Former federal prosecutor blasts Trump’s 'new malignant normal'

Attorney and author James D. Zirin is blasting the “new malignant normal in the administration of justice” that he says President Donald Trump has brought to America.

Zirin, a former SDNY federal prosecutor who wrote a book on Trump’s lawsuits, in an opinion piece at The Hill, walked through the past year of the president’s tenure.

Examining Trump’s “sorry record,” Zirin includes the “drip feed disclosure of Epstein files, ordered to be produced on Nov. 19,” and notes: “we are told there are 5.2 million pages to go.”

“Extrajudicial killings on the high seas,” he continues, “outsized assertions of executive power, resignations of U.S. attorneys over questionable prosecutions, threats to annex Greenland because Trump is miffed that Norway denied him the Nobel Peace Prize. And hovering over it all investigations and prosecutions of political enemies.”

Zirin pointed to a video made by six Democrats, “directly quoting the Uniform Code of Military Justice about the military’s responsibility to reject illegal orders.”

“Their message,” he noted, “came straight out of the 1945-46 Nuremberg trials of 22 Nazi leaders accused, among other things, of ‘crimes against humanity’ where the international court ruled that the ‘I was only following orders’ defense would not wash.”

The president, Zirin wrote, “blasted the video, calling it ‘SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!’ He added: ‘Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL.’ Imagine! Legislators who disagree with Trump executed by lethal injection.”

After detailing the efforts Trump administration officials took to respond to the video, including those from U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro and U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Zirin reminded readers: “Politicized prosecutions have no place in America; yet they are too much with us. Weaponized prosecutions undermine confidence in the criminal justice system and only lend succor to the cynic. Using prosecution to silence critics is a tactic common to authoritarian regimes.”

Zirin concludes, “helicoptering over it all, we have the politicized investigation of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement shooting in Minneapolis of Renée Good, killed in her confrontation with ICE officers, which has not led to an investigation of the officer who was the shooter, but an FBI inquiry into Good’s widow.”

“Attorney General Todd Blanche said that ‘there is currently no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation’ into the ICE agent. How about the videotape evidence showing that Good was veering her car away from the ICE agent?”

Summing it up, Zirin notes that he “lived through the Watergate era,” and, apparently by comparison, that “Nixon’s shenanigans appear as normal as apple pie.”

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