Donald Trump has met an enemy he can’t fire

| 9:02 pm EDT May 9, 2018
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Donald Trump was best known on television for firing people, or at least pretending to. Now that he’s illegally occupying the office of President of the United States, he’s once again become known for firing people, in an effort at preventing them from exposing his criminal scandals. Thus far Trump has fired James Comey, Sally Yates, Andrew McCabe, Preet Bharara, and some other names we’re probably forgetting. Now he’s met an enemy he can’t fire. More than one, in fact.

If it comes down to it, Donald Trump may end up trying to fire Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller. The odds of that succeeding are slim – but we’re not talking about them here. We’re talking about the other guy who’s leading an investigation into Trump’s crimes, the one who works for Stormy Daniels. There is nothing Trump can do to stop Michael Avenatti from using Daniels’ civil lawsuit as a de facto criminal investigation. But he’s not the only enemy Trump can’t fire.

The federal criminal investigation into Donald Trump and Michael Cohen is officially being run by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. The trick here is that there is no U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. The position became vacant when Trump fired Bharara last year. Trump has since nominated Geoffrey Berman to replace him. Berman is filling the role in an interim capacity for now, but he had to recuse himself from the Trump-Cohen investigation due to his ties to Trump’s other attorney Rudy Giuliani.

So the SDNY investigation into Donald Trump is being run by some Deputy in the SDNY office. Trump can try firing that Deputy, but then some other Deputy would simply inherit jurisdiction and keep going with the case. It’s roughly the plot of The Walking Dead, but with the zombies being the good guys. There’s just no way for Trump to shut the SDNY investigation down.