Just days ago, Rudy Giuliani made headlines for surviving a car accident after stopping on the side of a highway to help a woman reporting domestic violence.

This recent act of public service from “America’s Mayor” reflects a lifetime of public service, from taking down the Mafia in the Southern District of New York’s famed 1980s “Commission Trial,” to prosecuting high-profile terrorism cases that were tied to the first World Trade Center bombing in the 1990s with Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy.

Unfortunately, that history of fearless, nonpartisan justice stands in sharp contrast to the SDNY’s posture today, where partisan lawfare seems to dominate.

That’s why it’s so encouraging that a group of judges ruled in late August that Trump appointee Jay Clayton can remain in place as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Clayton has the potential to restore the SDNY back to its former glory during the Giuliani years.

He is a longtime Republican who clerked for a Reagan-appointed judge and served as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission during the first Trump administration.

For far too long, the SDNY has seemed to specialize in partisan lawfare.

For example, SDNY Judge Lewis Kaplan presided over journalist E. Jean Carroll’s 2019 civil lawsuit against Trump, which accused the sitting president of rape and defamation.

Carroll couldn’t remember what year the alleged assault took place, never mentioned it in her diary, and claimed that the numerous similarities between her account and a 2012 “Law and Order” episode were an “astonishing” coincidence.

But despite all these holes in Carroll’s story, the Left saw a chance to undermine Trump and leaped at it. Democrat billionaire megadonor Reid Hoffman funded the entire lawsuit through his nonprofit American Future Republic, and it was anti-Trump commentator George Conway who urged Carroll to sue in the first place.

Kaplan not only oversaw this farce but also put his thumb on the scale for Carroll. He ruled male DNA found on Carroll’s dress inadmissible, even after Trump offered to provide a sample. He admitted additional defamation charges that punished Trump for defending himself on social media. He even interrupted a line of questioning from Trump’s lawyer in a way that signaled clearly to the jury where his sympathies lay.

Jocelyn Strauber, commissioner of New York City's Department of Investigation, speaks during a new conference at the US Attorney's Office-Southern District of New York (SDNY) in New York, US, on Thursday, Sept. 26, 2024. New York City Mayor Eric Adams was indicted on bribery and fraud charges following a federal corruption investigation, calling into question the political future of the man in charge of running the biggest US city. Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The SDNY also conveniently charged New York City Mayor Eric Adams with bribery shortly after he started speaking out against the Biden administration’s open border policies.

When the Trump administration ordered the charges dropped, multiple prosecutors resigned in outrage after failing to make a single peep about the lawfare campaign against Trump.

These partisan prosecutions even extend to the realm of antitrust enforcement.

The SDNY is currently playing host to a Biden-era Justice Department lawsuit against Visa. Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland accused the company of driving up “the price of nearly everything” by monopolizing the debit transaction market.

In fact, it was Biden’s own inflationary policies that were driving up prices. Visa, which has a high market share because of its popularity but nothing close to a monopoly, just provided a handy scapegoat.

Meanwhile, the district always seems to drop the ball when it comes to getting actual justice for actual victims.

They failed to charge crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried until his whole fraudulent empire was collapsing around him, even though the writing was on the wall long before the crash.

By that point, it was already too late. Bankman-Fried was the largest single donor to Democrats in the 2022 midterms, ploughing over $40 million into PACs that helped Democrats keep the Senate and hold Republican gains in the House to historic lows.

Damian Williams, then the U.S. attorney for the SDNY, made it clear that these donations from SBF and his cronies were funded with “stolen customer money.” The people SBF defrauded might get their money back, but voters have no such remedy. There’s no way to un-air the ads his ill-gotten gains bankrolled.

The sex trafficking case against rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs provides another example of the SDNY’s failure. Maurene Comey, the lead prosecutor on the case, botched it so badly that the Justice Department fired her just weeks after the verdict came down.

Although Combs was convicted of prostitution offenses and faces up to 20 years in prison, the jury found him not guilty on the more serious charges of sex trafficking and racketeering.

Incidentally, Comey also worked on district’s prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell. That case ended with a conviction and a 20-year prison sentence but left so many unanswered questions that it’s difficult to call it an unqualified win.

During her confirmation hearings, Attorney General Pam Bondi promised to end “partisan weaponization” and “restore confidence and integrity to the Department of Justice – and each of its components.”

The SDNY is a particularly dysfunctional component that’s been fouling the gears of our justice system for far too long.

By ending the disastrous tradition of “blue slips,” the administration can take a major step toward the restoration of truly impartial justice.

There is no better way to honor the now recovering “America’s Mayor” than by restoring one of his top legacies back to its former glory.

* * *

James Skyles is a legal policy analyst and the principal of Skyles Law Group. He has written for some of the largest legal publications in the United States, including Law.com and Law360.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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