No. of Recommendations: 3
Is this the story that Abramson's article is based on?
That and I think a few others. From Seth's article:
As CNN reports, when Trump personal attorney Pam Bondi—who, as we now know, takes direct daily orders from her client (via both telephone and text) on how to handle federal criminal cases—became Trump’s top agent at DOJ, she began reviewing cases related to January 6 and learned that the prosecutors in Taranto’s 2023 case, scheduled for a post-conviction sentencing hearing this fall, had done three things any federal prosecutor would do:
1. They referred to January 6 as a “riot,” because it was literally a declared Riot (it was formally declared a Riot at 1:50 PM by on-scene MPD commander Robert Glover);
2. they made reference to Taranto’s January 6 case, which was essential to explain his motive for the crimes he committed on that day and after—including the apparent Attempted Assassination of Obama—and to establishing the unique sort of danger he posed and would continue to pose to Americans at large, and
3. they referenced that Taranto’s June 2023 crime was committed in response to a Trump tweet, which was essential to explain that Taranto was the sort of man who not just once but many times—on January 6, as to Trump enemy McCarthy, as to Trump enemy Raskin, and as to Trump enemy Obama, at a minimum—was willing to commit violent, politically committed crimes inspired by the violent and suggestively vile rhetoric of Donald Trump, who as of 2025 is still in a position to issue such edicts to highly suggestible criminals like Taylor Taranto.
And as we might expect, when Trump and his personal lawyer (Bondi) discovered that federal prosecutors Carlos Valdivia and Samuel White had filed documents in federal court confirming—as was necessary to the case—that Taranto was uniquely susceptible to Trump’s words in committing his acts of (in colloquial terms) “domestic terrorism,” they did exactly what you would expect two people with “consciousness of guilt” to do: they suspended Valdivia and White from their jobs, doctored the federal record in Taranto’s case by ripping up the prior filings that mentioned January 6 (and therefore, implicitly, Trump’s December 2020 tweet inciting January 6) as well as Trump’s June 2023 tweet inciting an Attempted Assassination of Obama, and did not maintain the ardent push for a 27-month federal prison sentence for Taranto, which resulted in him being immediately released from custody post-sentencing despite the DOJ previously contending in its court filings that doing so could be “catastrophically” dangerous.
But Trump and his personal lawyer made it appear as those filings had never existed.
In doing so, they covered up a clear, unambiguous, unmistakable pattern of Trump soliciting politically motivated criminal conduct from fans of his who he knows are capable of committing politically motivated violent crimes—and obscured Trump’s long history of, following such incitements, thereafter engaging in a premeditated cover-up of the way he not only solicited a crime and stood to benefit from that crime but also was in a position to make his involvement in the incident disappear ex post facto.
Trump pardoned Taranto and made his role in Taranto’s January 6 crimes disappear.
He tampered with Taranto’s 2023 criminal file and thereby made his role in Taranto’s June 2023 crimes disappear.
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So, is this just more of the same "Trump being Trump and no one caring", or is this a big scandal that will soon blow up? My vote is on the former option.
