A federal judge has cornered the Justice Department for withholding files on FBI interviews with the woman who accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her when she was 13.
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to release unredacted versions of several Jeffrey Epstein files, or explain why the DOJ should be allowed to keep them secret, as he sided with investigative journalist Katie Phang, who had accused Blanche of violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act. He gave the government until July 2 to comply.
Or what?
The FBI reports to Trump, and he put a toady in charge. Ditto for the DOJ. The Supreme Court has a tiny force of police who basically guard the buildings, but they don’t go out and arrest people.
It’s probably good that there aren’t competing federal police forces, some of whom report to the executive branch and some who are on the judicial branch. OTOH, the courts need to be able to do something if they’re being ignored.
Maybe it would work if the courts could tell the executive branch that until their orders were obeyed, the court wouldn’t hear any other business brought by the government. Any federal prosecutor anywhere brought a case, and the courts would refuse to hear it until other matters were resolved. OTOH, with the way the republicans want to break the country, maybe they’d be happy to have the courts effectively shut down completely. But, if the courts started issuing default judgements because the government wasn’t able to present their side, maybe that would work?
So that’s kind of what’s happening (very slowly)
The original law didn’t have any teeth or punishments for failing to release everything by the deadline. However judges orders come with the threat of contempt, so if Acting AG blanche fails to produce the documents or a valid reason for redacting them he can be held in contempt. And this matters because the attorney general is required to approve things like Fisa warrant requests, media subpoenas, death penalty cases, official DOJ opinions.
Trump could fire him and appoint another, but they’d be hauled into court to face those same questions under that same threat of contempt.
That’s a good start, but too often things happening slowly means that nothing happens in time. During Biden’s 4 year term they started to investigate and eventually prosecute things that happened in Trump’s first term. The clock just ran out though. Too many things were still being investigated when Trump took office again.