The White House Fires a Federal Prosecutor Who Criticized Trump and Was Prosecuting a Trump-Supporting, Tax-Defrauding CEO
Adam Schleifer, a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, was fired on direct orders from the White House because he criticized President Trump while running for Congress in 2020—and because he was prosecuting a fast-food CEO who is a Trump supporter.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
A federal prosecutor in Los Angeles was fired Friday at the behest of the White House, after lawyers for a fast-food executive he was prosecuting pushed officials in Washington to drop all charges against him, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. …
Schleifer was fired via a “one line e-mail, and it came from a White House staff account.” … Schleifer is a registered Democrat who made several unflattering remarks about Trump when he ran for an open congressional seat in New York’s 17th District in 2020. …
On Friday, Laura Loomer, a right-wing provocateur who has at times served as an advisor to Trump, shared one of Schleifer’s prior critical tweets on X and called for the prosecutor to be fired. …
Another source, a former prosecutor who handled fraud cases in the U.S. attorney’s office and sought anonymity over concerns about facing professional backlash, said he believes Schleifer’s firing is “going to have an incredible chilling effect. … The message from Adam’s case is that if you’re going to indict some run-of-the-mill CEO of a company, you need to check if he’s a Trump supporter first. … It’s going to cause line prosecutors to be considerably more careful about pursuing anyone who has even tenuous connections to the president.”
Andrew Wiederhorn, the Trump-supporting CEO, was indicted by a grand jury on charges that he hid taxable income from the federal government by dispersing “shareholder loans” from the company to himself and his family.
The president and the Department of Justice are entrusted with the impartial enforcement of the law. But for Trump, the purpose of power is to punish his enemies and grant immunity to his friends. Prosecutors will now give a free pass to anyone with friends in Washington even if they are defrauding the government. How is this for fighting “waste, fraud, and abuse?”
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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