There was never any chance Donald Trump would self-correct his gleeful political abuse of the Justice Department. And despite initial hopes that Todd Blanche — once a thoroughly decent and respected prosecutor in the Southern District of New York — might restore some ballast, the acting attorney general has only made it worse as he panders to the boss in an effort to win the permanent job.

But sometimes our system is capable of imposing meaningful, if imperfect, restraints. And in the wake of a series of jaw-dropping acts of corruption by the Justice Department, we’ve seen resistance from two key governmental institutions: the courts and, more unexpectedly, congressional Republicans.

It’s less surprising that the judiciary writ large has stood as a bulwark against the DoJ’s barrage of overtly political prosecutions. On Friday, federal district court judge Waverly Crenshaw of Tennessee dismissed the indictment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. You’ll recall Abrego Garcia was improperly deported to El Salvador by the Trump administration last year triggering a heated legal and political dispute over immigration and due process. The Supreme Court eventually ordered the government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States to enable him to properly contest his removal proceedings. The Trump administration dragged its feet and adopted a myopic interpretation of “facilitate” until it stumbled on a nifty solution: We’ll bring him back all right — in handcuffs, under indictment.

The criminal case against Abrego Garcia was an obvious pretext, an overhyped, incoherent mess born from a desire for payback. As I wrote in this space in June 2025, “because the administration got caught in a screwup, and then chose to flip off the Supreme Court rather than to faithfully comply with its directive, they created a political mess. The indictment became the easy way to mop it up.” Judge........

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