The President is in violation of the Constitution he swore to defend.

Executive Summary

The President of the United States failed to nominate Senate-confirmable U.S. Attorneys. He used procedural gimmicks to keep unconfirmed personal loyalists in those roles. Courts ruled his installations unlawful. Rather than comply, he directed political prosecutions through unlawfully serving officers, then fired a lawfully appointed replacement within hours of his swearing-in, citing the very constitutional provision that authorized the appointment. He is systematically dismantling separation of powers that prevent Trump becoming monarch and appointing his wife as his successor.

The Trump administration conduct is criminal on its face. The use of state machinery to punish political opponents through proceedings the government knew lacked legal authority, carried out by officers the government knew were unlawfully installed, under the direction of a Deputy Attorney General who spent nine years learning exactly how federal prosecution is supposed to work, then burned every bridge in his professional life to ensure it never works that way again.

Article II, Section 2

Congress may “by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper… in the Courts of Law.” Congress did that. 28 U.S.C. § 546(d) is that law.

It is the constitutional design working exactly as written.

When Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer, and Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche tweeted “Judges don’t pick U.S. Attorneys, the president does. See Article II” he actually cited the provision that says judges can pick U.S. Attorneys when Congress authorizes it.

It’s like he’s saying Enron accountants don’t balance the books, their CEO does.

The second-highest official at the Department of Justice publicly misrepresented the Constitution he swore to uphold, on a public media platform, to fraudulently represent firing an officer who had been lawfully appointed under the very clause he was citing.

The Trump legal 3-part tragedy runs like this:

1. A president has absolute authority to appoint U.S. Attorneys under Article II. But Trump didn’t appoint one here. He let the 120-day interim expire. He failed to get a nominee confirmed by the Senate. He didn’t do his job under the very article he’s invoking.
2. An Attorney General can then use a congressional statute (the Vacancies Reform Act and § 546) to install a loyalist through a back door — naming former campaign attorney John Sarcone “first assistant” to keep him in place. Statutory authority is legitimate when it serves the president’s interests.
3. However, when a federal judge uses the same statute’s next provision — § 546(d), the part that activates when the president’s 120 days expire — suddenly congressional authority over appointments is unconstitutional. The statute is valid in subsection (a) but void in subsection (d). The same law. The same page.

The position is that law applies to everyone except the president. It’s the monarch position, in direct violation of the Constitution and why America was founded.

The King’s attack already hit five districts

Look at the identical tragedy unfolding in New York, New Jersey, California, Virginia, and Nevada.

The president nominates a loyalist on an interim basis. The 120 days expire. Rather than submit to Senate confirmation — the process Article II actually requires for principal officers — the administration uses procedural maneuvers to keep unconfirmed people in place. When judges rule those hamfisted monarchist maneuvers unlawful, Trump either ignores the rulings or, as here, unlawfully fires the court’s lawful replacement within hours.

A systematic strategy to staff the federal prosecution apparatus without Senate confirmation. Similar to how Trump ran out the clock on appointments to the National Archives so he could inject someone who would destroy them. The one thing the Appointments Clause was specifically designed to prevent. The Framers included Senate confirmation because they had just fought a revolution against a king who appointed his own prosecutors, judges, and tax collectors.

Eastern District of Virginia alone makes the case

The unlawfully serving U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan brought criminal indictments against Letitia James and James Comey — known political enemies of the president. A judge threw those indictments out because Halligan had no authority to bring them. Halligan then brazenly continued using the title “United States Attorney” in court filings after being told she was not allowed. A federal judge warned she could face discipline for making false statements to the court.

This is what the unconfirmed prosecutors were for.

There’s nothing sophisticated here. It is plainly the political prosecution of Trump’s personal targets, carried out by people who serve at his pleasure because they were never subjected to Senate scrutiny as required by the Constitution. When judges tried to enforce the law, the administration spun disinformation attacks. They tried to say up is down, left is right, and the judiciary enforcing the Constitution to prevent abuse of power is an “abuse of power”. Obviously, without question, the president firing a court-appointed officer within hours is the abuse of power.

This Deputy Attorney General’s crimes appear intentional

Todd Blanche spent nine years as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York. He tried cases under the very appointment framework he’s now dismantling. He won the DOJ Director’s Award for superior performance as a federal prosecutor. He knows what § 546(d) says. He knows what a lawful appointment looks like. He knows what Article II authorizes. The misrepresentation on X was not ignorance.

It was a deliberate application of expertise in reverse, known well to historians of Nazi Germany, where the former prosecutor uses his knowledge of how the system works to prevent it from working.

Before becoming Deputy AG, Blanche was the president’s personal criminal defense attorney in three separate criminal cases — including the one that produced 34 felony convictions. He represented Paul Manafort, convicted of fraud and conspiracy. He represented Igor Fruman, a Giuliani associate who pleaded guilty to campaign finance crimes. He founded a solo law firm for the sole purpose of representing Trump after Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft pushed him out for taking the client. He moved his family to Palm Beach County near Mar-a-Lago. He switched his voter registration from Democrat to Republican.

He switched his entire professional life to serving one man’s legal survival against the Constitution, and his reward was the second-highest law enforcement position in the country to destroy the Constitution.

The leader’s private lawyer now oversees every federal prosecution in the republic. In healthier systems, such an appointment would not be possible.

Blanche record in office

• He personally conducted a two-day proffer interview with Ghislaine Maxwell — a convicted child sex trafficker — at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Tallahassee. A Deputy Attorney General has no business running a proffer session; that is line prosecutor work. Unless the purpose is controlling which questions get asked and which answers get recorded. The transcripts confirm the priority: Maxwell told Blanche the president “was never inappropriate with anybody… he was a gentleman in all respects.” She was subsequently transferred to a minimum-security facility.
• He refused to open a civil rights investigation into the ICE killing of Renée Good — a mother shot in the head by a federal agent — despite video evidence that 82% of Americans said showed unjustified force, and despite a dozen federal prosecutors in Minneapolis and Washington resigning in protest. He announced the decision on television before the FBI investigation was complete. He then called Governor Walz and Mayor Frey “terrorists” on X and confirmed investigations into them instead — the elected officials who called for peaceful protest, not the agent who fired into a car that was turning away from him.
• He was simultaneously installed as acting Librarian of Congress — a legislative branch position — after Trump fired Carla Hayden two years before her term ended. Library staff refused to recognize his authority. DOJ officials reportedly attempted to assume physical control of the building and were turned away.

Every action follows the same criminal logic. Shield Trump from legal exposure for his crimes. Punish anyone trying to hold him accountable. Extend Trump’s control into institutions where he has no authority. The client list didn’t change when Blanche moved from defense attorney to Deputy Attorney General. The billing arrangement did.

Blanche announced the firing of a court-appointed U.S. Attorney using the known Trump meme on a social media platform: “You are fired, Donald Kinsella.” He incorrectly cited a constitutional provision, which he knows opposes him and Trump. He appears confident that his audience won’t know he just said the opposite of the truth, intentional disinformation. This is the manner in which legal authority is exercised when its legitimacy is no longer the point.

The sequence deserves clinical attention: the leader’s personal attorney becomes the state’s chief prosecutor. Investigations migrate away from the leader and toward his political opponents. Courts intervene. The regime fires the court’s appointees and calls judicial review an abuse of power. The prosecutorial function has not been eliminated. It has been reversed. It now protects its patron and punishes his critics, and the man operating it got the job by keeping his client out of prison.

Criminal exposure: specific and documented

18 U.S.C. § 242 — deprivation of rights under color of law. Letitia James and James Comey were subjected to the coercive power of federal prosecution by an officer a court ruled had no authority to wield it. The administration was informed of that ruling and continued anyway. The willfulness element — usually the hard part — is handed to you by the court orders. They knew. They kept going.

18 U.S.C. § 1505 — obstruction of proceedings. The Renée Good civil rights investigation was killed before it could begin, over the objection of career prosecutors, announced on television before the FBI had completed its work. The use of positional authority to prevent a lawful federal proceeding from occurring.

18 U.S.C. § 371 — conspiracy to defraud the United States. Five districts, same pattern, same result. Install unlawfully serving prosecutors, maintain them after court orders, use them to bring political prosecutions. A scheme to impair the lawful function of the Department of Justice. Blanche sits at the top of that scheme as the official who oversees all 93 U.S. Attorney’s offices.

The logic is disbarment

Blanche is a member of the New York bar. Rule 8.4(c) prohibits conduct involving dishonesty or misrepresentation — his public statement that Article II gives the president sole appointment authority, when he knows Article II explicitly authorizes court appointments, is a material misrepresentation of law made in his official capacity to justify an official act. Rule 8.4(d) covers conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice — personally conducting a proffer session with a convicted sex trafficker to elicit statements exonerating his former client, while that former client controls her clemency prospects, is the corruption of a prosecutorial function. Rule 1.7 covers conflicts of interest — his former client is the president, his current role requires oversight of investigations implicating the president, and the Maxwell interview proved he cannot separate the two.

Every piece of it is on the public record because he announced it himself on X.

The problem was never the evidence. The problem is the defendant controls the courthouse.

The career trajectory of Beiermeister tells the story of why she’s suddenly in the news.

1. Palantir’s surveillance infrastructure
2. Meta’s engagement-at-all-costs model
3. OpenAI’s safety-theater-to-scale pipeline

Her career has been inside organizations where a product policy role exists to provide cover for decisions already made. And when she actually tried to use that role for its stated purpose, when she tried to push back on erotica injected into a chatbot with a massive underage user base, the machinery did what it always does: pushed her out instead.

The alleged discrimination complaint from a male colleague is almost too perfectly on-script retaliation. It’s classic privileged white male grievance. Young girls affected by OpenAI can’t be the victim, when men amassing the most power spin a narrative of themselves being the only victims allowed.

You don’t fire someone for whistleblowing when you’re already set up to cook false conduct allegations instead. The leave of absence, the complaint, the termination are all a sequence, not a coincidence. OpenAI’s statement that her departure was “not related to any issue she raised” is doing exactly the work it’s designed to do: creating plausible deniability while signaling to every remaining employee what happens when you dare to object.

Fidji Simo pushing the adult mode timeline is revealing. She also came from Meta, where the institutional lesson was always that engagement metrics override any safety concerns and you ship first, apologize strategically later, externalizing all costs to the most vulnerable in society.

After eight years at Facebook, in which former chief operating officer (COO) Sheryl Sandberg was one of her mentors, in 2019, she climbed the ranks to an executive position as head of the Facebook app. One year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and following Sandberg’s departure from Facebook, Simo also left…

And here she is again! From election interference to underaged erotica.

Beiermeister has been an insider, not an outside critic. She spent seven years at the infamously unethical Palantir. She understood how the radical right-wing Big Tech organizations operate. She chose to stay and work inside. The boys club, including Simo, that is burning her now is the predictable outcome of the architecture she helped build, rather than prevent, at every previous stop. These institutions discard people who raise inconvenient objections about safety, because that’s who and what they are.

On October 4, 2024, the European Court of Justice handed down its Grand Chamber ruling in Bezirkshauptmannschaft Landeck (C-548/21).

The case seems straightforward: Austrian police seized a man’s phone during a cannabis investigation, tried to unlock it without authorization from a prosecutor or court, didn’t document the attempt, and didn’t tell the owner.

And the Court said you can’t do that.

Even attempting to access the data constitutes processing under Directive 2016/680. You need prior authorization from a court or independent authority. You need to document what you did. You need to tell the subject afterward.

These are not suggestions.

As an old investigator, and an early adopter of acquisition tools, I find the results of this ruling very interesting.

It has been called “groundbreaking for investigative work and data protection throughout the European Union.“ It is. You can tell because forensic extraction vendors noticed immediately, in a weird way. Rather than help investigators comply, I see them pouncing on a compliance gap as a market opportunity.

Sigh.

Within months, vendor pitches started arriving on my desk. They want me to think the Landeck ruling means full-device imaging is legally indefensible. Ok, but does that really mean old workflows are non-compliant? We always should have focused on selective extraction tools and targeted, proportionate acquisition. So, asking are your current workflows compliant is a bit like asking how far from spirit you were by torturing the written law.

Investigators were being technically accurate to the letter, while also knowingly dishonest.

The Landeck ruling doesn’t mandate a specific technical approach to data extraction. It mandates a legal process. Prior judicial authorization. Proportionality assessment. Documentation. Notification to the data subject. That’s the stuff of good work.

A department that obtains proper authorization, documents the scope and justification, and notifies the subject afterward can perform a full-device image and remain fully compliant. The legal requirement is the process around the access, not a magic volume of data touched.

Do no harm doesn’t mean tie people up with a garden hose and beat them with a phone book, even if it doesn’t leave physical evidence of torture.

The selective extraction pitch I’m seeing actually inverts the ruling’s logic. I’m not a lawyer but that seems like something lawyers should be looking at sooner rather than later.

The vendor argument goes like this: our tool can target when it pulls, which means the extraction has inherent proportionality, which means skipping heavy authorization processes for a full image. The proportionality is point and click first, ask questions later.

The compliance gap is sold as compliance.

Ugh.

The Court was explicit that even unsuccessful attempts to unlock a phone require prior authorization. I’ve seen that before. Even attempts at data access are sometimes still classified a data breach (e.g. healthcare). The threshold isn’t the volume of data extracted when it’s the act of accessing the device at all. A tool that makes it easier to do quick, targeted pulls at the local station level is a tool that makes it easier to skip the required authorization step. The investigator does a selective extraction, writes up their own proportionality justification after the fact, and calls it compliant because the tool only grabbed what was “relevant.”

That’s the investigator escalating themselves to judge and jury, performing their own prior review, which is exactly what the prior review requirement exists to prevent.

EDRi flagged this dynamic before the ruling even landed. Companies like Cellebrite, MSAB, and Grayshift sell extraction equipment widely deployed at corporations and police stations for prosecuting any and all crimes, including petty ones. I still remember where my classmates came from for EnCase certification.

The bottom line is that technology outpaced the legal frameworks years ago. In many EU countries, smartphones still end up treated as ordinary evidence-gathering, another object to be seized, without special data considerations.

Germany is the clearest example. The rules on search and seizure in the Code of Criminal Procedure (StPO) don’t differentiate between complex digital data carriers and other objects. It’s left entirely to the interpretation practice of prosecutors and investigating judges to apply proportionality case by case. In practice, suspects’ laptops and smartphones are often seized even when suspicions are tenuous and the hope of finding evidence is based solely on investigative experience.

Landeck is supposed to fix this.

The Court laid down clear requirements: national legislatures must define with sufficient precision the factors to be taken into account, including the nature and categories of offences. Access must be subject to prior review by a court or independent authority except in urgent cases. The data subject must be informed of the grounds for authorization as soon as disclosure won’t compromise the investigation.

Yet the vendor ecosystem is openly flogging workarounds in real time. Selective extraction tools to bypass Landeck, marketed as Landeck-compliant by design, allow investigators to access device data faster and with less friction than a full forensic image would require. The reduced scope becomes the justification for reduced oversight. The tool tries to avoid the authority of a judge.

This is a pattern we’ve seen before. Every time a court or regulator establishes a constraint on data access, the compliance industry immediately begins selling products that satisfy the letter of the requirement while undermining its purpose. Cookie consent banners. Privacy impact assessments. And now, “proportionate” mobile forensic tools for unauthorized access to feel authorized because the extraction was selective.

The Landeck ruling said: get a judge involved before you touch the device. It didn’t say buy a tool that makes touching the phone feel proportionate enough that you can ignore Landeck.

Rubber hose cryptography still counts as a threat to confidentiality.

Investigators who want to comply with the actual Landeck ruling should focus on the procedural requirements: get authorization before access, document scope and justification, notify the subject when appropriate. The tool matters less than whether a judge reviewed the request for acquisition.

The ones buying selective extraction tools to skip authorization aren’t achieving compliance. They are being sold a black bag of plausible deniability.