Twenty-four hours after a New York jury handed Donald Trump an $83 million bill for again defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, Rep. Darrell Issa was the featured speaker 2,740 miles away at a GOP candidates forum.
On stage at Ramona Mainstage, Issa focused Saturday on the border crisis, the Homeland Security chief’s pending impeachment and even defended his attendance at the meeting of rich execs at Davos, Switzerland.
Nary a word on Trump’s legal woes.
But calling himself a “mainstream conservative,” the East County congressman decried the “Injustice Department” in answering questions from Times of San Diego.
In the concert venue’s lobby, I asked Issa how he would respond to fears of a president perceived by many as authoritarian.
“How do I say President Trump will lead and accomplish some great things? Because he had four years of doing it,” said Issa, who worked for Trump between his Congress stints and has endorsed him for 2024.
What about fears of Trump weaponizing the Department of Justice?
“Of course, we want to make sure DOJ does its job and that’s one of the things that he’s going on Day One to look at,” Issa said, contending the agency that includes the FBI is continuing to be “basically working for Obama.”
Issa, 70, said Trump, whose re-election he predicts, “is going to have to pick an attorney general who’s going to really dig in and do a lot more than [Jeff] Sessions or [William] Barr did.”
The longtime House member called out the DOJ for not punishing Hunter Biden and “overdoing it and charging people including … Peter Navarro. So I want a Department of Justice that works for all of us. It doesn’t right now, and I know [Trump] wants the same thing.”
Two Republican candidates for Superior Court judge — deputy district attorneys Brian Erickson and Valerie Summers — parried similar questions after their Ramona appearances.
“I have a lot of confidence in our judicial system and I believe in it and that’s why I want to continue to be part of it,” Erickson told me.
As far as Trump’s defamation verdict, “it’s not the end of the road,” said the veteran prosecutor. “If you feel that you haven’t been treated fairly, you get to appeal and move on to the next thing, which makes the system even more fair.”
But Erickson wouldn’t comment on Trump’s claims he’s the victim of a political witch hunt,
“I’ve seen a lot of people in his situation … want to claim that — but the system is open, you know, for both sides to file whatever they want.”
If Trump regains the White House, I asked the 56-year-old prosecutor, would you have any concerns about the weaponization of the DOJ?
“Well, I think that both sides accuse each side of that,” he replied. “And I don’t really feel that comfortable answering that question — just because I think it’s too much of taking a policy stance and I think our judicial canons wouldn’t let us.”
In any case, Erickson noted that he’s lost at trial but doesn’t leave court thinking he’s didn’t get a fair deal.
“I got a [fair] deal because I got a platform to state my case,” he said. “And the jury got to decide, which is the basis of our democracy. So I stand by it 100%.”
Running in a different judge race, Summers got similar questions.
Has the system dealt with Trump justly?
“I have great confidence in the judicial system,” she said. “Our judicial system is the best in the world and we’ll have to see how things play out.”
But what about fears Trump would pervert the American system of justice?
“I can’t tell the future on something like that,” Summers said.
Professors Share Critiques
Video of the Issa and judge exchanges was shared with legal and political experts at Loyola Marymount University.
Michael Genovese, author of “The Modern Presidency,” is president of the Los Angeles school’s Global Policy Institute.
He said my YouTube video (above) was instructive in revealing the contrasting temperaments of the would-be judges and veteran politician.
“Both judicial candidates were cautious and even reluctant to speak to the issues, seemingly more anxious to avoid than answer questions,” Genovese said via email.
“Rep. Issa on the other hand, while cautious in the early part of his answer, towards the end —as his partisan juices began to flow — gave the ‘tribal’ answer, accusing the DOJ under Democrats of politicizing justice and arguing that that had to be reversed.”
Genovese said Issa was more concerned with Hunter Biden than with former President Trump’s multiple alleged crimes.
“Issa … merely repeated party-line rhetoric and did not really answer the question. He — like Mr. Trump — seemed to believe that the best defense was a good offense, and that rather than discuss how Trump has openly argued ‘for’ the weaponization of justice if/when he is elected, chose instead to reverse the question with a ‘whataboutism.'”
The real answer, Genovese said, should have been that the weaponization of justice is wrong no matter who does it.
“But our tribal blinders distract instead of enlightening us in this and so many other areas,” he said. “Two wrongs do not, as my mother used to tell me, make a right. If it is wrong when Democrats do it, it is just as wrong when Republicans do it.”
Justin Levitt teaches law at the Catholic university — and has experience in both the Justice Department (under Obama, 2015 to 2017) and the Biden White House (2021 and 2022).
Both judicial candidates sounded very reasonable to him, he said. But each “kind of ducked the questions” — as he said many candidates do.
Levitt said that, thankfully but also “mildly unsurprisingly,” Erickson and Summers expressed faith in the judicial system.
“So I was actually heartened by what I would take as a given for most judicial candidates, but which is not always a guarantee in this day and age,” he said in a phone interview, noting their judicial temperament for the officially nonpartisan offices.
For his own part, Levitt shares fears* of Trump using the DOJ to attack his enemies.
A better answer, he said, would be: “That would be awful. And I … hope that won’t happen.”
“She didn’t express an opinion on the very real concerns about perversion of justice by a president who doesn’t respect the rule of law,” Levitt said.
Levitt, who was senior policy adviser for democracy and voting rights in the Biden White House (the first ever in that role), wasn’t surprised that Issa’s comments were “not of the same measured tenor.”
Issa’s Views ‘Concerning’
He called Issa’s replies “underinformed because not only did he have a very different view of what the justice system ought to be doing, but he had a very different view of what the justice system in fact does or is doing or has done” — with DOJ allegedly taking orders from Obama.
“That’s more concerning,” he said, given Congress’ oversight role on DOJ.
Levitt noted the “extremely strong firewalls” between DOJ and the White House.
“I had two conversations ever during that time with the White House,” he said. “And neither one of them was about the conduct of a case. And when I worked at the White House, I had conversations with DOJ about general policy matters (but not) conduct of a case…. So the fact that those conversations were strictly off-limits wasn’t something to be lamented.”
Levitt was more forgiving of judge candidate Summers: “It doesn’t surprise me that she would have declined to respond to a future set of events.”
But Levitt hit Issa’s belief that Hunter Biden is being treated gently by DOJ.
“I think that there is pretty ample proof actually that the system doesn’t work the way that Rep. Issa was implying in the simple fact of the federal prosecution of the president’s son,” he said.
“For any individual case where a person’s liberty is on the line, I think you want the broad trends of partisan politics to stay as far away from that as possible.”
Phillip Halpern is a retired assistant U.S. attorney who worked out of the DOJ’s San Diego office when he prosecuted Issa’s 48th District predecessor — Rep. Duncan D. Hunter.
He says the judge candidates “both simply mouthed platitudes (although I confess Erickson was a bit more forceful in his support of the judicial system).”
Halpern called Issa “predictably disingenuous — although absolutely consistent with a politician that has always served as a reliable mouthpiece for the radical right MAGA element of the Republican Party.
“Without such congressional enablers, Trump would not pose an existential threat to our democracy, but instead be consigned to the trash bin of history by this point.”
*An earlier version of this story incorrectly said Levitt would have liked Summers to comment on Trump using the DOJ as a weapon.
Updated at 2:20 p.m. Feb. 1, 2024