Quinta Jurecic

When President Joe Biden announced in the weeks before his inauguration that he was committed to reestablishing an independent Justice Department, he didn’t say that it was going to be easy.

Until the day that a violent mob stormed the Capitol building, it seemed possible that Donald Trump would be able to shuffle into postpresidential life without facing any real consequences. President-elect Joe Biden had indicated his anxiety over a potential prosecution of the former president. Commentators muttered about the political divisiveness of pursuing Trump after he left office.

Donald Trump will not serve a second term. The litigation launched by his campaign and the Republican Party to overturn the election results has no chance of preventing Joe Biden from swearing the oath of office on January 20—as Trump himself seemed to haltingly recognize last week after his administration finally allowed the presidential transition to begin.

Updated at 3:50 p.m. ET on October 4, 2020.Barely a week after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, before the late justice had even been buried, President Donald Trump hosted a Rose Garden ceremony to formally announce his nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to fill the open seat on the Supreme Court. A week later, it appears that the inauspicious ceremony may have been at the center of the coronavirus outbreak now plaguing the White House and the Senate.

So you want to corrupt the Justice Department.It’s a worthy project for the power-hungry politician. These are polarized times. Left alone, the department could get weaponized against you, particularly if—and only you know whether this is true—there are skeletons in your closet. The department has a lot of people with guns and subpoena power, a lot of investigative muscle, and it can lock up your friends—and even you—if you’re not careful.

The Supreme Court knows how to go out with a bang. On Thursday, the justices closed the (virtual) courthouse doors for the summer after finally releasing two long-awaited rulings on President Trump’s efforts to block the release of his financial information to prosecutors and Congress.

The big question is why.Why would the president fire a federal prosecutor just five months before an election, with no indication of wrongdoing on the prosecutor’s part, in a manner sure to ignite controversy?Three days into the scandal around the abrupt dismissal of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, we still have no answers.

Last week began with one of the ugliest—and potentially most dangerous—spectacles of Donald Trump’s presidency: the nation’s leader, having declared himself “your president of law and order,” striding across a park violently cleared of peaceful protesters by police firing chemical irritants.Within a week, however, the Trump administration’s response to the nationwide protests over the killing of George Floyd had devolved into a bleak farce.