Is Justice Done?

You’ve probably seen or read at least something about the story that is the subject of tonight’s post. If you appreciate having access to an explanation of the federal sentencing process and the kind of context for situations like this that I provide based on 25 years of experience at DOJ as a line prosecutor, an appellate chief, and a political appointee, the U.S. Attorney in North Alabama during the Obama administration, I hope you’ll support my work with a subscription to Civil Discourse.

On July 14, 2023, Taylor Taranto, 37, of Pasco, Washington, was charged in a federal indictment with carrying a firearm without a license and possessing an illegal device designed to feed large quantities of ammunition to a firearm. He was also charged with four misdemeanors related to his involvement with events on January 6. The government’s evidence against Taranto included a video that captures him saying, “So we’re in the Capitol Building … legislative building … we just stormed it.” The caption reads: “This is me ‘stormin’ the capitol’ lol I’m only sharing this so someone will report me to the feds and we can get this party rolling!”

The charges related to January 6 were wiped out by Donald Trump. But Taranto was convicted on the gun charges in May of this year. Those charges stemmed from an arrest near former President Barack Obama’s home in the District of Columbia. The charges don’t mention President Obama. The Justice Department’s official release indicated that “Prior to his arrest, court documents say that Taranto made several concerning statements regarding the residences in the area and desires to commit acts of violence against a federal facility.”

Taranto’s van was searched pursuant to his arrest. He had quite an arsenal with him, including the two weapons circled in yellow below. All told, investigators said they found two guns, a machete and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in Taranto’s van.

Photo from the government’s sentencing memo

How did Taranto know where Obama lived? Donald Trump posted it on social media in June of 2023. Taranto was arrested in Obama’s neighborhood the same day. The government moved to detain Taranto, explaining in their memo to the Judge that he was live streaming on YouTube, saying he was looking for an “entrance points” to underground tunnels and was trying to line up a “good angle on a shot.” He reposted Trump’s message about Obama’s home address and wrote: “We got these losers surrounded! See you in hell, Podesta’s and Obama’s,” a reference to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager.

The case has been in the news this week because Taranto was due back in court to be sentenced. The prosecutors filed a sentencing memo for the Judge that accurately reflected the defendant’s conduct. This is what prosecutors do in every case.

Federal law requires judges to impose a sentence that is “sufficient, but not greater than necessary” to reflect the seriousness of the offense, promote respect for the law, and provide just punishment, while also deterring future crimes, protecting the public from the defendant, and affording the defendant rehabilitation opportunities. Judges are required by law to consider a number of factors, including the nature and circumstances of the offense and the history and characteristics of the defendant. So prosecutors write to those issues in their sentencing memo, analyzing the evidence to advocate for the sentence they believe the judge should impose. It’s literally their job. You don’t leave key details, like a defendant threatening to send a former president to hell, out of the equation.

But in this case, simply doing their jobs resulted in the removal of the prosecutors. ABC’s Katherine Fauders was the first to report that “Two federal prosecutors were informed Wednesday they will be put on leave after filing a legal brief that described the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol as being carried out by ‘thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters,’ sources tell me.” She continued, “The two prosecutors, Carlos Valdivia and Samuel White, were locked out of their government devices and informed Wednesday morning they will be placed on leave just hours after filing a sentencing memorandum in the case of Taylor Taranto.” Already furloughed because of the government shutdown, the prosecutors were told they’d be placed on administrative leave when government reopened. Putting the prosecutors on leave could be a prelude to firing them, unless the public spotlight forces DOJ to walk the personnel action back.

Subsequently, the Washington Post reported that “By Wednesday afternoon, the filing had been removed from public court dockets and replaced by a new sentencing memo. All references to Jan. 6, Trump’s social media post, Valdivia or White [the two prosecutors] had been removed. Two new prosecutors signed the replacement filing.”

It’s hard to overstate how serious this is. We’ve now seen revenge prosecutions, like those against former FBI Director Jim Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. We have seen prosecution withheld for cronies of the president, like the pass border czar Tom Homan got for allegedly taking $50,000 in exchange for a promise to steer government contracts to the people who paid him. We saw agents and prosecutors fired for doing their duty and working on investigations assigned to them, like the January 6 cases and the Trump investigations, at the start of this administration. And now we are seeing prosecutors being disciplined for telling the courts the truth—in an era where this administration has increasingly withheld it from the courts.

The assassination attempts against Donald Trump were taken seriously and swiftly investigated and prosecuted by the Biden administration. Any attack on a former federal official is a serious matter. Apparently, in this Justice Department, that is no longer the case. Whether it was the mention of President Obama or of Donald Trump’s role in making his address public that triggered this situation, it’s utterly appalling. It completes the corruption of the Justice Department.

MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian reported that the action against the prosecutors came “at the direction of the White House.” Pam Bondi and other political appointees should have prevented this from happening. Instead—although we don’t know exactly what happened internally—they facilitated or initiated it. They certainly didn’t interfere with it. CBS Justice Correspondent Scott MacFarlane reported that when District of Columbia U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro was asked about removing any reference to January 6 from the sentencing memo and asked why it had happened, she declined to answer beyond saying the “papers speak for themselves.” She also refused to discuss the action taken against the case prosecutors.

If the direction to do this came from the White House, officials like Bondi and Pirro should have resigned rather than letting it happen. They should have protected the prosecutors and the integrity of the case. They should have stood for the rule of law. Not doing so reveals who they are in an undeniable fashion. This isn’t hard. It’s easy. And they got it wrong.

Near the end of the first Trump administration, acting DOJ officials who were in place as Republican appointees refused Trump’s direction to support his lies about election fraud. They walked away with their heads held high and their reputations intact. This group has not learned that lesson.

The prosecution’s sentencing memo asked the Judge to impose a 27-month sentence to reflect the gravity of Taranto’s conduct, his lack of remorse, and the need to deter him and others from engaging in similar threatening conduct. It’s a reasonable request, one that is within the sentencing guidelines for the offense.

But Donald Trump is intent on whitewashing history to improve his own position in it. I write about it in my book as a “new lost cause,” a parallel to the post-Civil War narrative that romanticized “the old South” and slavery, giving rise to narratives that shaped themselves into today’s Christian Nationalism. Trump has rebranded January 6 criminals as patriots and attempted to restore them to the American mainstream. It’s a story about a new “lost cause,” transforming disloyal criminals into an idealized version of the story. Trump’s Justice Department is aiding and abetting in that Orwellian task. “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth,” Orwell wrote in 1984. “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.” His main character, Winston, muses about whether, “Within twenty years at the most … the huge and simple question, ‘Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?’ would have ceased once and for all to be answerable.”

Trump is so intent on rewriting his own history that he wants prosecutors to erase it even in a criminal case where facts are being presented to a Judge. That Judge was not impressed. In today’s sentencing hearing, he questioned DOJ about the substitute second sentencing memo, which removed references to January 6 and Trump’s post of Obama’s address. Taranto was sentenced to 21 months, and since he has already served more than that while awaiting trial, he’ll be released, but will remain under supervision by U.S. Probation for three years. The President who set him on his path has faced no consequences. Fixing that will be up to us, to the voters, who have work ahead of us when we vote to see to it that this president is finally held accountable and that a new Congress that will return to performing its constitutional duties is seated after the midterms. It’s a sorry state of affairs at the Justice Department. Our work is cut out for us.

We’re in this together,

Joyce