LET IT GO, TODD

Dear Todd,

Let’s start with the face. Your face.

Because before we get to the $1.8 billion slush fund, before we get to Ghislaine Maxwell’s cushy accommodations, before we get to the part where you stood at a Senate hearing yesterday and essentially argued that men who beat police officers with flagpoles deserve taxpayer compensation — we need to talk about what is happening with your face.

You look like a man who has not produced a successful bowel movement since the Obama administration. You look like someone who ate a concrete sandwich in 2014 and has been quietly waiting for resolution ever since. Every single time a camera finds you — at a podium, at a hearing, lurking slightly behind Kash Patel like a man who needs a wall to lean on — you have the face of a person who has been informed that the nearest restroom is in another zip code. That is not gravitas, Todd. That is suffering. That is a man sealed shut by the sheer compacted weight of his own moral compromise, every bad decision calcified into a single immovable mass that your body has simply decided to build a life around rather than deal with.

You are the human equivalent of a rest stop toilet that’s been out of order for months. There’s a handwritten sign on you. Nobody’s happy about it.

You were once an actual prosecutor, Todd. A federal one. You went home at night and presumably looked at yourself in the mirror and felt something recognizable as self-respect. You worked nights as a paralegal because you wanted this — the weight of it, the meaning of it, the idea that the law was a thing worth protecting.

And then Donald Trump called.

And something in you — some last clenched, stubborn, straining remnant of the person you used to be — gave up. Just let go. And what followed was the longest, slowest, most public moral evacuation in the history of the American legal profession, except nothing actually came out, because that’s the whole problem, Todd, that’s the through line of this entire catastrophe: you are a man constitutionally, professionally, and apparently gastrointestinally incapable of release.

You tried to help him walk on the hush money. He was convicted on 34 felony counts. You ran out the clock on January 6th until Trump won and Jack Smith had to pack his desk. You became the legal mechanism by which a man who tried to end American democracy escaped accountability. You were the cork. You were the plug. You were the reason nothing went anywhere.

And your reward? Acting.

Not Attorney General. Acting Attorney General. A title so provisional it has a disclaimer built into it. A title that means: we’re using you right now and we’ll let you know. You burned your bar standing, your reputation, your soul, the last functioning part of your conscience, and the man you did it all for is out there right now deciding if maybe the EPA guy wants your job.

Let’s talk about the $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund. Created without congressional approval. Funded by taxpayers. Potentially — and you refused under oath to rule this out, sitting there in that hearing room yesterday with that face, that face, looking like a man trying to remember if he took his medication or just thought about taking it — potentially available to January 6th rioters who assaulted, bloodied, and hospitalized Capitol Police officers.

You sat in front of United States Senators and you said anyone who believes they were a victim of weaponization can apply.

Anyone.

No floor. No ceiling. No guardrails. Just a wide open fund and a commission whose members you appoint and an answer so slippery it practically slid off the table and pooled on the floor of the hearing room. And you delivered it with the serene, thousand-yard stare of a man who has made peace with the fact that nothing is ever coming out and that is simply who he is now.

You “interviewed” Ghislaine Maxwell, Todd. You sat down with Epstein’s co-conspirator, the woman who groomed and trafficked children for the most infamous predator in modern American history, and then you moved her to a minimum security camp. And when they needed someone to go on Fox News and explain it — when Bondi had gotten so radioactive they wouldn’t let her near a camera — they sent you. The clean one. The composed one. The one with the face like a man enduring something he cannot name in a public place.

You’re overseeing all of it. Just sitting there on top of all of it. Perfectly still. Completely impacted.

Bondi is gone now. The woman who, per her own colleagues, degraded DOJ’s independence more than anyone in 155 years — gone. And you’re holding the bag alone now, unconfirmed, un-nominated, running the whole rotten operation on a provisional basis while Trump plays golf and contemplates whether Lee Zeldin might want your job.

It’s worth noting that your father’s church got cited for a zoning violation and lost in the Colorado Supreme Court. The whole family packed up and drove to Florida. You were thirteen. I am not saying that was your fault.

I am saying that the first institution that bore your family’s name couldn’t survive its own ethical corner-cutting either, and the apple, Todd — the apple has not fallen far. The apple has not fallen at all. The apple is still up in the tree, weeks overdue, hardened past the point of use, waiting for a process that isn’t coming.

Get help, Todd.

Not legal help. Not PR help.

A gastroenterologist. A good one. Someone who works with truly difficult cases, who has seen things, who does not frighten easily, who has the tools and the patience and the protective equipment to go in there and find out what has been building inside your for years and figure out what it’s going to take — medically, spiritually, cosmically — to finally, finally let it go.

I am rooting for you.

I am also rooting against you in every other possible sense.

But on this one specific thing — the thing that’s written all over your face every single time you stand in front of a camera — I’m with you, Todd.

I want you to find peace.

I want you to find relief.

I want you to feel, just once before this is all over, what it’s like to be empty.

Lord knows the Justice Department already is.

With loads of disrespect,
Rook T. Winchester

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