Biden Looks Like Trump By Firing Corruption-Busting U.S. Attorney

CHICAGO — President Joe Biden's move to abruptly fire top federal prosecutors across the country, including Northern District of Illinois U.S. Attorney John Lausch, is the kind of blindly partisan maneuver Americans came to expect from now-former President Donald Trump — perhaps only dumber.

For Illinoisans tired of the corrupt political status quo in our state, getting rid of Lausch feels like a slap in the face. He's the guy who launched a massive public corruption probe that has already led to the indictment of Democratic Party power brokers and insiders, squeezed a bribery confession from a politically connected public utility and recently widened its reach into former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration.

Under Lausch's leadership, the Chicago U.S. Attorney's Office's ongoing investigations connected the dots on dirty public dealings that stretched from Chicago ward bosses and suburban mayors to Springfield lawmakers and back again.

The long list of corruption indictments during Lausch's tenure — Chicago Ald. Edward Burke, Crestwood Mayor Lou Presta, Cook County Commissioner Jeff Tobolski, and four state senators, to name a few — don't tell the whole story of his investigative impact.

Without Lausch's aggressive prosecution efforts that connected Cook County Democratic Party boss Toni Preckwinkle to Burke, she might be Chicago's mayor. If not for the investigation that lead to ComEd's guilty plea for engaging in a bribery scheme to benefit the most powerful politician in Illinois history, it's likely the man his office dubbed "Public Official A" — Illinois Democratic Party boss Michael Madigan — would still be House speaker. And a titan of Illinois' film industry might be still getting the shakedown from Teamsters boss John Coli, who pleaded guilty to extortion.

The politicians and power brokers accused and found guilty of corruption under Lausch have at least one thing in common: ties to the corrupt Democratic Machine that runs Illinois politics.

There are still trials to be had. And there's no telling where the federal investigation is headed.

Rushing to oust Lausch as the top prosecutor at a time like this smacks of 2017.

That's when Trump's attorney general, Jeff Sessions, did the same type of thing, firing 47 U.S. attorneys in March 2017. Back then, Democrats criticized the Republican White House for not protecting the independence and disrupting the prosecution of important ongoing federal cases.

The difference this time around is that the Biden administration didn't bother to wait for the U.S. Senate to confirm its attorney general selection. In Illinois' case, the overly eager Biden White House didn't bother discussing Lausch's fate with Sen. Dick Durbin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate judicial committee.

Durbin and Sen. Tammy Duckworth, once in the running to be Biden's pick for vice president, on Tuesday rushed out a news release calling on Biden to at least allow Lausch "to remain in office to conclude sensitive investigations."

Those sensitive investigations don't only include corruption investigations. The Lausch-led Justice Department has teamed with Chicago police to target the scourge of gangs, guns and drugs fueling city street violence that plagues poor, minority parts of the city neglected by politicians for generations.

To remove Lausch as leader of those efforts without having a successor in place — a process requiring U.S. Senate confirmation that could take six months or longer — is just plain stupid.

More than that, the move needlessly sets a partisan tone for an administration that pledged to bring people together.

Biden should know better, particularly after serving under President Barack Obama, who resisted the temptation to execute a politically motivated mass firing of U.S. attorneys at the dawn of his first term. And when it came to Chicago U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald — the President George W. Bush-appointed prosecutor who convicted former Gov. Rod Blagojevich on corruption charges — Obama kept him on the job until he voluntarily stepped down in 2012.

Sure, Lausch was appointed by Trump. But he also won the recommendation of a nonpartisan screening committee and unanimous confirmation by the U.S. Senate in November 2017 — eight months after U.S. Attorney General Zachary Fardon was asked to resign.

And since then, Lausch arguably has done more in a shorter amount of time to root out widespread graft and disrupt the status quo at all levels of government in America's most corrupt state than federal prosecutors that came before him.

If Biden doesn't pump the brakes on Lausch's political ousting, well, he'll be starting out about as well as the guy who came before him.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series, "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN, and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots."

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