| At first glance, the news this week about Kimberly Guilfoyle and Cassidy Hutchinson appears to concern two very different situations. Guilfoyle, the US ambassador to Greece, may have committed federal criminal bribery, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal. Hutchinson, a witness in the Jan. 6 hearings, is under investigation by the Justice Department for lying to Congress. |
| These are in fact two parts of the same, larger story — the Trump administration’s abuse of the legal system to protect itself and its allies, on the one hand, and to pursue its opponents and adversaries, on the other. Political and legal philosophers call this “rule by law.” |
| Guilfoyle, of course, is a Trumpworld fixture — a former Fox News host and stalwart Trump supporter who was also once engaged to Donald Trump Jr. According to the Journal, she solicited $100,000 from a political donor named Eric Deters to cover a credit card bill as part of a deal in which she was supposed to lobby the Justice Department and IRS on his behalf. The details are convoluted, but basically, Deters wanted the DOJ to extradite someone from Pakistan, and he also wanted the IRS to close an investigation into his tax filings. |
| If the reporting is accurate, there’s very good reason to believe that Guilfoyle is guilty of soliciting bribes. |
| In a responsible administration, she would already have been sidelined as the ambassador to Greece, and the DOJ would already be investigating. Nothing of the sort appears to be happening here, and the reason seems obvious: She is closely aligned with the administration. |
| Hutchinson, by contrast, drew the ire of Trump and his supporters after she testified in the Jan. 6 hearings in 2022. For years, they have tried to claim that Hutchinson lied when she testified that a Secret Service official told her that Trump had lunged to grab the steering wheel when he was being driven away from the US Capitol on Jan. 6. The driver and other officials said that this did not happen. |
| If that is the basis for the investigation, the case is practically dead on arrival. The DOJ would need a highly credible witness who could testify that Hutchinson intentionally fabricated this anecdote — a scenario that, by the way, would make no sense. |
| It very much remains to be seen whether Hutchinson will be charged. The investigation is being handled by prosecutors in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which has hired a bunch of buffoons, and the Justice Department has generally fared poorly in its political prosecutions to date. |
| Prosecutors would need to charge Hutchinson in Washington, D.C., since that is where she testified, but grand jurors and judges in the District have repeatedly pushed back against the department since last year — most notably, when US Attorney Jeanine Pirro tried and failed to indict six Democratic members of Congress, and when Pirro tried and failed to criminally investigate former Fed chairman Jerome Powell. |
| Still, this is pernicious, and the contrast could not be starker. The DOJ is evidently ignoring the possibility that a US ambassador solicited bribes while at the same time trying to fabricate criminal charges against someone who testified against the president after he tried to steal the 2020 election. |
| This is rule by law in perhaps its purest form. |
