David Frum

One of the defining characteristics of the Trump years has been the determination of President Trump and the people around him to turn into instruments of presidential will, federal agencies that were always thought of as more or less independent and apolitical.

The Department of Justice, well, it's part of the administration for sure, and the Attorney General is an appointee of the President, but there had always been a belief that the actions of the Department of Justice, especially the criminal enforcement actions, were not dictated for political reasons by the President.

Well, that idea has just gone up in smoke in the Trump years.

This has been the most nakedly political Department of Justice.

perhaps since Warren Hardings in the 1920s, and maybe the most in history because of the recent event where Jeanine Pirro, US Attorney for the District of Columbia, supposedly acting on her own, but obviously acting at the command of Attorney General Bondi, who was acting obviously at the command of Donald Trump,

When the U.S.

attorney for the District of Columbia actually tried to indict six members of Congress, four of them members of the House of Representatives, two of them United States senators, for making a video urging U.S.

military personnel to obey lawful orders and not to obey illegal orders, which you would think is something that –

would be as basic as telling the President of the United States not to take bribes.

How could such a statement be controversial unless the President was taking bribes and unless the military was contemplating illegal orders?

So they took offense for that reason, and they tried to prosecute members of Congress.

Now, the speech of members of Congress is protected not only by the First Amendment, like as yours and mine is, but by the speech and debate clause of the Constitution, which puts very severe limits on the ability of anybody to punish a member of Congress for something that the member of Congress said.

And yet the Department of Justice tried just that.

Happily, a grand jury completely rejected the charges.

There was reportedly not a single member of the grand jury who took this seriously.

It was unanimous rejection, an unparalleled humiliation for the Trump Justice Department.

But the litigation of other attacks on those members of Congress continues.

At the same time, we saw in this past weekend a really shocking event where President Trump traveled to Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Fort Bragg is now Fort Bragg again.

It was renamed and it's now de-renamed.