by Steve Benen | Jun 3, 2026 | Crime & Courts, Criminal Justice, Maddowblog, News, Politics
Two weeks after Election Day 2024, Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama assured the public that Donald Trump wouldn’t choose “a criminal” to serve in any key positions. Soon after, the president (himself a convicted felon) started adding politically aligned ex-cons to his administrative team.
But of particular interest are the Jan. 6 rioters who’ve been hired by the Republican administration, despite — or quite possibly, because of — the role they played in the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Last summer, for example, Trump’s Justice Department hired Jared Wise, a former FBI agent who not only participated in the Jan. 6 riot, he was also filmed urging his fellow insurrectionists to “kill” police officers. (Though Wise was criminally charged, federal prosecutors didn’t have time to proceed with the case before Trump started handing out pardons to rioters, including violent felons who clashed with police officers.)
Wise parted ways with the administration a couple of months ago, but as it turns out, he wasn’t the only Jan. 6 rioter to get a job on Team Trump. The Washington Post reported:
A convicted Jan. 6 rioter who later said that he regretted his participation in the U.S. Capitol attack has been hired by the Trump administration to work inside a Pentagon office that manages highly classified military operations, according to four people familiar with the matter.
The appointment of Elias Irizarry, who was 19 at the time of the riot in 2021, to a post in the Defense Department’s Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict office has raised alarm internally among staff who question how anyone convicted in the assault on American democracy could be trusted
by Steve Benen | May 14, 2026 | Criminal Justice, Justice Department, Maddowblog, News, Politics
In late 2024, when federal prosecutors secured an indictment against Gautam Adani, it wasn’t just another case. Adani, with a net worth of $104 billion, is India’s richest man with unparalleled influence in his home country, making the criminal indictment a matter of geopolitical significance.
In the United States, the Justice Department nevertheless concluded that he had allegedly overseen a bribery scheme, which he and his team lied about while trying to raise money from American investors.
According to new reporting from The New York Times, however, Donald Trump’s DOJ is prepared to abandon the case:
Now, according to several people with knowledge of the case, the Justice Department is planning to drop the charges altogether.
The reversal came after the Indian billionaire, Gautam Adani, hired a new legal team led by Robert J. Giuffra Jr., one of President Trump’s personal lawyers and the co-chairman of the prominent firm Sullivan & Cromwell.
The Times’ article, which has not been independently verified by MS NOW, added that the billionaire’s defense lawyer met directly with Justice Department officials last month, and he went through a series of slides intended to show what he characterized as weaknesses in the case.
One of the slides, however, stood out: “If prosecutors dropped the charges, Mr. Adani would be willing to invest $10 billion in the American economy and create 15,000 jobs, echoing a pledge he had made in the wake of Mr. Trump’s election.”
The Times’ reporting went on to note that Adani’s lawyer also took steps to resolve related cases from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Treasury Department, and “both of those agencies are now preparing to strike
by Barbara McQuade | May 10, 2026 | Criminal Justice, Opinion
Jack Smith has been speaking out. His words are welcome — even if they may be coming a little too late.
From the time he was appointed special counsel in 2022 until his resignation in January of 2025, Smith conducted himself with the kind of stoic silence we expected of the Justice Department at the time. He spoke only at formal press conferences — during which he announced criminal charges against Donald Trump — and even then, scrupulously followed DOJ’s guidance to discuss only facts contained within the four corners of the indictments.
His conduct mirrored that of Robert Mueller, who was similarly silent when serving as the special counsel investigating Russian election interference just a few years prior. In stark contrast, Trump’s current acting Attorney General Todd Blanche routinely uses television news interviews to discuss pending cases, such as the recent indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
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Blanche claims criminal charges against Comey extend beyond Instagram ‘seashell’ post
May 3, 2026 / 07:24
As Smith recently told an audience in Washington, D.C., “I grew up as a prosecutor in sort of the Robert Mueller mode of prosecutor. I speak in courtrooms. I do not speak on the courthouse steps. I don’t do media.”
But since leaving his post, Smith has begun to let those rigid prosecutorial walls come down a little, blasting Trump’s Department of Justice on multiple occasions. In April at a private event hosted by the Cosmos Club in Washington D.C., Smith stated that DOJ “targets people for criminal prosecution simply because the president doesn’t like them” and “fails to move on cases because they might uncover facts
by Steve Benen | Apr 27, 2026 | Criminal Justice, Justice Department, Maddowblog, News, Politics
During Joe Biden’s presidency, the Democratic administration took steps to end federal executions, including a measure that converted 37 death row inmates’ sentences to life in prison. Donald Trump vowed to reverse course and use federal powers to kill more people. To that end, the Republican president and his team have authorized seeking death sentences against 44 defendants.
But as important as these developments are, it’s also notable how, exactly, Team Trump is prepared to proceed with these executions. The Associated Press reported:
The Justice Department will adopt firing squads as a permitted method of execution as the Trump administration moves to ramp up and expedite capital punishment cases, officials said Friday. […]
The federal government has not previously included firing squad as a method of execution in its protocols, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Five states currently allow executions by firing squad: Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Utah.
The policy shift was announced in a statement from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, whose document spent a fair amount of time denouncing Biden as part of the Republican lawyer’s latest apparent attempt to make Trump happy.
It’s worth emphasizing that Trump’s Justice Department hasn’t explicitly said that it will start killing people with firing squads, but now this option is on the table as part of a new, streamlined process in which the administration intends to expedite death penalty cases.
Time will tell what becomes of the shift and whether there are related Eighth Amendment court fights, but the developments reminded me of something Rachel Maddow told viewers back in 2014, when Republican policymakers advanced similar measures at the state level.
“Over time, we’ve
by Scott Hechinger | Jan 18, 2026 | Criminal Justice, Opinion
An ICE agent shot Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, 2026. He shot her in the head while she was inside her car. She was 37 years old, and a mother of three.
Those facts are fixed. Also fixed: the video footage from multiple cameras, including the ICE agent’s own cell phone camera, which quickly provided politicians, law enforcement and the public with multiple angles of the scene before, during and after the deadly encounter. Trump administration officials are demanding that the public accept that Good “weaponized” her vehicle, that the shooting was “self-defense” and that questioning this version of events endangers law enforcement.
Although an FBI probe is ongoing, the Justice Department has already said it does not believe there is currently any basis to open a criminal civil rights investigation into Good’s killing. This is a deeply unsettling and exasperating moment for those of us who care about police accountability, truth and justice. We have been here before with the police killings of Eric Garner, Philando Castile and George Floyd — and the many lesser-known killings also caught on camera. We have seen clear video, watched it again and again, and still justice is delayed or never comes.
This is a deeply unsettling and exasperating moment for those of us who care about police accountability, truth and justice.
After all of this, it’s easy to conclude that filming doesn’t matter. I don’t believe that. I’ve seen what happens when video exists, and I’ve seen what happens when it doesn’t. More often than not, it feels like video is the only thing standing between a lie and a life being ruined by it.
