A couple of weeks ago I posed the question of whether the recently-initiated federal prosecution of New York Mayor Eric Adams is legitimate, or whether it is yet another instance of abject corruption by our Department of Justice and FBI, in this instance pay-back by the prosecutors for Adams’s criticism of the regime’s immigration policies. To help you as you ponder that question, it might be useful to look at a few other things that the DOJ and FBI are recently up to.

As Item Number 1, Justice “Special Counsel” Jack Smith chose the date of October 2 — 34 days before the upcoming election — to file his brief laying out his reasons why ex-President Trump does not qualify for immunity from prosecution under the Supreme Court’s July 1 ruling in Trump v. United States. Smith’s brief, which is 165 pages long, was then promptly unsealed by the District Judge in the case, Tanya Chutkan. I am not going to quote from it here, but it is fair to say that the brief goes out of its way to be as inflammatory as possible against the former President.

In a New York Times op-ed on October 9, Professor Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School raises completely legitimate questions about the timing of the filing. Note that Goldsmith is no fan of Trump. From the op-ed:

[T]he timing of the release should receive more scrutiny, because the Department of Justice should not have allowed the information to be disclosed so close to Election Day. This event is the latest of many examples of Biden administration officials paying insufficient public attention to executive branch rules that are designed to ensure that prosecutions are, in appearance and reality, conducted fairly and apolitically. . . . It is . . . vital . . . for the executive branch to take scrupulous care to assure the public that the prosecutions are conducted in compliance with pertinent rules. On this score, Mr. Smith has failed. . . . The filing is in clear tension with the Justice Department’s 60-day rule, which the department inspector general has described as a “longstanding department practice of delaying overt investigative steps or disclosures that could impact an election” within 60 days of an election.

Professor Goldsmith has used the gentlest possible terms to describe outrageous conduct by Justice. What Smith has done is to construct an overheated filing against the administration’s main political rival, and to orchestrate its timing, in a clear effort to achieve maximum impact on the election. I guess that the Times should get some credit for publishing the op-ed, although if this had been a prosecution by Trump of one of his rivals we would have been treated to six different stories on the front page.

For today’s Item Number 2, consider the case of Dr. Eithan Haim of Texas Children’s Hospital. TCH is the largest hospital for children in the country. In early 2022 Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued an opinion stating that gender transition surgeries for minors were a form of child abuse. Within days, in March 2022, TCH announced that it had halted all such procedures. (From the AP, March 6, 2022: “The nation’s largest pediatric hospital has announced it has stopped gender-affirming therapies.”). Thereafter, the Texas legislature began work on a bill banning such surgeries for minors, which bill was then enacted in 2023 and signed by Governor Abbott on June 2, 2023.

Dr. Haim was working as a resident at TCH in 2022 and 2023. Haim observed gender transition procedures on minors as young as 11 taking place at TCH shortly after the March 2022 announcement, and continuing thereafter. From Health Care News, July 8, 2024:

“The hospital had said unequivocally they were going to shut down their transgender program because of potential criminal legal liability,” Haim told Health Care News. “Because I worked there, I knew that this was a lie. Categorically, it was untrue. They not only continued the program but expanded it.” The documents showed TCH performed “gender-affirming care” just days after the announcement . . . . One such procedure done shortly after the announcement was performed on an 11-year-old girl.

Haim provided documents about the ongoing gender procedures on minors to Texas authorities and to investigator Chris Rufo, who published information on this matter in City Journal on May 16, 2023. All patient-specific information had been redacted from the documents to protect the privacy of the patients. From Rufo’s City Journal piece:

I have obtained exclusive whistleblower documents showing that, despite its public statements, the Houston-based children’s hospital—the largest in the United States—has secretly continued to perform transgender medical interventions, including the use of implantable puberty blockers, on minor children. . . . I can confirm that nothing in the information provided to me identified any individual; all the documents were, in fact, carefully redacted.

In June 2024, the Justice Department issued an indictment not of TCH, but of Haim. What had he done wrong? Here is the DOJ press release announcing the indictment. The subject matter appears to be violations of medical privacy, but curiously the press release does not assert that any private patient information was improperly revealed. Rather, it states that Haim “obtained personal information including patient names, treatment codes and the attending physician from Texas Children’s Hospital’s (TCH) electronic system without authorization . . . [and] under false pretenses.” The press release does not mention what statute may have been violated, although presumably it must be HIPAA.

In other words, the theory is that finding out about ongoing illegal behavior and reporting it to the authorities and the public is now itself deemed criminal by DOJ when the behavior disclosed is deemed important to the progressive agenda. All people in a hospital who are not actually doing the gender surgeries themselves are to be prohibited from talking about them. If they can silence Haim and others like him, then TCH can go on engaging in its conduct free from concern from pesky Texas statutes.

Read some of the linked articles for more details on DOJ’s tactics of intimidation in the effort to silence Haim.

And for today’s Item Number 3, have you heard of the case of Brian Malinowski? This one comes from the August 2024 issue of Hillsdale College’s Imprimis. Malinowski was the manager of the airport in Little Rock, Arkansas, until the morning of March 19, when DOJ’s ATF conducted a pre-dawn SWAT-style raid on his house and shot him dead.

Malinowski was a gun hobbyist who sometimes bought and sold guns at gun shows. Federal law requires people “engaged in the business” of buying and selling guns to get a federal license. The statutory definition of “engaged in the business” is quite restrictive:

Congress has defined “engaged in the business” to apply to those who deal in firearms “as a regular course of trade or business with the principal objective of livelihood and profit” as opposed to those who make “occasional sales, exchanges, or purchases of firearms for the enhancement of a personal collection or for a hobby.”

ATF took the position that Malinowski was “engaged in the business” of buying and selling firearms, despite the restrictive definition and the fact that Malinowski had a rather responsible day job. Anyway, rather than, say, writing Malinowski a letter, or issuing some kind of summons, here’s how ATF chose to proceed:

Multiple undercover ATF agents were sent to observe Malinowski selling firearms at a gun show, a GPS tracker was secretly placed on Malinowski’s car, and a search warrant was obtained for his home. Malinowski wasn’t home the first time ATF agents showed up to serve the warrant, so the second time they left nothing to chance. Dressed in SWAT gear, together with Little Rock police, they showed up in ten vehicles at Malinowski’s house before dawn on March 19. They cut the power to his house and put a piece of tape over the doorbell camera so that Malinowski couldn’t see who they were. Less than a minute later, after an exchange of gunfire, Malinowski was dead. And in violation of both ATF and Little Rock police policies requiring body cameras, not one of the law enforcement agents involved in this deadly raid was wearing an activated camera.

Your federal government in action. The chances of any of the personnel involved facing any consequences is about zero.