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

President Donald Trump is set to fire a top federal prosecutor for committing a serious dereliction of duty, ABC News reports. What exactly is this prosecutor’s offense, you ask? Did he fail to follow Justice Department protocol? Blow an easy prosecution? Botch the handling of evidence?

Nope. Trump is set to remove Erik Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, for being faithful to facts, evidence, and guidelines governing good prosecutorial conduct, rather than fully corrupting his office to target Trump’s enemies.

That’s not a rhetorical cheap shot. It’s what Trump is actually doing, per ABC:

President Donald Trump is expected to fire the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia after his office was unable to find incriminating evidence of mortgage fraud against New York Attorney General Letitia James, according to sources.

Federal prosecutors in Virginia had uncovered no clear evidence to prove that James had knowingly committed mortgage fraud when she purchased a home in the state in 2023, ABC News first reported earlier this week, but Trump officials pushed U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert to nevertheless bring criminal charges against her, according to sources.

That sounds buffoonish, but it also represents grave misconduct on Trump’s part. The president’s accomplice in this scheme—William Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency—has been highlighting so-called “mortgage fraud” by Trump’s leading enemies, and using that as a pretext to refer them to DOJ for prosecution.

These foes have included California Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and James. Yet the scheme is falling apart everywhere. The allegations of mortgage fraud—which involve the designation of multiple residences as primary ones—don’t indicate serious transgressions. Trump officials and even Pulte’s relatives have done similar. And with both Schiff and Cook, exculpatory evidence has emerged.

Now, in James’s case, U.S. Attorney Siebert has failed to find evidence of criminality despite investigating for five months. Investigators sought to show that James had knowingly falsified documents to secure favorable mortgage terms.

Instead, they found that one document that might have been incriminating had limited significance, and every other relevant document was accurate. Yet Trump officials are pressuring Siebert to bring charges anyway.

Trump hates James, of course, because she successfully brought a massive civil fraud case against him, resulting in a fine of hundreds of millions of dollars. Though an appeals court tossed the fine, the verdict stands, and Trump has sought retribution for years.

Now Trump is set to fire that top prosecutor precisely because he apparently will not cook the facts to make the original allegation against James stand:

Sources familiar with the matter said that the administration now plans to install a U.S. attorney who would more aggressively investigate James.

Translation: Trump will replace him with someone who will pliably bring prosecutions against Trump’s enemies when the facts don’t warrant it. As Jon Favreau put it: “The president is firing prosecutors who won’t help him get revenge on his political enemies by making up fake crimes.”

There’s a deeper absurdity about this whole affair that’s worth highlighting. At the core of Trump’s whole tit-for-tat retribution project is the aim of entirely erasing the very idea of legitimate guilt and innocence.

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.

All this is grist for the bigger idea that Trump is a politically weak and ineffectual president who’s simultaneously consolidating autocratic power in areas where he has more flexibility to do so. As Jonathan Bernstein notes, Trump’s record in lower courts is terrible, which is part of a larger dynamic in which he constantly loses on many fronts where he faces real opposition. Indeed, there’s a kind of split screen here: Trump can appear “strong” by ordering troops into cities and blowing up little boats in the Caribbean Sea, and his sycophants can boast about it to puff him up further:

But that’s enabled by the murkiness of the law around limited unilateral military strikes and Congress willingly ceding presidents warmaking authorities for decades. Similarly, Trump can force news organizations to deliver him the scalps of comedians when corrupt lackeys like FCC Chair Brendan Carr can leverage legal uncertainties around the licensing process to do so. As consequential as these things are, they represent what you might call “easier” autocratic paths for Trump.

Yet the James affair shows that on other fronts, Trump is running into deep institutional resistance and the sheer unwillingness of many key actors to wholly abandon the rule of law on his behalf. Yes, Trump may replace the prosecutor, but then he’ll have to get this sham past many layers of courts and a jury. It’s unlikely to happen. And this Supreme Court could always find a way to let Trump remove Cook, but that will likely prove temporary. Thus far, this whole “mortgage fraud” scam is utterly failing to advance his broader authoritarian project. And there’s no reason to think that will change anytime soon.