Normalizing Depravity

The goal is to convince people to accept the unacceptable

Birds of a feather.

There is a case unfolding in a New Jersey federal courtroom that tells us something important about who this regime is protecting, leaving us to wonder why.

Judge Zahid Quraishi recently presided over what should have been a routine sentencing hearing for Francisco Villafane, a man who pled guilty to possession of child pornography. But given the venue, a federal court in New Jersey, this was anything but routine.

According to a report in The New York Times, the relatively inexperienced line prosecutor on the case, Daniel Rosenblum, showed up accompanied by a more senior colleague, Mark Coyne. Coyne, however, had not filed the appropriate paperwork and had no right to appear before the court. Judge Quraishi made it clear that while Coyne could sit there and pass notes to his colleague, he could not address the Court.

Judge Quraishi had some pointed questions, which he directed at Rosenblum. He wanted to know, for example, why the prosecution had moved forward with a plea agreement before it had all the evidence in hand, and why the defendant was given a favorable deal that allowed him to serve significantly less time than sentencing guidelines required. The judge asked:

How did the screw up happen? Was it your office, the U.S. attorney’s office, the FBI, or both? How did you execute a plea agreement without knowing all the evidence?

Despite the judge’s instruction, Coyne kept interjecting because Rosenblum was struggling to answer basic questions about who is running the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office, which is in a state of profound dysfunction.

Here’s the background. Alina Habba, Donald’s longtime personal attorney, was appointed U.S. interim attorney, an appointment Judge Matthew Brann found to be unlawful. Attorney General Pam Bondi then installed a three-person leadership team consisting of Philip Lamparello, Jordan Fox, and Ari Fontecchio. Last week, Judge Brann ruled all those appointments to be unlawful as well.

Brann warned that Donald’s reliance on illegal maneuvering to install New Jersey’s top prosecutors could mean that scores of dangerous criminals might have their cases dismissed or their convictions overturned.

Habba, who is now a senior adviser to Attorney General Pam Bondi, has been spotted in the New Jersey office in recent weeks. No one seems to know exactly why. When Rosenblum was asked whether Habba still had some role in operating the office, he said he had no personal knowledge either way. For the record, Judge Quraishi was an assistant U.S. attorney for the district of New Jersey for five years and knows the office well and he has reasons to be suspicious of the leadership structure currently in place.

He ordered all three members of the so-called triumvirate to appear in his courtroom next month and testify under oath about who is actually in charge. Before the hearing ended, Judge Quraishi said this to Rosenblum:

You have lost the confidence and the trust of this court. You have lost the confidence and the trust of the New Jersey legal community, and you are losing the trust and confidence of the public.

This reminds me of something U.S. District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai of Oregon said about the attempts of Donald’s DOJ to seize state voter rolls:

The presumption of regularity that has been previously extended to [the government] that it could be taken at its word—with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes—no longer holds.

This is how far we have fallen and it is precisely what many people knew would happen as the Trump regime fired prosecutors and civil servants with decades of expertise and replaced them with incompetent loyalists—or failed to replace them at all.

The way the DOJ is handling the case in New Jersey is emblematic of its unprofessionalism and dysfunction, and it also points to another deeply disturbing pattern. Typically, prosecutors take charges of child pornography seriously. The instinct should be to throw the book at offenders, not grant them sweetheart deals—especially when prosecutors failed to look at all of the available evidence, which is exactly what happened with the Villafane case.

It’s worth asking why Pam Bondi thinks a man who is guilty of child pornography deserves a sentence significant more lenient than sentencing guidelines call for.

This bizarrely lax attitude towards sex crimes and those who commit them is endemic to the Trump regime and the DOJ as it is currently constituted, as exemplified most obviously by the extreme reluctance to release the Epstein files or investigate, charge, and try the guilty.

But then there’s Donald’s long history of associating with sexual abusers of women. Andrew Tate, one of the most openly and aggressively misogynistic figures in public life with a massive and influential social media following, is facing charges of rape and sex trafficking in both Romania and Great Britain. So is his brother, Tristan. Both were ordered to remain in Romania while the case against them was being built, but in the meantime, they forged alliances with members of the Trump family, including Donny and Barron.

After Donald’s second inauguration, according to Megan Twohey:

[A]n extraordinary order came down from the highest levels of the Romanian government instructing prosecutors to reach a compromise with the brothers.

And then those travel bans were lifted, which was something that the prosecutors did not want to do. . . . Once [Donald] was reelected, there were supporters of the Tates here in the United States who ascended into the administration, including a special diplomatic envoy named Richard Grenell, who . . . had at least two conversations with Romanian officials about the Tates’ case.

And then within days of that second conversation, the order came down in Romania ordering the compromise that led to the lifting of the travel bans. And we have been told that the Romanian prime minister believed that that would appease the Trump administration.

Very shortly after the ban was lifted, the Tates were flown by private jet to Florida.

The Trump regime is engaged in a systematic effort to normalize misogyny and the crimes of rape and sex trafficking and child pornography while protecting the men who commit those crimes.

So, we need to keep asking the questions: Why is Donald’s DOJ going easy on child pornographers? Why is it covering for men credibly accused of raping and trafficking girls and young women? Why is a man who is himself an adjudicated rapist and who has been credibly accused of sexual harassment and assault by almost two dozen women, associated with so many of these men? These are not rhetorical questions. We demand answers. In the meantime, the actions and the silence of the complicit speak for themselves.