DOJ Prosecutor quits, refuses criminal investigation into $20B in climate spending

There is a curious storm brewing in Washington, and at its center stands Denise Cheung, until recently the head of the criminal division in the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office. She has stepped down, not with a whimper but with a resolute refusal to bend to the will of interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin. His order? To launch a criminal investigation and unleash the machinery of grand jury subpoenas. Cheung said no—and paid the price with her resignation.

The root of this clash appears to lie in EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s crusade to claw back $20 billion in green energy contracts—funds shoveled out under the grandiosely misnamed 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, dispensed in the twilight of the Biden administration. Zeldin, with the fervor of a man who sees waste as an affront to decency, has branded these contracts a scandal, alleging they are little more than "pass-through" schemes designed to siphon money to mysterious elsewhere. His aim is noble on its face: return the lucre to the U.S. Treasury. "Gold bars off the Titanic," he quipped on Fox News, a line that drips with both wit and disdain.

But Cheung, in her resignation letter, drew a line in the sand. She was willing to freeze the funds in a Citibank account—a practical move—but when Martin demanded escalation, likely into the realm of asset seizure and criminal probes, she demurred. The evidence, she argued, did not meet the threshold of probable cause. Martin, unamused, requested her departure, and she obliged.

This episode, like so many in our age, raises questions that cut to the marrow of governance and justice. First, the matter of legal thresholds: Cheung’s stand rests on her judgment that the evidence is too thin to warrant criminal action. One wonders what she saw—or didn’t see—in those contracts. Were they merely sloppy, rushed by a departing administration eager to cement its legacy, or was there something darker, something provably illicit, that she nonetheless deemed insufficient? Without the specifics, we are left to speculate, but her refusal suggests a prosecutor’s caution—perhaps even a flicker of integrity.

Then there is the political context, which looms large and unavoidable. Zeldin’s zeal fits neatly into a broader narrative: the dismantling of Biden-era excesses, particularly the climate spending that has long been a totem for progressive virtue. His rhetoric is that of a fiscal conservative with a populist edge, a man who sees $20 billion not as an investment but as a plunder. Is this pressure—political, theatrical, Trumpian—pushing the Department of Justice to overreach, to conjure a case where the evidence is more smoke than fire? Cheung’s exit might suggest as much.

And here we arrive at the institutional tension, the quiet war between the careerists and the appointees. Cheung, a seasoned prosecutor, pitted against Martin, an interim figure, and Zeldin, a Trump loyalist. Is her resignation a principled cry against the politicization of justice, a refusal to let the law be bent to the whims of a new regime? Or is it, less charitably, the stubbornness of a bureaucrat unwilling to adapt to a shifting tide? We cannot know—not yet—for the details remain frustratingly opaque. What were these contracts? What evidence did Cheung weigh and find wanting?

In the absence of clarity, we are left with competing visions. Zeldin’s camp might thunder that the contracts are a blatant misuse of taxpayer money, a green-tinted boondoggle crying out for justice. Cheung’s position whispers back: not so fast—the case isn’t there, not yet, not enough. What we witness, then, is less a resolution than a skirmish, the opening salvo in a grander struggle over Biden’s climate legacy and how this administration—brash, unapologetic—chooses to bury it.

 As ever, the truth lies buried beneath the noise, and we are poorer for it.

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