A Taste of the Swamp

March 16, 2025 by Jack Cashill

Much to the chagrin of the media, Bruce Swartz, “globally renowned for representing the Justice Department in some of its most sensitive foreign dealings,” resigned rather than accept a demotion by President Trump. If Trump special envoy Richard Grenell has his way, Swartz will be prosecuted.

“Bruce Schwartz [sic] undermined Donald Trump and US foreign policy while he worked at DoJ,” Grenell tweeted on Saturday. “I told him private information about negotiations (he has a TS clearance) and he used it to tip Jack Smith off at The Hague - and Jack indicted Thaçi because of it. He must be investigated and prosecuted.”

Hashim Thaçi was president of Kosovo in 2020 when Trump tormentor Jack Smith allegedly sabotaged Grenell’s peacemaking efforts in Kosovo by arranging for Thaçi to be arrested for war crimes. At the time, Grenell was serving as Trump’s special presidential envoy for Serbia and Kosovo peace negotiations.

The fate of Kosovo and Thaçi are of less immediate interest than the fate of the U.S. Department of Justice. Grenell’s accusation sheds new light on the DOJ’s long history of sabotaging justice on behalf of the Democrat party, and no one fronted for the party’s interests more dutifully than swamp creature extraordinaire Swartz.

In 2019, the inspector general’s report from the Department of Justice (DOJ) highlighted Swartz’s dogged effort to railroad Trump adviser Paul Manafort before the 2016 election.

As Swartz himself acknowledged, he had a Javert-like zeal to bring Manafort to justice. “[Nellie] Ohr and Swartz both told us that they felt an urgency to move the Manafort investigation forward,” reported Horowitz, “because of Trump’s election and a concern that the new administration would shut the investigation down.”

This urgency translated into frequent semi-covert meetings with FBI lovebirds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. Strzok told the I.G. that Swartz wanted him to “kick that [investigation] in the ass and get it moving.”

In December 2016, concerned that the DoJ’s money-laundering division (MLARS) was not moving fast enough against Manafort, Swartz brought colleague Andrew Weissmann into the act.

Swartz hoped to get the cooperation of an unnamed “foreign national” to help squeeze Manafort. According to Ohr, he and Swartz had “information that Manafort [was] ... somehow ... a possible connection between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.”

Swartz admittedly did not advise DoJ leadership of his maneuverings. He claimed that the meetings were on the hush-hush to keep the Manafort investigation from being “politicized.” More likely, Swartz hoped to pressure Manafort into rolling over on the newly elected President Trump and did not want Trump’s people in the DoJ to know about his intentions.

The “unusual level of interest” in the Manafort case by Swartz, Ohr, and Weissmann caught the attention of some of their colleagues. Reported the I.G., “The former senior Department leaders we interviewed expressed serious concern about Swartz’s assertion that not informing Department leadership about case-related investigative activities somehow protected the Department.”

Although Swartz did not officially join the Mueller team, Weissmann did. The case against Manafort that had been languishing in the money-laundering division now got the kick in the ass that Swartz and Weissmann wanted. Mueller took over the case in May 2017, and in October 2017, Manafort was indicted on twelve charges, including money-laundering, none of which had anything to with Russian collusion.

It seems likely that Swartz lied repeatedly to the I.G.’s office about the reasons for his unseemly meddling, and Horowitz more or less scolded him for it. Horowitz could have made a much stronger bias charge against Swartz had he been able to review Swartz’s handling of the Sandy Berger affair.

Here’s the background. In 2002, according to a subsequent House report, former president Bill Clinton “designated Berger as his representative to review NSC documents” in relation to the 9/11 inquiry.

In that capacity, Berger made four trips to the National Archives. He did so presumably to refresh his memory before testifying first to the Graham-Goss Commission and then to the 9/11 Commission. Berger made his first visit in May 2002, his last in October 2003.

During those four visits, Berger stole and destroyed an incalculable number of documents. “The full extent of Berger’s document removal,” reported the House Committee, “is not known and never can be known.”

Beginning with the third of Berger’s four visits to the Archives in September 2003, when Berger was first caught in the act of stealing documents, Paul Brachfeld, the inspector general of the National Archives, tried to alert the Justice Department to the scope and seriousness of the theft.

Brachfeld wanted assurance that the 9/11 Commission knew of Berger’s crime and the potential ramifications of it. He did not get it. On March 22, 2004, two days before Berger’s public testimony, senior DoJ attorneys Swartz and John Dion got back to Brachfeld. They informed him that the DoJ was not going to notify the 9/11 Commission of the Berger investigation before Berger’s appearance.

The House report singled out Swartz as the one attorney most adamantly protective of Berger. Swartz refused to admit that Berger could have stolen documents in his first two visits despite Brachfeld’s insistence that he had the means and the motive to do so.

Frustrated, Brachfeld called DoJ’s Inspector General Glenn Fine on April 6 and again expressed his concern that the 9/11 Commission remained unaware of Berger’s actions. Again, nothing happened.

Brachfeld never did succeed in persuading the DoJ of the potential seriousness of Berger’s sabotage. As the House report concluded, “The lack of interest in Berger’s first two visits is disturbing.” The DoJ also declined to submit Berger to a polygraph exam as required by his plea agreement.

If these DoJ attorneys were “unacceptably incurious” across the board, one could write off their inaction as bureaucratic sloth. But at the same time Dion and Swartz were cosseting Sandy Berger, they were eagerly campaigning to out the rascal who blew CIA agent Valerie Plame’s imagined cover.

“Those who have worked with Dion say he will not shy away from advocating charges against any high-level Bush administration official if that’s where the investigation leads,” read a hopeful AP piece.

Among the colleagues quoted was Dion’s immediate supervisor, Bruce Swartz. Even after Patrick Fitzgerald took over the Plame investigation, Dion and Swartz stayed on the team, Swartz reportedly as second-in-command.

Swartz, Fine, and Dion were all careerists held over from the Clinton administration. Although Dion has no obvious record of federal contributions, Fine and Swartz had contributed only to Democrat candidates in federal races.

Swartz is the textbook swamp-dweller. From all appearances, no matter who sits in the attorney general’s chair, these seemingly respectable subversives protect the progressive Deep State and punish those who would threaten it. Supplied leads by a complicit media and shielded by that same media from exposure, people like Swartz have been perverting justice for decades.

If proof were needed, Swartz and his boys recommended a $10,000 fine for Berger and three-year loss of security clearance for a crime that would have put a Republican in prison for decades. Happily for the Deep State, Berger regained his clearance just in time to serve as a Hillary Clinton adviser in the 2008 campaign.

Manafort did not fare quite so well. He was indicted by a federal grand jury in a city that gave Donald Trump 4 percent of its vote. True, the Russia collusion fears that inspired the Manafort investigation were imaginary, but the federal charges were very real. Manafort, then nearing 70, descended into a Kafkaesque legal hell from which he emerged only by grace of a Trump pardon in December 2020.

And the media would have us feel sorry for Swartz?