Peter Keisler in The New Republic
Board Member Peter Keisler was quoted in a New Republic piece detailing the authoritarian threat to America’s legal norms and institutions. Greg Sargent writes:
“That’s a completely plausible scenario,” Peter Keisler, who held high-level positions in the Justice Department during the George W. Bush administration, told me. Keisler said Trump would likely choose his attorney general precisely because he’d willingly transmit Trump’s whims to eager subordinates. Alternatively, Keisler said, Trump’s White House chief of staff could well be a loyalist willing to ring up a Trumpy U.S. attorney and make a suggestion or two about someone who has displeased Trump.
Perhaps this will strike readers as overly speculative. But it shouldn’t. Trump already tried to order prosecutions of foes during his first term. And if anything, the expectation of harassing investigations—ones that fall short of prosecutions—is a benign way to interpret the second-term intentions that Trump and his allies have openly articulated. Preparations for this are grounded in a basic recognition about the justice system: Trump and his allies probably won’t be able to launch baseless prosecutions on a mere Trumpian whim—that would require the cooperation of grand juries and courts. But they probably can create lots of hardship just short of that.
“The first steps of any investigation are very easy to initiate—much easier than prosecutions are,” Keisler said. “Preliminary investigations face far fewer checks or interventions by independent actors in the system, like judges. And they can do a lot to ruin people’s lives. Either way, the targets would be in hell. The question is just which circle of hell they’d be in.