The situation in Minnesota continues to prove an abject nightmare. The Trump administration continues to ignore and flagrantly undermine judges. If the administration put half as much effort into honoring its legal obligations as it places into attacking judges on social media, perhaps they wouldn’t be staring down a massive staffing crisis — a crisis they’re trying to resolve by asking people on Elon Musk’s pornification site to sign up as AUSAs.
Hey, they built ICE by indiscriminately recruiting people who failed even the barest of entry qualifications and then refusing to train them to follow the bare minimum of rules that bound federal law enforcement… maybe it will work for prosecutors!
In the meantime, let’s see how it’s going on the ground over at DOJ.
So, I guess they haven’t seen a flood of new applications based on Chad Mizelle asking potential prosecutors to slide into his DMs.
It’s early, but Julie Le now takes a commanding lead in the race for quote of the year. “The system sucks, this job sucks,” she told Judge Blackwell. Given the multiple recorded incidents of DOJ attorneys lying to the courts, this is refreshing candor.
Personally, I like to think she delivered it like Scarface quitting his job in Half-Baked.
In any normal setting, she would likely get her 24 hours of sleep starting roughly 5 minutes after getting back to the office and learning that she’d been fired. But these are not normal times, and the DOJ may need to hang on to the lawyer even if she’s willing to go on the record as actively hating her job.
This is what “flooding the zone” looks like. Trump’s braintrust long thought that bombarding the system with abuses would overwhelm the guardrails. What they’re finding out is that the guardrails hold and the administration itself just ends up squished.
For her sake, hopefully she can cut ties with this Justice Department on her own terms sooner rather than later.
Earlier: DOJ Begging For AUSAs On Twitter Like They’re Putting Together A Kickball League
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
