done nothing wrong) had engaged in “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” The president and his team similarly pushed the “Seditious Six” label with unnerving enthusiasm.

This led U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News host who’s currently the top federal prosecutor in the nation’s capital, to authorize prosecutors to try to persuade a grand jury to indict the Democratic veterans on charges of seditious conspiracy — charges that, if they had resulted in a conviction, would have sent the elected lawmakers to prison for many years.

That didn’t turn out well. Regular citizens on the grand jury rejected the ridiculous gambit. Under normal circumstances, grand jury members are deferential to prosecutors, but MS NOW confirmed that literally zero members of the grand jury who heard this case were prepared to go along with the partisan scheme.

Pirro’s U.S. Attorney’s Office had the option of trying again, but federal prosecutors ultimately concluded the prudent move was simply to stop trying.

“Will the Seditious Six ever be prosecuted?” Trump asked Thursday. The answer is, “Probably not, because they didn’t commit any crime.” That said, the fact that the president is trying to breathe new life into this absurdity, on the same day his attorney general suggested the DOJ isn’t investigating Democrats over their political rhetoric, is tough to ignore.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post Despite Blanche’s denials, Trump tries to breathe life into criminal case against Democrats appeared first on MS NOW.

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