Where does Pam Blondi keep coming up with these people? It’s like she’s pulling prosecutors out of thin air because they have no idea what they’re doing! They’re completely unqualified, yet she keeps dumping them into major cases that someone with much more experience would find a struggle. It’s very difficult to understand why. Maybe there isn’t a why – there’s just a ‘find someone who will take the bait and do this’. From The New Republic via AlterNet:
Jay Clayton, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s most recent appointment to investigate Democrats involved with late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein after President Donald Trump’s sudden reversal, has been chosen for what The New Republic’s Michael Tomasky says is a “political task that has nothing whatever to do with justice.” Clayton, a corporate lawyer who is “mostly a high finance guy,” Tomasky notes, chaired the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first term.
You can already see where we’re going with this. First, we had Lindsey Halligan. Now, we have Jay Clayton. He’s not fit for anything regarding prosecution, and that includes political enemies cases. It’s career suicide, but that doesn’t seem to matter. He has a chance to make his name big. Sure, it would be quite the feather to put in his cap, but his chances are really slim of actually being able to do so.
“One thing that impressed me, and that was at odds with the standard Trumpian flouting of rules of any kind governing the behavior of appointees and their families, is that his wife, a Goldman Sachs official, resigned her position when he took the job,” Tomasky notes. “What? People in the Trump solar system acting ethically of their own volition? Hard to imagine how Trump tolerated that,” he adds. However, Clayton has “no prosecutorial experience at all,” Tomasky writes.
Kudos to his wife for making that decision. It can’t have been easy, and that would not be a low paying position, either. And it says something that she believed in him enough to do so. It’s still career suicide for him. A political prosecution? That’s not going to be simple, especially considering his lack of previous experience in anything resembling that field. But, well, he took the job.
It would be “brave” if Clayton comes back and says there’s no evidentiary basis to indict his targets—former Democratic President Bill Clinton, Democratic presidential adviser Larry Summers, and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman, but if he does bring indictments, Tomasky says, there are only two plausible reasons. “One might find that there’s actually evidence sufficient to an indictment. In which case, let justice be done. But in Donald Trump’s and Pam Bondi’s America, we would be quite justified in suspecting a second explanation: That Clayton did what he was ordered by the White House to do,” he writes. “The Trump era is a time of learning what people are made of. I’m guessing that in six months’ time, we’ll know a lot more about Jay Clayton than we know today,” he adds.
Indeed, we will, if he lasts that long. He has some serious expectations to live up to, and he’s starting from zero. It should be “interesting” to see if he comes up with anything. As Mr. Tomasky said, there could be actual evidence for each person. But going by what we’ve already seen with Halligan, the chances of it aren’t very good at all. We’ll have to wait, as annoying as that is, to see what he does. We have to wait.
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Your headline says “Another Clown.” I’d say ASS-Clown is more accurate!