Indicting Political Enemies
I started writing my book, Giving Up Is Unforgivable, around the time of Donald Trump’s second inauguration. Americans didn’t know precisely what was going to happen. I heard a lot of people suggesting that it would be a more normal presidency, that he’d learned his lesson. That was not my personal view.
I was prepared for a full range of bad outcomes. Like many of you, I had studied Project 2025. And, I remembered all too well the early days of the first Trump administration with its Muslim ban and a fired FBI Director. I remembered family separation. I remembered all of the scandals involving abuse of public money by cabinet officials. I recalled the pomposity and the dismissive attitude toward the public that presidents are supposed to serve. And I remembered “alternative facts,” the fuel that Trump runs on.
Our Civil Discourse community understood that the second Trump administration was going to be bad for democracy. But I’m not sure anyone was prepared for how quickly the slide would happen, on multiple fronts all at once.
We’ve reached the point where anyone who is paying attention can see how far Trump and his machine have gone. People’s worst fears have been confirmed. We’ve been discussing the indictments of former FBI Director Jim Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James for the last two weeks. Trump has a loyal U.S. Attorney (although Comey’s lawyers are now questioning in court whether she was installed correctly in that job) in the Eastern District of Virginia, his former lawyer, someone who has never been a prosecutor. We now live in a country where the president and his minions remove experienced, career prosecutors if their professional judgment fails to line up with the president’s whims. We now live in a country that has political prosecutions, something Americans previously associated, negatively, with banana republics and authoritarian regimes.
Trump has installed his personal lawyers, people with no qualifications to be prosecutors, in both Virginia and New Jersey. More experienced personal lawyers and loyalists are now in top roles at DOJ and the FBI—people like Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, who are in a position to stop these abuses but haven’t. We understand what that means. Lawyers are challenging the anti-democratic moves coming out of the Justice Department, highly skilled lawyers who could just as easily sit this out, but choose not to turn a blind eye. Their work is underway—something we can all take comfort from.
The first Trump revenge indictment, the one charging Comey, came as something of a shock. The second one, involving James, who had pursued Trump’s business for fraud in her role as New York’s Attorney General, was widely viewed as an outrageous attack on a prosecutor. But what happens if, as seems likely, there are more? Is it possible to sustain the outrage when there’s a new indictment every week? Or does it subside into an unremarkable new normal?
A good friend, who is also a former United States Attorney, said to me, “This is how democracy dies.” And let’s be clear, this has the potential to be that moment. That’s why we aren’t going to let it happen.
Imagine that you’re a young assistant district attorney, and you’re new on the job. You’re given a case file to work on. But it turns out, one of the defendants is a close friend of the DA’s. You’re not going to close the case because of that; you keep working. Or imagine that one of the DA’s political rivals is under investigation in a case, but it turns out, there is evidence that while she was in the area where a crime was committed, she wasn’t involved in any way. You aren’t going to proceed against her despite the evidence. If you rejected the good case or moved forward with the bad one, there would be consequences. These things have a way of coming to light and that would result in public outrage, removal of people involved from office, maybe even prosecutions if the facts warranted them.
Trump does exactly that, but out in the open.
This Truth post/text to the Attorney General from the President of the United States is what we might call, in a different setting, evidence suggesting a conspiracy. There is no outcry from people on the right who would be outraged if this happened in a Democratic administration. The Supreme Court may have said that the president can’t be held accountable for breaking the law, but that doesn’t mean that he can’t break it, or that when he does, we should ignore it.
If a president can use the criminal justice system to punish his enemies (and reward his friends, I still haven’t forgotten about border czar Tom Homan’s $50,000 in a bag), we are all at risk. There was reporting yesterday about reconfiguring offices involved in federal tax prosecutions so that people and groups who donate to Democratic candidates can be prosecuted. “Trump Team Plans IRS Overhaul to Enable Pursuit of Left-Leaning Groups,” is how the Wall Street Journal headlined it. What could be more crass and anti-democratic? It’s Stalinist, this idea of controlling Americans by threatening them with criminal punishment if they are out of step with the administration. If we tolerate this, it will only get worse.
We have due process in America, a layer of protection against this type of abuse. We see signs that lower federal courts understand this and are insisting on due process in a number of legal settings. It comes as no surprise that this administration is trying to do away with due process too.
Here is the most important part, what we can do:
Most importantly, don’t let revenge prosecutions become just another story in the recitation of Trumpian abuses. Keep it on your lips. Share it with people. Help them understand that in a world where nothing feels normal, this is one of the worst abuses.
Show up, whether it’s to the marches on Saturday or to share your views with people at a local get-together, at church, even at a family gathering. Don’t let anyone intimidate you out of exercising your rights. “No Political Prosecutions” would make a good sign, or bumper sticker, or tee-shirt.
Make sure your elected officials know how you feel. This is too important to give them a pass on, especially if you’re representatives include Republicans who have cultivated an attitude of ignoring your communications. One of my Senators is a lawyer. Lawyers are uniquely positioned to understand how dangerous this is and we have to get them on record. Refusing to respond to a direct question on this issue is part of them creating a record on who they are. Write and ask them this question, point blank: Do you think it’s acceptable for the president to have his enemies prosecuted? How would you feel about a Democratic president doing this in the future? Record their answer/non-answer and share it with other voters.
Support the lawyers who are doing heavy-lifting in this area. Stay educated about the cases they are bringing, like we do here at Civil Discourse. Share that knowledge with others to build awareness and keep this issue front and center.
Don’t give in to the narrative that you have no power, because you do. We are a nation that runs on grass roots politics. When public opinion swells, this administration backs off. That happened with deportations to CECOT prison and we’re watching the outrage over ICE’s conduct reach a boiling point. It’s more difficult, more nuanced, to sustain outrage over revenge prosecutions, but if we don’t want to live in a world where all of us are vulnerable to someone in power who decides that we’ve stepped out of line, we have to keep it up. If anyone tells you this is just about Comey and James, make sure you tell them it’s about setting a precedent that normalizes politicization of the criminal justice system, and that puts all of us at risk. Where it starts is never where it ends up.
But it’s likely that the prosecutions of Comey and James aren’t the only ones we will see. Trump’s former National Security Director John Bolton has been mentioned, as has Democratic Senator Adam Schiff. We can’t accede to an endless drip of assaults on American justice. Prosecutions may become more expected and less shocking if they keep happening, but that won’t mean they’re any less dangerous; they will be even more so.
Now you know what to be on guard for and pay attention to. Every additional revenge prosecution will demand that we dig deeper and keep up a fresh, sustained response. At least, if we want to hold onto democracy. I wrote in my book that “we have a republic to keep, and we are not quitters.” I believe that, because I believe in all of you.
We’re in this together,
Joyce