Leah Litman

wouldn't fly because it stumbles on their inability to dot their I's, cross their T's and read.

And then, you know, the final kind of thing it might do is it just colors the public atmosphere and potential assessment of a claim of like vindictive prosecution.

Right.

If like all the career prosecutors resign because they're uncomfortable handling this case, that's pretty good evidence to the judge that this case stinks.

I mean, it's going to slow it down.

So at a minimum, it's going to slow it down, right?

Because if you change out all the prosecutors who all of a sudden have to get up to speed on the case, familiarize themselves with it, they are going to have to take time to do that.

But second is, what you were just saying is, this further politicization of the Department of Justice is going to undermine public confidence in that case, even though there are very serious, real allegations of fraud that deserve to be held accountable.

But when you just destroy public confidence in institutions like DOJ, that doesn't go away, even if, you know, the stopped clock occasionally has a meritorious case or two that it pursues.

It's very unusual, at least in cases like this, where there's just no reason to suspect that the state law enforcement apparatus is compromised or somehow engaged in the commission of the crime.

It's state and local law enforcement that have primary responsibility for investigating crimes.

The vast majority of people who are detained and have criminal convictions have them by virtue of state and local law and state and local prosecutors.

So these are individuals who have...

more experience and more familiarity with the locale, the people who are potential witnesses, the communities.

And so it is not common to just entirely exclude this very helpful array of experts who have expertise and perspectives that you lack and the lack of cooperation between

State and federal law enforcement, you know, was also one of the signal flaws that led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

The idea was, you know, they would ensure there would be continued cooperation and communication between state and federal authorities.

But obviously that proved inconvenient at this moment.

And so they just dispose of that project.

But again, they're not engaged in a serious investigation.