Trump DOJ Seeks to Claw Back EPA Funding by Launching a Bogus Criminal Investigation
Justice Department prosecutors have been resigning rather than carry out corrupt or abusive orders. One prominent example is Denise Cheung, the top criminal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., who resigned rather than follow an order to open a bogus criminal investigation.
CNN reports:
Denise Cheung … resigned Tuesday after declining a request from her Trump-appointed superiors to open a grand jury investigation that she viewed as premature, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. …
Cheung, a long-time DOJ employee, had been asked to shepherd an investigation into an Environmental Protection Agency funding decision during the Biden administration and then use DOJ’s powers to freeze that funding. …
Cheung noted in her letter that she and other experienced white-collar prosecutors looked at whether the DOJ had met its threshold for a grand jury investigation. While Bove’s office insisted that it had, citing a Project Veritas video, Cheung and others didn’t believe the evidence on hand was enough for a grand jury investigation. …
Cheung’s departure revolves around the implementation of stopping some funding from the EPA to non-profit groups.
As with the administration’s raid on New York City bank accounts, this is an attempt, not just to control current and future government spending, but to reach into the past and claw back money already appropriated and distributed, using a trumped-up criminal investigation as cover. The Trump administration has been actively abusing the DOJ’s powers and freezing funds already allocated to non-profits.
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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