Jeanine Pirro, Lindsey Halligan and Alina Habba all showed us what failing upwards looked like this year.
Chris Hayes provided a nice summary on his show on Christmas Eve on these incompetent hacks, like Jeanine Pirro who couldn't even indict a ham sandwich back in September, and Lindsey Halligan, who had her cases against New York attorney Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey tossed out in court.
HAYES: Do you remember the DC sandwich guy? That would be the gentleman who chucked his Subway sandwich in the chest of a Customs and Border Protection agent on a corner in the nation's Capitol last summer, all recorded on a smartphone.
The Department of Justice tried to indict him on federal assault. A grand jury did something grand juries almost never do. It just said, no, not going to happen. There's that old saying about how any prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. Apparently not at the prosecutor's work for Donald Trump.
Sandwich Guy's case was just one of many losses for the D.C. U.S. Attorney and former Fox host Jeanine Pirro. Pirro also tried three times to indict a woman for pushing an FBI agent in a protest. All three times a grand jury returned a decision of no true bill rejecting the indictments.
In September, Trump picked Lindsey Halligan, his former personal lawyer, to be U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, specifically to get federal charges brought against his perceived political enemies.
She got one grand jury to indict New York attorney Letitia James, but a judge tossed that one. So then Halligan tried twice more. Both grand juries, no true bills.
If you're keeping count, that is just the tip of the iceberg. Most federal prosecutors have never seen one no true bill from grand jury in their career. It can be a career stopper if they do. It's like malpractice, but, Trump's prosecutors have gotten no true bills on at least eight separate occasions just in DC and Virginia.
That doesn't count some that we've seen come out of Los Angeles and other places. Just one year and the Trump administration is showing that it doesn't have as much control of the justice system as they might have thought. Juries of our peers keep saying no.
We've covered how badly Halligan botched both James' and Comey's cases here at C&L, and Comey's move to have her disqualified, along with former Trump lawyer Ty Cobb's calls for her to be disbarred.
We also covered Habba finally being kicked to the curb by an appeals court earlier this month.
In a sane world, none of these people would be anywhere near the levers of power in our government and would be shunned from polite society. But sadly, that's not the world we live in.
For being a bunch of incompetent hacks willing to do Trump's bidding and go after his political enemies and make a mockery of our justice system in the United States, here's your Crookie Award, you bunch of Trump toadies.
