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Monday
Of all the red lines that Donald Trump has crossed, ordering the Justice Department to prosecute his enemies may be the reddest (although the competition is fierce). In the case of former FBI James Comey, Trump had to fire a seasoned prosecutor and name a flunky in his place to have his suit brought. Few expect the case to succeed.
Courtroom success may not be the ultimate object, however, as novelist and political commentator Greg Olear observed last December. Applying Dickens’s Bleak House to Trump, Olear predicted that the incoming president would use Jarndyce v. Jarndyce tactics to go after his enemies.
The case, which is at the heart of the novel, is shrouded in fog and driven by avarice:
Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained-glass windows lose their color and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect and by the drawl, languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery…
Jarndyce v. Jarndyce is so complex that it baffles everyone who comes in contact with it:
Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises.
While the case against Comey is also confusing, at least it shouldn’t last long as long as Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which goes on for generations. If a judge doesn’t summarily throw out the suit on the grounds of malignant prosecution, the former FBI director has the right to a speedy trial. Another difference is that, whereas the purpose of Jarndyce and Jarndyce is for lawyers to make money—”The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself,” Dickens writes—Trump’s goal is “to sap his critics of time, money, energy, and the will to live.”
That difference being noted, however, the effect is the same. Trump, who loses most of the suits he initiates, understands that the point is not winning them but bringing them. Olear points to the Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson, who had to hire lawyers to defend him against a frivolous defamation suit. “If the purpose of terror is to terrorize,” Wilson said,
the purpose of lawfare is also to terrorize. The tools and techniques of lawfare, particularly these loonbucket defamation suits, would terrify people without means, experience, and strong legal representation.
Jarndyce v. Jarndyce is miraculously settled at the exact moment that all the money runs out. (Dickens reports that “the whole estate is found to have been absorbed in costs.”) Similarly, we can anticipate that all the lawsuits that Trump is directing the Justice Department to instigate will miraculously vanish the moment he leaves office.
Unfortunately, in the novel some good people are irremediably broken by the experience.
Not the lawyers, however, who have a good laugh at everyone’s expense.
