Thanks, Suze! Abrego Garcia Seizes On Vanity Fair Interview

It was pretty obvious that White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’ admission to Vanity Fair that President Trump was engaged in “score settling” was going to make it into a legal filing sooner or later. Now it has. In a filing overnight, Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s attorneys cited the Wiles interview as part of their bid to dismiss the indictment against him on vindictive prosecution grounds: As a practical matter, we can say that of course it’s a vindictive prosecution. But as a legal matter, the standard to establish vindictive prosecution is high and hard to meet. Wiles’ comments alone won’t do the trick, but they are the capper to what has been a series of remarkable public commentaries, threats, and admissions about Abrego Garcia and his criminal case from high-ranking administration officials, chief among them Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. The new filing, in addition to citing Wiles, reveals quite a bit more than we’ve known about recent proceedings in the Tennessee case, which have been taking place under seal and outside of public view for the past few weeks. Without getting too deep into the weeds, the judge in October found “a realistic likelihood of vindictiveness” and allowed Abrego Garcia to conduct discovery into the Trump DOJ’s conduct. That was a huge win and a major initial hurdle for any criminal defendant to overcome. Since then, the Trump DOJ has fought tooth and nail to avoid having to comply with both the court order and Abrego Garcia’s discovery requests. It has repeatedly attempted to re-litigate the federal judge’s decision to allow discovery. It has stonewalled on providing responsive documents. It has attempted to quash Abrego Garcia’s subpoenas seeking live testimony from Blanche, associate deputy attorney general Aakash Singh, and acting principal associate deputy attorney James McHenry. While the fight over discovery into vindictive prosecution has been mostly conducted behind closed doors, we can piece together a few things from the latest heavily-redacted filing : DOJ, on orders from the judge, eventually coughed up “20-odd pages” of internal documents which Abrego Garcia now claims expose a “web of false representations to the Court” that Nashville acting U.S. Attorney Robert McGuire independently brought the case on his own, not at the behest of Main Justice (or the White House): [W]hat we do know, from documents the defense and the Court had to pry out of the government’s hands, is that the government deceived the Court, the defense, and the public about Mr. McGuire’s purported status as the sole decisionmaker. Put bluntly, numerous government lawyers chose to mislead this Court in order to try to save this unjust prosecution. The internal documents show that Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh was the conduit between Blanche’s office and McGuire, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys argue. Because the relevant documents and court rulings are sealed, we can’t independently verify the claims by Abrego Garcia’s attorneys, but let’s just say the redacted portions of their latest filing are pretty tantalizing: We may not have to take...

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