Although Democrats were initially stunned by Trump’s unbelievable flurry of executive orders, they soon regained their footing and began to fight back via lawfare. Forum shopping has put them in friendly courts, where leftist and NeverTrump judges have done their best to stop Trump from firing employees, investigating bureaucratic cash flows, and shutting down departments.

However, as we constitutional conservatives know, these efforts will ultimately fail. Under the Constitution, the Executive branch has the power to do all these things, and DOGE is the perfect vehicle to do it—especially since it’s a legitimate reconfiguring of an Obama-era program.

If the left’s current wave of lawfare is manifestly illegitimate, why is it bothering? Well...it’s all about buying time. However, in a delicious irony, some of them may opening themselves up to 20-year prison sentences under 18 U.S.C. § 1512, the same statute that the DOJ abused to imprison January 6 defendants.

We know that the D.C. Swamp rats are very worried because they’ve seemingly started lawyering up like mad (emphasis in original):

Internet search trends in the Washington, DC, metro area have been nothing short of stunning in recent weeks, reflecting what appears to be growing panic within the federal bureaucracy as President Trump and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) root out corruption in non-governmental organizations (NGO) and federal agencies. 

Earlier this week, internet search trends for "Criminal Defense Lawyer" and "RICO Laws" went viral on X, fueling speculation that Washington's political elites were in panic mode. The searches coincided with DOGE's efforts to neuter USAID's funding of NGOs that propped up a shadow government, as well as begin cutting tens of thousands of workers from various federal agencies.

One can see where, in a political town, people might want to lawyer up. Many are apparently genuinely worried that their sins are catching up with them and, as their statute of limitation searches reveal, that time is not on their side:

The more optimistic are even trying to see if they can hide their ill-gotten gains, whether to pay their lawyers or have a nice little taxpayer-funded nest egg, whether they avoided prison or afterward:

However, with the specter of prosecution facing them, the Swamp rats aren’t just praying that the statute of limitations has run on their bad acts, that they can find a lawyer, or that they can at least salvage some cash. It seems some are also planning to engage in an orgy of deleting the evidence:

This is, of course, illegal. It’s more than just illegal, though; it’s illegal in a kind of perfect way.

Following the events on January 6, one of the biggest weapons in the Biden DOJ’s arsenal was 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2). That narrow subsection makes it illegal for people to “obstruct...any official proceeding,” and carries with it a stiff prison sentence. The Biden DOJ said that applied to anyone even near the Capitol on January 6 because their presence temporarily stopped the Senate from confirming the Electoral College results.

However, this deliberately misread the entirety of 18 U.S.C. § 1512 because it’s not about protesting at Congress. Instead, the statute as a whole is intended to apply to people who interfere with an ongoing federal investigation into criminal wrongdoing. In that context, the entirety of subsection(c)—as opposed to just sub-subsection (2)—is illuminating:

(c) Whoever corruptly—

(1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or

(2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so,

shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

It’s not just me saying that. The Supreme Court confirmed in Fischer v. United States that § 1512(c)(2) does not apply to the January 6 prisoners, all of whom, I believe, have a good basis for a staggering lawsuit against the U.S. government. (Something we, the taxpayers, will end up funding.)

However, it’s pretty clear from the face of things that those D.C. Swamp rats who are destroying evidence that the Executive branch is actively searching for as a predicate to ending fraud and corruption in the federal government, will have opened themselves up for arrest—and perhaps, face a much longer penalty than they would have for their initial crime.

Or, as they said during the Nixon era, “the cover-up is worse than the crime.”

Image by AI.