The last time a tornado hit Washington, D.C., like this was August 1814. That’s when British troops were fleeing a frightening twister. The storm extinguished fires the British set and killed more redcoats than the American army did.
In the last 72 hours, Donald Trump has whirled through the Washington bureaucracy with similar fury. Things that seemed impossible last week, Trump made possible, like revoking LBJ’s sixty-year-old Executive Order 11246 that mandated the use of race in government contracting.
Yet there is a mountain of problems. Meet two DOJ lawyers who used their positions to target the first Trump administration: Deborah Zerwitz and Jennifer Ramella.
Unlike Jack Smith, Zerwitz and Ramella are still employed at DOJ.
Zerwitz and Ramella are two progressive DOJ lawyers who work for the Inspector General. They authored the recent hit job on the first Trump term.
More on who they are in a moment, lots more.
Here’s the hit. Just before the inauguration, the pair authored a little-noticed hit piece on actions taken in the first Trump term.
Specifically, they worked on a report by the DOJ Inspector General. The DOJ IG published a report about nursing home COVID deaths that occurred in New York and elsewhere.
In 2020, state officials in New York and elsewhere were shoving COVID patients into assisted living facilities, where their virus promptly spread to existing residents and killed them by the thousands.
The Trump Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation into the despicable behavior under laws prohibiting discrimination against institutionalized persons, particularly the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act of 1980 (42 U.S.C. 1997). The law is often referred to in shorthand as “CRIPA.” People in nursing homes have a federal civil right to not have Governor Andrew Cuomo shove sick patients with a deadly disease into their otherwise healthy nursing homes.
The Inspector General report makes the shocking conclusion about the Trump DOJ:
The OIG investigation found that three then Senior DOJ Officials violated DOJ’s Confidentiality and Media Contacts Policy by leaking to select reporters, days before an election, non-public DOJ investigative information regarding ongoing DOJ investigative matters, resulting in the publication of two news articles that included the non-public DOJ investigative information.
Stop the press! The Inspector General concludes that senior DOJ officials engaged in a, wait for it, leak? How did the Republic survive?
In other words, the Inspector General investigated political appointees for talking to reporters about the behavior of targets of investigations. The offending conduct was something that took place all during the Robert Mueller investigation, the Jack Smith investigation, and every single investigation of Donald Trump during the Biden administration. In other words, the new DOJ inspector general report is abject horse manure.
It stinks so bad the attorneys involved in the Inspector General report aren’t fit to hold their positions anymore at the Department of Justice. Too many bureaucrats on the GS scale have used their petty powers to smear and malign Donald Trump and his presidency, as Zerwitz and Ramella did here.
Their behavior is particularly despicable because it provides political cover to state officials who were acting in a way that cost lives, the very thing federal law is designed to prevent.
Their report obscures the fact that Governor Cuomo and other state officials shoved COVID-infected people into nursing homes during the height of the pandemic and caused thousands of unnecessary deaths.
The facts are straightforward. In April 2020, the DOJ received complaints about the COVID-related deaths of large numbers of elderly military veterans who lived in a Massachusetts nursing home. Allegations included claims that local officials concealed the deaths and stacked the dead bodies in a trailer.
The Trump Justice Department launched an investigation in 2020 and issued a press release about its investigation. DOJ subsequently learned that several state agencies in Massachusetts were also investigating, so DOJ paused its investigation to give the state a chance to investigate the case first.
Information then surfaced that COVID-related nursing home deaths occurred at astonishing rates in New York and elsewhere because Governor Cuomo and other state officials required nursing homes to accept COVID-positive individuals. Thousands died because of this decision. Families sought answers, rightfully so.
DOJ officials opened an investigation, and the available information suggested that death rates in four states – New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan – were much higher than in other states. DOJ asked each of the four states to produce data about their nursing home COVID-related deaths under CRIPA enforcement powers. The Trump DOJ transparently issued press releases about these requests, too:
“Protecting the rights of some of society’s most vulnerable members, including elderly nursing home residents, is one of our country’s most important obligations,” said then-Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Division Eric Dreiband. “We must ensure they are adequately cared for with dignity and respect and not unnecessarily put at risk.”
When Biden became president, it was payback time. It’s not nice to use federal civil rights laws to look at Democrat-run states like New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.
Leftist career DOJ staff complained to DOJ’s Inspector General that DOJ’s investigation into the nursing home fiasco was “politically motivated.”
That’s how the over-educated lawyers at DOJ play. Things they disagree with or that hurt Democrats are “politically motivated.” Things that advance progressive orthodoxy are never politically motivated. It’s the game they play, and I saw it up close when I worked at the Civil Rights Division over and over again.
The Inspector General assigned the complaint to two leftist career attorneys, Deborah Zerwitz and Jennifer Ramella.
So, who are Deborah Zerwitz and Jennifer Ramella?
Zerwitz donated 35 times to Democratic candidates. Public records show her salary in excess of $159,000. She “liked” countless anti-Trump screeds on social media that disparaged Trump-appointed Attorney General Bill Barr and other Trump appointees, all while working for the DOJ Inspector General. Zerwitz demanded that “we” “boot” Trump appointees “out of office at every level of government” and endorsed one anti-Trump screed that ended “F---k off.”
Jennifer Ramella likewise donated 33 times to the Democratic PAC ActBlue. Her salary, according to government records, exceeded $172,000 at one point.
Another story reported that Zerwitz “liked” thousands of posts by left-wing media and radical Democrats. Not ethically constrained, according to Mollie Hemingway’s work, Zerwitz “liked” tweets from former Governor Cuomo and Democrat journalist April Ryan talking about nursing homes.
No surprise there, as the department has a history of misbehavior by leftist lawyers posting online commentary about the very matters they are handling.
DOJ officials under Biden brushed off the political bias of Zerwitz and Ramella and instead cited First Amendment free speech rights that allow career DOJ lawyers to opine publicly about the very matters they are working on.
What is good for the career attorney goose is not good for the political appointee gander.
The politically-motivated team then drafted a “report” critical of the alleged politically motivated conduct by Trump appointees.
This is how they play, and at a minimum, the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) should be instructed by the tornado now whirling through Washington to open an immediate investigation into Ramella and Zerwitz. OPR can plumb the depths of their own political biases and how they infected the DOJ IG’s COVID nursing home report.
Here’s a head start for the OPR lawyers assigned to the Ramella and Zerwitz case:
The IG’s “report” distorts the facts to minimize the seriousness of what happened to thousands of victims. Why? Did the biases of the authors lead to this sickening gloss over thousands of lost lives? Were they trying to shield Democrats from criticism?
The Inspector General’s report expresses not a word of sympathy about those who died due to the misguided mandates issued by Governor Cuomo and his fellow Democrats. Why not? Was it because of all the thousands of dollars in political donations to Democrats? OPR can ask.
The Inspector General’s report repackages a legitimate civil rights investigation involving thousands of lost lives and possible violations of federal law as a violation of a trivial media policy by three Trump appointees to infer improper political motives of political appointees. Why?
The real point of the Inspector General’s ridiculous report—indeed, the only point—is to do what so many other Department of Justice lawyers have done for almost eight years: use their highly paid government jobs to denigrate President Trump and his appointees because they hate him.
They voted for the other guy. They donate to the other team. They run in social circles and attend schools and clubs with fellow travelers who also hate Trump, so what’s the problem? It’s what you do in Takoma Park or Potomac or all the other places where highly paid DOJ lawyers live with the comfortable class.
We have seen this story over and over and over. Only the names change. The pages of PJ Media have been filed with example after example of leftist lawyers trying to reshape the nation in their own image. Donald Trump 2.0 has already started delivering on promises to reshape and transform what the American people gave him control over – the Executive Branch. It’s time for Deborah Zerwitz and Jennifer Ramella to find work elsewhere.
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