MEDIA MONDAY / H0W DEEP THE TOADIES HAVE SUNK THE DOJ

With apologies to Herblock via PillartoPost.org online magazine

GUEST ESSAY / By The New Republic Magazine--In case you missed it, CNN originally reported late last Wednesday that the Justice Department was opening a probe into whether E. Jean Carroll, the New York woman who successfully sued Donald Trump and won $88.3 million in damages for sexual abuse and defamation, lied during the legal proceedings against Trump, and that Andrew Boutros, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, would be leading the investigation. Then, on Thursday, Boutros said, Hey, not me!, categorically denying that he was investigating Carroll. 

This is extraordinary on so many levels. First and foremost, it’s shocking and disgusting that the Trump administration would even contemplate doing this. 

It’s important to dip briefly into the facts here. Yes, in a 2022 deposition, Carroll misrepresented the fact that Democratic billionaire Reid Hoffman donated to her defense fund. Her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, has said that Carroll recalled later, sometime in 2023—it seems worth bearing in mind that she was in her late seventies at the time—that she had received some outside donations and that she told Kaplan, and Kaplan immediately told Trump’s lawyers. Those lawyers tried to pounce on this new information to cast doubt on Carroll’s credibility, but the judge barred Trump’s lawyers from using it at trial. Two juries subsequently found Trump liable for both sexual assault and defamation. 

That’s the background. 

Here’s the important part, as detailed by Lisa Rubin in a recent MS NOW column: Trump appealed, twice, trying to get appellate courts to agree that Carroll was lying, and he lost both times. First, a three-judge appellate panel upheld Trump’s conviction and believed that Carroll just forgot: "Ms. Carroll plausibly represented that she had forgotten about the limited outside funding," the panel wrote. Second, eight of 10 active judges on an appellate panel in June 2025 denied a request for rehearing by Trump’s lawyers. (And even just last month, a third appellate panel denied a rehearing of the defamation case.) 

If you look at that June 2025 ruling I linked to above, you’ll see an interesting name listed as counsel for "defendant-appellant": Todd Blanche. This, of course, is the same Todd Blanche who is running the Department of Justice today. 

When Trump fired Pam Bondi as attorney general and stories came out that Trump had been displeased with her lack of zeal about going after his enemies, you, like me, probably wondered how anybody could possibly be more of an unethical, corrupt, cowardly lickspittle than Bondi was. She brought—or tried to bring—prosecutions against Trump antagonists Letitia James, James Comey, James Brennan, Fani Willis, and more. 

When career prosecutors declined to bring those cases, she fired them and brought in incompetent hacks to do Trump’s bidding. In some cases, federal judges found these hacks to have been installed illegally. Bondi was venally corrupt, on an absolutely Wagnerian level. 

Just this week, in fact, a retired chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, backed by 120 judges, attorneys, and law professors, brought a blistering ethics complaint against Bondi demanding that she be investigated and disbarred. That complaint is mostly about her handling of the Epstein files because, remember, she behaved indefensibly there too. So how could anyone be more corrupt than that? I’ll tell you exactly how, through Trump’s eyes: They could succeed where Bondi failed. 

That was her crime. Not obviously and serially violating departmental ethical canons. Her crime was not doing it well. Hence, Blanche. The fact that his name was on that appellate denial—that he was one of Trump’s lawyers in the Carroll proceedings—means he has personal skin in this game, which in turn means that there’s no way on earth this should be happening on his watch. 

And indeed, he is said to have "recused" himself on the matter of the Carroll investigation. So it was tossed to Boutros, in Chicago. But Boutros, as I noted above, says he’s not investigating Carroll. He maintains that he’s only investigating Hoffman’s nonprofit, American Future Republic. It’s based in Chicago, you see, so there’s the veneer of justification. But this just raises the question: What has American Future Republic done wrong? 

It’s allowed to donate money to a legal defense fund. It’s a 501(c)4, not a (c)3, the basic difference being that a (c)4 is allowed to be more directly political (also that donations to a (c)4 are generally not deductible as charitable contributions). GuideStar records show that the group did donate $7 million to Kaplan’s former law firm in 2020. That is by far its largest single donation. But even so, so what? 

The material question here isn’t whether Hoffman partly or even wholly paid for Carroll’s defense. The question is whether she lied about it. Three different panels of judges believe she did not. 

What’s really going on with this investigation, one sniffs, is this. Trump is running out of appeals here. As Lisa Rubin wrote in the column I cited above: "In other words, Trump is facing down the increasingly real possibility of paying Carroll more than $88 million, before interest, with only the Supreme Court to potentially rescue him." 

So he and his current lawyers are trying to resuscitate the issue that a judge prevented them from using at the original 2023 trial. That’s not necessarily a crazy, last-ditch legal strategy for a person faced with writing that kind of check. The problem, though, is that the person is the sitting president of the United States, and "his current lawyers" are the U.S. Department of Justice, which he has corrupted. 

And by the way, if you want to know more about this Boutros fellow, just read Michelle Goldberg’s column today about his ghastly attempt to prosecute six people, including onetime Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, on felony conspiracy charges. 

The case fell apart last week after prosecutors admitted to misconduct before the grand jury. As Goldberg put it, "If Trump didn’t manufacture scandals on such an industrial scale, the case that collapsed last week in Chicago would have been a huge story." So many things would have been huge stories under any other presidency. 

For example, Trump’s purchase of Dell stock and the awarding of a large Pentagon contract to the company. AND White House intervention to get a $620 million contract funneled to a company affiliated with Don Jr. AND the ongoing ICE scandals, with Democratic pols being prevented from being able to inspect horrid conditions at ICE’s detention camps. AND the new homeland security secretary vowing to cancel international flights to certain liberal cities. AND the plainly illegal effort to put Trump’s face on a new $250 bill. 

Any one of those, in normal times, would be a major scandal. And those were just this week! 

The New Republic pondered writing about each of those. we chose the Carroll matter because it’s not only obviously corrupt but another cannon blast at the rule of law and the independence and integrity of the Justice Department. And because it’s something new: Are investigations into liberal nonprofits to become a regular thing now? 

So far, Trump has used the DOJ completely unethically, but he’s used it just to go after a handful of personal enemies. If he and Blanche open up the gates to start harassing liberal groups on a much wider basis, then we’re truly in tinpot dictator territory (see PillartoPost.org online magazine's Thomas Nast parody of tinpot despots). AND, yes it can, and will, get worse. 

 

SUNDAY REVIEW / ART OF THE 500 WORD SHORT STORY

 

BRUISER

By Thomas Shess 

Original Fiction

The hallway smells faintly of laundry detergent and sharpening steel. Doors stay open in the Olympic Village because everyone keeps odd hours and nobody remembers which country borrowed the scissors. A skate blade ticks the tile every few steps as she walks in, still half wrapped in USA tape, equipment bag with #21 branded on its side and slung over one shoulder like she just came off a construction shift instead of a practice session for an international competition. 

Inside the apartment, the television is muted but tuned to a replay of another sport, biathlon maybe, or curling, the universal background noise of the Games. Her spouse looks up from a small kitchen counter crowded with accreditation badges, charging cables, and a bowl of pasta gone from hot to waiting.  “Good practice?”

She drops the bag. It lands with the unmistakable thud of pads, helmet, and the kind of gear designed to collide with a moving human at speed. “Good skate, but I took a shoulder in the corner. Coach wants faster breakouts.” She sits and begins pulling off her practice uniform, each tug a small act of layered archaeology after two hours of laces frozen into place. The socks are damp, the knee already coloring into tomorrow’s bruise, the USA crest still bright against sweat-creased fabric. 

Outside the window a shuttle bus exhales air brakes and somewhere down the corridor a language she doesn’t speak erupts into laughter. 

“Chicken or pasta?” comes the question, the most ordinary sentence inside the most extraordinary week of the year. 

“Carbs,” she says, rubbing a red mark at the collarbone. “We play Canada.” 

 There’s a moment where the world narrows. Not to politics, not to television, not even to medals, just two people at a small Olympic table, one icing a shoulder, the other sliding over a plate. She put down the fork and winced. 

 “Same shoulder?” 

 She shook her head once. "The other one."

He looked into her eyes, not the shoulder. “Tell me again. When did they start calling you Bruiser?” 

 She smiled faintly. “My dad. Since as long as I can remember.” There was a silence. She played with her fork. 

 “What are you thinking?” he asled. 

 She tried to smile. “Just once I’d like to be the skater. The little frilly skinny-thighed fraud everybody throws roses at.” 

 “No one throws roses at enforcers,” he said. “You open the fast breaks for offense.  Somebody's gotta do the grunt work.” 

 “Doesn’t mean I like it.” 

 “Would you rather be doing something else right now?” 

 “Yeah,” she said. “I’d like to shoot a puck that goes right through the fucking back of the net.” 

He bent down and kissed the top of her ponytail, “That’s my Bruiser,” he laughed. 

 She felt it coming back now. The heat. The noise. The want. “Bring it,” she said like a curse. 

 Outside, another shuttle bus hissed to a stop in the snow. She thought about her husband, who had knee replacement scars and a bouquet of memories. Now, he was a damn fine cook. She let out a big sigh. And told herself: "Soak it up, Bruiser."

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