To scrutinize
More from the Barr is dirty files:
The New York Times is reporting that attorney general Barr has assigned an outside prosecutor to “scrutinize the criminal case” against Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser.
The review is highly unusual and could trigger more accusations of political interference by top Justice Department officials into the work of career prosecutors.
“Highly unusual” as in “unprecedented in living memory,” according to prosecutors Rachel Maddow talked to yesterday. This is not what the Justice Department is supposed to do. The fact that it’s doing it in a case that Trump has loudly and frequently bellowed about makes it all the more grotesque.
Future constitutional historians of the US, I predict, are likely to gravitate to the use of two terms, BT and AT: Before Trump and After Trump. So far, the checks have checked and the balances have balanced. But Trump and the Americans who voted for him are putting the Constitution through a pretty rigorous test.
I’m not sure that we can conclude that the checks and balances have worked, given that the almost cartoonishly criminal man has just been acquitted in the senate.
I think the checks and balances have been frayed for a long time as Congress has ceded more and more power to the president, power not part of the president’s Constitutional office. Trump merely found those fraying ends and tugged at them. The whole thing is unraveling.
To be fair, I do not think Trump did this knowingly or intentionally, but solely through a dangerous combination of arrogance and ignorance. He just continued doing what Trump has always done, continued dirty deals along with brain vomit and diarrhea of the mouth, and the inevitable happened.
The checks and balances only work if the party in charge of enforcement actually enforces them.