Former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates delivered a searing indictment of the Trump administration's subversion of democracy and the rule of law at Tuesday night's session of the virtual Democratic National Convention.
Yates said that "from the moment President Trump took office, he's used his position to benefit himself rather than our country. He's trampled the rule of law, trying to weaponize our Justice Department to attack his enemies and protect his friends."
Yates said that Donald Trump's attacks on the FBI, the free press, inspectors general, military officers and federal judges all have one purpose: "to remove any check on his abuse of power."
Yates' speech was less a stemwinder than a succinct summing-up of the prosecutor's case. But if this had been a real, pre-COVID convention, there would have been cheers on the floor (though not, we can hope, cries of "Lock him up").
What we can expect are calls for Joe Biden, assuming he's elected, to give Yates the top position in the Justice Department. She briefly occupied that post on an acting basis at the dawn of the Trump administration before being fired for refusing to defend an early version of Trump's travel ban.
Which is why Biden probably shouldn't give her the job.
Yates certainly has the professional qualifications, having served as a career prosecutor and U.S. attorney. Unlike former AGs John Ashcroft and Jeff Sessions, she's not a politician, though some Democrats wanted her to run for a Georgia Senate seat this year.
But, as I argued here, Trump's politicization of the Justice Department — which included a thwarted attempt to get rid of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III (according to Mueller's report, though Trump denied it) — calls for a different kind of attorney general after the debris is cleared away. Trump should follow the example of the late President Gerald Ford, who in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal appointed Edward H. Levi, a legal scholar and the president of the University of Chicago, as his AG.
