The crowd-sourced Project 2025

Chapter 17, the Department of Justice, by Carrie

We are continuing with our project, where intrepid volunteers offered to read a chapter (or chapters) of the HeritageFoundationTrumpRepublican plan for our future, Project 2025. This section is borrowed with permission by the author, and you can (and should) visit her Substack to read the original here because she’s included some incredible links that don’t seem to want to transfer here. Seriously, go visit You’re Overthinking It, and thank me later.

Project 2025’s Chapter on Justice Doesn’t Even Pretend to Be Serious

But the author hopes you don’t notice how racist it is

I feel the need to note the date - even if it is in the byline.

Every dateline seems to come with another blow to our democracy.

It is now six days after the Supreme Court ruled that a president has absolute immunity. The Court has also asserted that it has absolute immunity. The only way to change that is with super democracy - which means an overwhelming vote by U.S. citizens in all states. It means Democrats have to win back the House, and hold the Presidency and the Senate - not an easy task with calls for Biden to drop out, and Ohio (Sherrod Brown) and Montana (John Tester) listed as toss-ups.

If Dems take the Senate, the House, and the presidency (with Joe or Kamala), then the work to fix the Supreme Court can begin. That could mean adding more members. The Supreme Court reached its complement of nine members in 1869. Twenty-two years later, the Court of Appeals was formed, dividing the country into nine circuit courts - one for each Justice to supervise.

Now, there are 13 circuit courts, but still only nine Supreme Court Justices.

There have been plenty of calls to add four Justices.

There are other remedies.

It all starts, though, with citizens voting to save democracy.

The Justice of Jim Crow

Given the news of the week, I thought it appropriate that this second installment in our Project 2025 series should focus on chapter 8: Justice.

I don’t know why I’m surprised, but this 35-page chapter (including six pages of footnotes) feels like it was written by a post-graduate frat boy who feels slighted.

Turns out, that’s exactly who it’s written by. Gene Hamilton worked in the Trump Justice Department, where he was one of the architects of the family separation policy, along with his good friend Stephen Miller. Hamilton currently works with Miller at America First Legal, which is on the front lines of white supremacist legal theory.

Miller, according to this rather disturbing Vanity Fair piece, rejoiced at seeing photos of children being torn from their parents at the border back in 2018. (Hamilton is also mentioned in the piece.)

Much of this chapter on Justice is based on the same fact-free beliefs Miller espouses in Vanity Fair:

• That Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election was a hoax, perpetrated by the Obama Justice Department

• That the Justice Department censored social media - especially in regards to (now discredited) reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop

• That (white) parents who are threatening school board members and other officials across the country are being unfairly targeted by the FBI; while ANTIFA (who Hamilton seems to think is an organized group, like the Proud Boys, rather than a loose term for people with anti-fascist beliefs) and Black Lives Matter are allowed to roam the streets “wilding” on innocent (white) people

• That the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act - which was passed in the 1990s after a summer of anti-abortion protests culminated in the murder of Dr. David Gunn, and the attempted murder of Dr. George Tiller (who was actually murdered in his church 15 years later) - discriminates against people with conservative beliefs. Because people with conservative beliefs are allowed to be violent and murderous?

• That disinformation cannot be monitored or corrected by social media companies (and, by extension, legacy media companies) because there are people who believe the disinformation, and correcting them is an act of discrimination

• That January 6 insurrectionists are martyrs to the Justice Department’s overzealousness

• That the Voting Rights Act of 1965 should not be enforced because ensuring Black people have no impediments to voting is somehow discriminatory to white people

• That the Justice Department - via Homeland Security - is being too soft on immigrants

• That crime is up, and crime committed by immigrants is rampant

None of this is true. More interesting is that none of the (98!) footnotes that Hamilton lists prove these accusations are true. They either say the opposite of what Hamilton thinks they say, or they are written by fellow ideologues in the fact-free, right-wing echo chamber.

For instance, as I noted in the last P25 installment, violent crime has been going down since the 1990s. Even the 2020 pandemic spike in crime didn’t get close to levels from 20 years before. And crime has gone down precipitously since then.

As the libertarian CATO Institute has been reporting for years, immigrants commit very few crimes.

Another instance of an untruth Hamilton propagates: that Russia didn’t interfere in the 2016 election. One of Hamilton’s footnotes is a piece from John Solomon from The Hill. It was later reported that, when he wrote the piece, Solomon was working with Rudy Giuliani consiglieri Lev Parnas to pin the 2016 election interference on Ukraine (and the Bidens) instead of Russia.

This is hardly a neutral source.

The other source Hamilton footnotes for the Russia Hoax theory is an AP report on former FBI agent Kevin Clinesmith, who altered an email that said Trump campaign official Carter Page was a CIA source, because he thought Page wasn’t a CIA source, and took a shortcut to save himself the hassle of getting a “corrected” email from the CIA.

He was sentenced to a year of probation.

Hamilton is outraged at this, even though the AP story, itself, is neutral. His inclusion of the AP story is window dressing, as he goes on to use the discredited Solomon as his main source in other places in the document. Hamilton also fails to note that Clinesmith was the only person convicted in the sweeping investigation by Special Council John Durham, who was appointed by former Attorney General William Barr to find Ukrainian/Biden interference. He found none, according to the New York Times. But he did find - and ignored - evidence of criminality by Trump.

The strategy Hamilton employs here and throughout the P25 Justice chapter is performative outrage. He clearly hopes readers will glean onto that outrage rather than recognize the lies and omissions the outrage is based on. 

He doesn’t even mention the Republican-led Senate Intelligence report which starts with: 

“The Russian government directed extensive activity, beginning in at least 2014 and carrying into at least 2017, against U.S. election infrastructure' at the state and local level."

It’s as if Hamilton walked into a rival’s office and saw a hammer on the man’s desk, then concluded: “The hammer on his desk is proof that he hit people over the head!”

If there’s already a conspiracy theory out there about a hammer wielding hoodlum, then people will believe it.

Even if an investigation shows the man was building a bookcase, people who are primed by the conspiracy won’t believe the truth.

It is lies compounded by other lies and then justified by previous lies.

In fact, Hamilton specifically wants the FBI to enable more lying. He wants them to stop “engaging, in general, in activities related to combating the spread of so-called misinformation and disinformation by Americans who are not tied to any plausible criminal activity.”

Say someone does a robocall to LGBTQ people or Black people who are registered Democrats. Say that call impersonates a candidate or a party operative telling them that voting day is November 1, when it’s actually November 5. That is a felony. But Hamilton wants to allow people to do that.

Now, there are people out there - Hamilton’s people - who will say, “Nowhere in the document does he give that example.” I have already written about those people.

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Hamilton also wants to get rid of the FBI’s Office of General Counsel, which makes sure FBI agents are doing their job ethically.

To be fair, the Office of General Counsel has been mired in personnel issues, having to do with bad management, personal vendettas, and sexual harassment. It was also front and center in the initial Russia investigation.

But that’s not why Hamilton wants to get rid of it. He argues for closing the Office of General Counsel because it is, in his view, redundant. It’s part of the Justice Department, he argues. The Justice Department already has attorneys. They should just use those attorneys.

This is where I get to use my second favorite word - specious. (My first favorite is onomatopoeia, duh.) Hamilton knows attorneys in the Justice Department oversee different areas (drugs, sex trafficking, etc). He knows that all of them are busy with those full-time jobs. And he knows that the area of oversight for the Office of General Counsel is the FBI.

The redundancy argument is specious. On the surface, it sounds like a great idea for cutting corners. But it’s really about getting rid of oversight that ensures agents act within the rule of law as they carry out their duties as law enforcement officers.

Hamilton wants to “free” FBI agents to not have to deal with respecting the rule of law if they don’t want to.

Worse, he wants to stop agents from interpreting the rule of law to mean anything the folks at Project 2025 disagree with.

The paragraph below, chilled me to the bone when I read it:

Let’s parse this. When the “next Republican president” (a phrase used throughout Project 2025) wins, Hamilton and Miller are ready to go through all of the Bureau’s cases and decide which ones are “unlawful or contrary to the national interest.”

He does not define what he means by national interest.

There are no specifics in that paragraph. And that’s what scares me.

One of the knocks on the FBI in recent years was the lack of action from it’s field offices in Indianapolis and Los Angeles over credible evidence that Larry Nassar was sexually abusing gymnasts. Hamilton wants more authority vested in local FBI offices. And he wants to make sure they only investigate what’s “in the national interest.”

I have no idea if Hamilton thinks sexual abuse is in the national interest. He clearly thinks, as I noted above, that it is not in the national interest for the FBI to prosecute people who harass school board members. He thinks (white) parents who send death threats to public officials are perfectly fine. He also doesn’t acknowledge that the anti-abortion protesters prosecuted under the FACE Act murdered a doctor, and physically harassed countless numbers of innocent people.

He’s hoping that you don’t fill in the blanks with reality.

So my breath catches when I see a phrase like, “in the national interest” from Hamilton. Especially since he was one of the government officials who thought taking children away from their parents was “in the national interest.”

Hamilton also thinks the “national interest” is enforcing the Comstock Act, which would prohibit abortion pills - or even tools like specula that OBGYN’s need to do their jobs - from being sent in the mail.

Of course, he doesn’t mention the Comstock Act. He just mentions the law numbers - 18USC 1461 and 1462.

He stays far away from using clear words people would easily understand. It leaves him with plenty of plausible deniability.

Hamilton writes on page 22 of the pdf of the Justice chapter linked below (page 566 of the entire document) that he wants to “overhaul… the DOJ grant application process” so that grants are only going to “lawful actors who support federal law enforcement.”

In the paragraph just above that, he excoriates Obama for upholding LGBTQ rights.

In the paragraph immediately following his “lawful actors” statement, he talks about immigrants.

It’s not hard to understand that Hamilton wants the Department of Justice to deny grants to local and state governments, non-profits, and private companies that have DEI or immigrant-friendly initiatives. 

He wants to wage economic warfare using the Justice Department.

This will affect all of us. Even the racists he is writing for.

Let’s not allow him to carry this strategy out.