The Trump-despising Politico senior writer, Ankush Khardori, has found four, count 'em, FOUR, foreign diplomats who are remarkably all worried about the rule of law under President Donald Trump. Also very conveniently, all these diplomats happen to be unnamed. And Khardori milked them to warn about Trump on Monday in "‘We Still Don’t Know How Far They’ll Go’."
Was that quote by the unnamed diplomats given to Khardori in unison or separately? The subtitle warns "Foreign diplomats are growing nervous about the rule of law in Trump’s America — and it could complicate law enforcement across the globe." So are those the same unnamed foreign diplomats who are nervous or can at least ONE diplomat be named?
Senior officials in some of America’s closest European allies are quietly fretting about the law enforcement priorities of the Trump administration and even the conduct of the Justice Department, according to four European diplomats who are stationed in Washington and who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive trans-Atlantic diplomatic and law enforcement matters.
Wait! So the four unnamed European diplomats based in Washington are citing UNNAMED senior officials in Europe to whine about law enforcement priorities of the Trump administration? Is this what a court of law would refer to as double hearsay? ?
Their concerns run the gamut from the administration’s approach to specific issues — including immigration, free speech and international drug trafficking — to broader and more structural questions about the integrity of the U.S. legal system and the potential erosion of the rule of law.
It must have been quite a shock for poor Khardori to discover that President Trump would be enforcing existing immigration law rather than ignoring it entirely as happened in the previous autopen administration. It's "erosion of the rule of law" to control the border?
The mood among the European diplomatic set, to the extent that it can be summed up based on these conversations, appears to be one of heightened vigilance and of low-level — but persistent — anxiety about where things are headed in the U.S. legal system in Trump’s second term and beyond. “We still don’t know how far they’ll go,” one of them told me.
Claimed one of the four conveniently unnamed diplomats... or was it a unicorn?
Another diplomat put things more bluntly, accusing “the Trump DOJ” of “disregarding foundational legal commitments, including protections for asylum seekers and due process in deportations.” That, in turn, “has undermined the credibility of U.S. leadership and signaled that domestic politics could override international obligations.”
Does this unnamed diplomat realize that the previous administration had no process for deportations? And why should FOREIGN diplomats have any say in how our immigration laws are enforced whether named or conveniently unnamed?
Finally we come to the most laughable of the claims supposedly whispered to Khardori by the unnamed diplomats:
There are also broader and more serious concerns about whether the Justice Department is being irreversibly politicized under Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel.
Two of the diplomats I spoke with zeroed in on this issue without prompting. One of them described the strident and aggressive tone in public remarks from Bondi and Patel on law enforcement matters like violent crime and illegal immigration as both counterproductive and unprofessional. They worry that the standards for decorum among the nation’s top law enforcement officials have fallen, and that senior administration officials like Bondi and Patel — as well as DHS Secretary Kristi Noem — have politicized law enforcement in a way that may seriously compromise the integrity of the U.S. criminal justice system and make allied law enforcement agencies reluctant to lend support to Trump administration investigations or prosecutions they see as primarily political.
The reason this is so amusing is that it was Ankush Khardori himself, not an unnamed source, who was urging in July 2024 for the Judge Chutkan trial of Trump to be put on speed dial in order that he would face political harm by election day:
Special counsel Jack Smith and his colleagues at the Justice Department have been put in a terribly difficult position, but they should advance the case as aggressively as possible, even if that means that it cannot be fully resolved by Election Day.
...One way to go forward would be for Chutkan to solicit briefs as quickly as possible on the parties’ position on the status of the indictment in the wake of the court’s ruling. Trump will continue to argue that it should all be dismissed or held in abeyance for some reason or another, but Smith and his team can present their best case for continuing the prosecution after the Supreme Court’s ruling.
If for some reason there are evidentiary questions that need to be resolved, those hearings should happen as quickly as possible, and the government should present as much evidence as is reasonably possible — including evidence concerning the conduct on Trump’s part that remains at issue in the prosecution, and including evidence that has not yet become public.
Prosecutors usually do not like to have trial witnesses testify in pretrial proceedings — among other things, because they can potentially be impeached at trial with any inconsistent statements — but this is the rare situation where that preference should be ignored. If there are hearings of any sort before November where it would be appropriate, prosecutors should consider calling people like Raffensberger and even Pence.
Chutkan’s overriding objective should be to move this case as expeditiously as possible before November, even if that means trying to resolve all of these questions and perhaps even scheduling a trial that may not end before Election Day.
No unnamed diplomats (or unicorns) were harmed during the making of this report.