Revenge is a dish best served as cold as the Iowa day in January 2024 when Donald Trump set a course that ended with the indictment Thursday of another of his perceived political enemies.
Trump fulminated at a rally in Sioux Center about the multimillion-dollar civil fraud case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James against him, his adult sons and the Trump Organization.
“How would you like to be me? Do you think my life is any fun?” Trump moaned to his crowd, before declaring James should be “arrested and punished accordingly.”
Twenty-one months on, Trump’s handpicked prosecutor secured an indictment against James — weeks after the president listed the New York AG in an angry social media post to Attorney General Pam Bondi demanding charges.
The new bombshell came only a day after former FBI chief James Comey appeared in court to be arraigned — another case against a Trump foe. Comey has pleaded not guilty to the two charges: providing false statements and obstructing a congressional proceeding
It requires a staggering suspension of disbelief not to see the brace of indictments as the latest step in Trump’s retribution tour. The Justice Department, which the president long complained was weaponized against him, is now openly a tool in his bid for political vengeance. Sometimes it’s hard to fathom that this is taking place in the United States, once the global standard for justice and democracy.
Trump isn’t even hiding what he’s doing — the evidence is in the Truth Social post of September 20, addressed to Bondi, which mentions Comey, James and California Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” Trump wrote.
Like any other citizen, James will have the chance to answer the allegations in court, and before a jury if the case goes to trial. She is accused of two felony charges: bank fraud and making false statements to an institution in paperwork related to a mortgage for a home she purchased in Virginia. “This is nothing more than a continuation of the president’s desperate weaponization of our justice system,” James said in a statement in which she blasted the charges as “baseless” and political retribution.
The bar for prosecutors to secure a grand jury indictment is far lower than the standard required to convict in a jury trial. But Ryan Goodman, a New York University law professor, said on CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront” that the indictment looked questionable, saying, “It’s deeply suspect that it is a real case.”
Like the Comey indictment, the one against James was brought by Trump’s former personal attorney Lindsey Halligan, who was recently installed as US attorney of the Eastern District of Virginia. CNN reported last month that DOJ prosecutors in Virginia, led at the time by Erik Siebert, interviewed dozens of witnesses and did not believe had they gathered enough evidence to support criminal charges against James. Under pressure by Trump to bring charges against Comey and James, Siebert resigned and was replaced by Halligan.
A long and boiling feud
It’s no surprise that Trump, whose life creed requires that no slight goes unanswered, went after James.
James brought a successful civil prosecution against Trump in New York in which a judge found Trump, his adult sons and the Trump Organization liable for inflating the value of their properties and ordered them to pay $355 million. An appeals court has since thrown out the penalties and Trump is appealing the verdict.
It might be possible at a pinch to believe that James is just another would-be defendant who is being investigated by the authorities. But in the real world, following the Comey indictment and Trump’s perpetual threats to use his power to pursue retribution against those he regards as political enemies, his conduct adds up to a chilling trend of assaults against the rule of law.
This week alone, he transported National Guard troops from a Republican-run state, Texas, to enforce his mass deportation campaign in a Democratic one, Illinois — against the wishes of the state and local authorities. He tried to pull reservists from California to deploy in Portland, Oregon. Both deployments have been temporarily blocked by judges.
On Wednesday, in another example of his use of vast presidential power to intimidate, Trump called for the jailing of Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.
The apparent new American reality that a president can simply order up indictments against political opponents represents a grave threat to the democratic political system.
“It’s just a broken way to do politics, it is corrupt, and I think that anyone who cares about the Constitution and cares about our institutions surviving should care that the president of the United States is using Pam Bondi to do his bidding against adversaries,” Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin told CNN’s Kasie Hunt on Thursday.
The president and his supporters have long argued that the Biden administration weaponized the Justice Department against him to thwart his return to the White House.
New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, a possible Republican gubernatorial candidate, said action against James was overdue and welcomed her indictment. “For years, Letitia James has illegally weaponized her office to conduct a political witch hunt against Democrats’ political opponents most notably President Donald J. Trump,” Stefanik said in a statement posted on X.
Trump’s fury is proof that the flurry of indictments against Trump after he left office in 2020 ended up being politically counterproductive, even if they were legally sound. And while there is no evidence that former President Joe Biden participated in the kind of indictment shopping that Trump enjoys, it’s a fair question whether the current president was a victim of overzealous prosecutors in some of the cases against him.
When she ran for office as a Democrat, James pledged to take on Trump. In the civil fraud case, his lawyers accused her of building her political career on persecuting him. While Trump was found liable for fraud, some experts did question whether he was singled out because of who he was, and whether, had he been a New York businessman not involved in politics, things might have been different. Some legal scholars also raised questions about the rationale for a separate criminal hush money case against Trump, also in New York, in which he was found guilty.
But the federal crimes with which Trump was charged by the Justice Department related to his attempt to steal the 2020 election in an unprecedented assault on American democracy and over his alleged hoarding of classified information. Those cases, which went away when he became president again, were based on a solid evidential record. Trump denied wrongdoing to all charges in all cases.
The idea that Trump was being prosecuted for political reasons became the driving force of his 2024 campaign, and was skillfully wielded by the president to bind his voters into his persecution cult. The strategy was epitomized by a mug shot of Trump taken in an Atlanta jail where he was booked in another case, that one to do with alleged election meddling in Georgia.
The feud one with James is one of Trump’s most vituperative.
In breaks in the New York fraud trial, the former and future president would rail against her, claiming she was a “racist” and a “fascist.”
The disdain was mutual. James riffed on Trump’s famed catchphrase when she accused him of being a master of the “Art of the Steal.” She seemed to have perfected the art of getting under his skin. “No matter how much money you think you may have, no one is above the law,” James said before court one morning.
Most days, James would sit in court a few rows behind Trump, who was at a table with his lawyers — literally and figuratively looking over his shoulder. During the long days of the trial — at least, when he wasn’t acting up and angering the judge — Trump looked deflated and almost humiliated.
This miserable experience, hinted at in his social media order to Bondi, is a clue to his motivation now. While it will be months before the cases against James and Comey come to trial, if they ever do, each now faces the stigma of being a criminal defendant after years on the other side of the courtroom.
So even if Trump doesn’t get the satisfaction of seeing his foes convicted, they may at least suffer some of the pain — personal, reputational, and financial — that he believes was inflicted on him. That’s not to say his conduct is understandable or rational. For one thing, it sets a terrible precedent and raises the possibility that future presidents might follow suit in a never-ending cycle of judicial and political retribution.
“You know, whatever threshold gets set here is the new floor for future prosecutions when roles are reversed. That’s just the way this town works,” Republican Sen. Thom Tillis told CNN’s Manu Raju on Thursday.
But Trump is not looking that far ahead. His strategy now can best be summed up by comments he made in an interview on Sirius XM radio after hearing in 2023 that Republicans had opened an impeachment investigation against Biden (which ended up going nowhere).
“They did it to me,” Trump told Megyn Kelly. “I think had they not done it to me … perhaps you wouldn’t have it being done to them. This is going to happen with indictments too,” he said.
Asked whether he’d turn indictments against Democrats if he won a second term, Trump replied, “I would never have even thought about doing it, but now you certainly have to think about it differently. It doesn’t mean I’d do it, because I think it is so bad for the country.”