Is This Good News or Bad News?

Chicago reporter Dan Mihalopoulos on Twitter/X:

We’ve covered lots of losing teams on the back page of the paper. But none with a record as bad as the Chicago DOJ during Operation Midway Blitz:

• 0 conviction
• 11 charges dropped
• 3 no-billed cases
• 1 jury acquittal

And James Queally of the LA Times:

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in L.A. has lost every case it brought to trial against a protester who allegedly attacked a federal LEO last year. A number of other cases were dismissed or rejected by grand juries.

If you want you can find whole collections of videos on TikTok or YouTube Shorts of judges angrily dismissing charges brought by various Trump lackeys.

As these people note, Federal prosecutors usually win most of the cases they bring, and legal insiders like to repeat the old joke that a good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. So this is a remarkably bad record.

Plus, Trump has threatened all sorts of political figures with investigation for their parts in opposing January 6 or other Trump "initiatives," but none of them have been convicted of anything. So far as I am aware, none of the lawsuits he has threatened against news organizations has ever led to a trial and a loss for his opponents, although lots of people have settled out of court.

What are we to make of this? Should we be reassured that Trump's people are so incompetent? Pleased that their clumsy crackdown is generating so much opposition?

If you really wanted to weaponize the law, would you make Pam Bondi the AG and put a complete idiot in charge of the FBI?

Is the point just harassment, intimidating people into silence by the threat of a few days in jail?

Or is it to wear Americans down until we no long react at all when Federal officers commit outrages? To make this into the new normal?

Is it just a reflexive burst of rage against immigrants and people who support them?

It feels like an extremely clumsy move to me, bad enough to generate widespread outrage but not so bad as to really intimidate the country.

Am I missing something? What, really, is this all about?