I am not american and have only a brief understanding of their procedures and stuff. I heard somewhere that this situation is similar to what lead to nixons resignition. I am just very confused to what the accusations, plans, intrigues ect. are.
New York mayor got caught soliciting and taking campaign contributions from Turkish nationals. Foreign money in our elections is supposed to be a huge no-no. The Justice Department had everything lined up ready to prosecute. In comes our mobster president who thinks “oh gee, I can use this for leverage to get what I want!” Orders the justice department to dismiss the charges “without prejudice.” That term means they can bring the charges back anytime they want. This is how fanta orange plans to leverage the charges to make the mayor cooperate in his immigration sweeps. Under the Constitution state and municipal police cannot be compelled to cooperate with federal law enforcement. He sees this as an opportunity and loophole.
Because this is all so blatantly unethical 7+ justice department officials have resigned refusing to carry out the order. At least one of which is a very well respected life long conservative who is standing up to her own party leader.
Finally, New York state and the New York City municipal code allow for the governor to bring charges against the city mayor and have him removed. This part I know the least about as it’s not a normal thing in US states, and it’s never been done before.
Edit: I left out that the immigration cooperation for dropping charges was an actual quid pro quo requested by the mayor in discussions with the justice department officials. So that’s not an assumption or being pulled out of thin air. The people in that meeting took notes and were later ordered to destroy them.
Thank you for the explanation. Can you also please explain how all of these people resigning isn’t exactly doing what they want? If everyone resigns, isn’t that a clear path to no resistance?
They have to put someone in that position who is willing to do it. If they don’t resign they’ll just be fired and replaced anyway. It’s an act of resistance to resign and it also brings a lot of attention to the situation.
In one word: corruption. The mayor is corrupt and now that he’s playing nice with trump re rounding up migrants the prosecutors were told to drop the case (iirc it’s federal) and they resigned instead.
The briefest of summaries (keeping in mind hand waving details)
- NY Major is charged with taking bribes from the Turkish government
- Trump ordered attorney in charge to drop the case
- Attorney after attorney resigned with scathing resignation letter rather than drop the case because the decision to drop is obviously political
- DOJ isn’t supposed to be political but independent
- Almost 3x the number of attorneys resigned here than under Nixon
- Under Nixon, this was the flame that started his impeachment. Under Trump, crickets.
