According to the Congressional Budget Office, President Trump’s wasteful effort to change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War would cost taxpayers as much as $125 million.
Trump would more accurately rebrand the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) as the “Department of War.” Although DOJ’s website still claims its mission is to uphold the rule of law and to protect civil rights, its priority has shifted from what it was during my almost 40 years as a federal prosecutor — evidence-based, evenhanded justice — to a war on Trump’s political enemies and retribution against those who call out the lawlessness and corruption of this administration.
We are now asked to believe that spineless and ethically challenged Trump bootlickers such as Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI head Kash Patel will conduct a legitimate investigation of the killing of Renee Good. The most telling evidence that such an investigation will not occur is that six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned and several supervisors in the criminal section of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division in Washington gave notice of their departures. This was allegedly over the DOJ leadership’s refusal to investigate the shooting as a civil rights matter and to include Minnesota state investigators in their examination of the incident, as well as their order to investigate the Good family’s activities and connections to anti-ICE activist groups. For those Trump supporters who dismiss these resignations as just unhappy, “woke” prosecutors leaving, keep in mind that the group included Joseph Thompson, the First Assistant U.S. Attorney in Minnesota, who was overseeing all of the federal fraud investigations into Minnesota social services programs. Just a month ago, Thompson gave a Comeyesque press conference publicly suggesting, without indictments or arrests backing up the number, that there was over $9 billion in fraudulent payments from the programs. Hardly the action of a Democratic partisan. Besides Thompson, other senior career prosecutors who resigned included the white-collar crimes chief and the violent and major crimes chief in the office. As a former federal prosecutor, I know what a tragedy these resignations are for Minnesota law enforcement. There is no quick replacement for that loss of experience, not to mention the disruption to the complex cases those prosecutors were handling. 
Along with its disgraceful attempt to justify the Renee Good shooting, DOJ continues to green-light criminal investigations of Trump’s perceived political foes, most recently Gov. Tim Walz, Mayor Jacob Frey, and Fed Chair Jerome Powell. The revelation of the existence of the Nixon administration’s secret enemies list during the Watergate hearings of 1973 inspired bipartisan revulsion. It caused conservative columnist and Nixon supporter William F. Buckley Jr. to write of the enemies list in his column On The Right (July 7, 1973): “It is fascist in its reliance on the state as the instrument of harassment.” Today, Trump publicly instructs his enablers to indict, intimidate, and attempt to destroy his opponents and Republicans in Congress hardly blink.
Do conservatives who espouse liberty and freedom really feel more comfortable with thousands of masked government agents in unmarked cars, decked out in military gear more appropriate for Mosul than Minneapolis, patrolling our city streets with no legal accountability?
Frank Sherman
Eagles Nest