Trump Firing Top Prosecutor for Failing to Invent Fake Crimes by Foes

Yes, Trump does assert that James is guilty of crimes and that he is innocent of them. And so do his propagandists. “She is guilty of multiple significant serial criminal violations,” Stephen Miller seethed recently, calling James “corrupt” and “shameless.” (One imagines that as the facts refused to cooperate, Miller was on the phone shrieking wildly that Siebert had better bring a prosecution or else.)

But ultimately, what Trump and Miller are actually doing is trying to establish the ethos that all prosecutions are just a power struggle, that the only guilt-versus-innocence metric that has any force is established by who wins elections (by any means necessary) and, by extension, who gets to prosecute whom.

The James affair reveals this starkly. James’s office actually did the work of building a case against Trump, and mostly succeeded, securing a verdict (if not a penalty) that stands. Trump and Miller thought they could simply command the prosecution of James in response and automatically get it. Now that the facts aren’t playing along, they’re simply looking for a new prosecutor who will bring a case against her regardless.