Just a week into the announcement of Donald Trump’s $1.776 billion fund to reward political allies and Jan. 6 rioters, congressional Republicans appear to be rebelling against the plan.
During a Substack Live this morning, Legal AF’s Michael Popok and I recapped why the fund appears to be foundering in the legislative branch and has come under increasing pressure in court.
Trump’s former criminal defense attorney turned Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche didn’t meet with the results he expected when lobbying for Congress’s support and distributing a one-page document defending his former client’s insurrectionist enrichment scheme.
Here are some of the other topics that we discussed.
The “Broadview Six”
Meanwhile, the Trump Justice Department was forced to dismiss all charges against the “Broadview Six,” the Chicago-based politicians and activists who had been charged with impeding and assaulting law enforcement outside an immigration detention center last year.
The humiliating reversal, days before a trial, happened after a federal judge discovered indications of grand jury “misconduct.”
After the initial grand jury rejected the initial indictment with a “no bill,” federal prosecutors took several actions that alarmed the judge. One prosecutor “vouched” for the case on her own credibility rather than the evidence. There were “improper prosecutorial communications” with a grand juror, and skeptical members of the panel were excused during the deliberations process.
Then came the cover-up: U.S. District Judge April Perry told the government that she was “incredibly shocked” to find evidence of misconduct redacted in the grand jury transcripts that she received.
“I put even more reliance on Department of Justice attorneys,” Perry told prosecutors. “Your sole goal is to do justice. Your client is justice itself. I do believe deeply in the presumption of regularity and that most government attorneys are doing the best they can to do the right thing. That trust has been broken.”
Judge Perry indicated that she would revisit the possibility of “sanctions for prosecutorial misconduct and for potential ethical violations, including lack of candor to the Court.” (Read the blistering, unsealed transcript of the hearing here.)
As I mentioned during the discussion, the “Broadview Six” evokes another famous case of activists prosecuted in the Windy City: “The Chicago Seven,” who put the legal system on trial after their arrests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention — mocking the notion of their prosecution with stunts like bringing U.S., South Vietnamese and Viet Cong flags into the courtroom.
In the “Broadview Six” case, the mockery of the system came from the Trump Justice Department. One of the co-defendants, local Chicago elected official Brian Straw, has asked a judge to order the preservation of evidence, and the government is opposing that motion.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia
Toward the end of our conversation, Michael Popok and I remarked about the length of time it had taken to rule on Abrego’s vindictive prosecution motion.
Hours later, a federal judge granted Abrego’s motion to dismiss his indictment.
Read All Rise News’s breaking report on that development here.
