Donald Trump campaigned on ending “weaponization” in government after accusing his political enemies of launching a legal war to derail his chances of winning the presidency a second time.
But the president, with an emboldened Department of Justice, led by staunch ally Pam Bondi, has launched apparent partisan lawfare of his own, with investigations underway against prominent Democratic officials and left-leaning pop superstars, dozens of legal threats aimed at his ideological opponents — and even the law firms representing them.
Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office accusing Joe Biden’s administration of a “systematic campaign against its perceived political opponents” that is designed “more toward inflicting political pain than toward pursuing actual justice or legitimate governmental objectives.”
But the order seemingly does what it condemns — “ending the weaponization of government” by turning the government against his enemies.
The president promised “retribution” for his supporters during his first campaign speech in 2023, and critics say his administration has wielded the executive branch and leveraged the Justice Department to settle personal and political vendettas.
“We are witnessing a huge attack on the rule of law, and direct assault on the Constitution,” Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen told reporters May 20, listing off Trump’s “tyranny and political blackmail” and threats to federal funding, arrests of student protesters and his “weaponizing” of the Justice Department.
In her confirmation hearing, Attorney General Bondi promised to lawmakers that “the partisanship, the weaponization will be gone” from the Justice Department. “America will have one tier of justice for all,” she said.
But instead, her Justice Department “has transformed into Donald Trump’s personal law firm,” accuses former pardon attorney Liz Oyer, who is suing the administration over her “abrupt” and “illegal” firing.
Bondi’s office is “essentially whatever the president wants it to be right now,” Oyer told NPR.
Trump’s list of targets seemingly grows by the day.
Within the last week, the Justice Department’s civil rights division opened an investigation into Chicago’s Democratic mayor after he boasted to a church congregation about hiring so many Black people to his administration, federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against a sitting member of Congress, and Andrew Cuomo — a prominent Trump antagonist while serving as New York’s governor and now the leading candidate for New York City mayor — has been accused of lying to Congress.
The president has also demanded a “major investigation” into his own allegations that Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce, Oprah Winfrey and Bono violated campaign finance laws by supporting Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.
Richard Grenell, Trump’s appointed president of the Kennedy Center, also called the center’s deferred maintenance and financial deficit “criminal” and referred the institution to the U.S. attorney’s office.
Administration officials leaped on former FBI director James Comey for a social media post spelling out “86 47,” which the president called an “assassination” threat.
The Justice Department also announced plans this week for a new unit specifically taking aim at university diversity programs in an effort to pull out federal funding.
Prosecutors are also investigating New York Attorney General Letitia James for mortgage fraud — after she successfully led a civil case against the president and his real-estate empire for defrauding investors by fraudulently inflating the value of his properties.
“This investigation into me is nothing more than retribution,” James said in public remarks last week. “It’s baseless.”
And, in the middle of an Oval Office meeting with South Africa’s president, Trump lashed out at a “jerk” reporter the president said “ought to be investigated,” adding to a long list of media outlets and publishers the president has threatened with legal action.
The Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Cuomo, the current front runner in the race for New York mayor, was unveiled just weeks after the administration dropped corruption charges against his rival Eric Adams.
An investigation follows accusations from House Republicans that Cuomo lied to a congressional subcommittee about decisions he made during the COVID-19 pandemic while he was governor.
“We have never been informed of any such matter, so why would someone leak it now? The answer is obvious: This is lawfare and election interference plain and simple — something President Trump and his top Department of Justice officials say they are against,” Cuomo’s spokesperson Rich Azzopardi told The Independent.
“Governor Cuomo testified truthfully to the best of his recollection about events from four years earlier, and he offered to address any follow-up questions from the subcommittee — but from the beginning this was all transparently political,” he added.
The probe is coming from the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., not in New York. The top prosecutor in D.C. is now former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, who unsuccessfully ran against Cuomo for state attorney general in 2006.
Pirro routinely came to Trump’s defense on-air throughout his criminal indictments and investigations, and she previously called on state prosecutors to investigate the governor for manslaughter and negligent homicide.
“You cannot escape the consequences of your intentional and reckless acts,” she said during a Fox News segment in 2021. “You cannot escape your intentional coverup.”
Ed Martin, who was replaced by Pirro as the top prosecutor in Washington, is now the head of the Justice Department’s “Weaponization Working Group,” which he says will “name” and “shame” people that the administration can’t charge with crimes but deserve to be punished publicly.
During a press conference earlier this month, Martin called himself the “captain" of the group, which is investigating federal prosecutors involved in past investigations into Trump and his allies.
“There are some really bad actors, some people that did some really bad things to the American people. And if they can be charged, we’ll charge them. But if they can’t be charged, we will name them,” Martin said. “And we will name them, and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed.”
The Justice Department’s investigation into Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who is Black, hinges on accusations that he hired people for the government solely because of their skin color.
The allegations — outlined in a letter from Trump’s new civil rights division chief Harmeet Dhillon — rest on his comments to a Black church congregation when he was asked about economic opportunities for minority residents.
“There are some detractors that will push back on me and say, you know, ‘The only thing the mayor talks about is the hiring of Black people,’” Johnson said in his remarks. “No, what I’m saying is, when you hire our people, we always look out for everybody else. We are the most generous people on the planet. … Having people in my administration that will look out for the interest of everyone, and everyone means you have to look out for the interests of Black folks, because that hasn’t happened.”
In a news conference responding to the investigation, Johnson said he won’t be “intimidated by the tyranny that's coming from the federal government.”
Dhillon has recast the agency’s mission into one that leans into the president’s grievances and shifts its focus away from police oversight, voting rights protections and combating racial discrimination. Last week, her division ended police misconduct investigations in departments across the country.
The rapid transformation of the civil rights division is “really unprecedented and and really threatens the foundations of our multiracial democracy, and it’s something that all Americans should be very, very alarmed about,” Jin Hee Lee, director of strategic initiatives at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told The Independent.
“Everything that this administration has said indicates that they have absolutely no interest in pursuing civil rights violations or holding bad actors accountable for civil rights violations,” she said.
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