The FBI’s search of John Bolton’s home and office last week shook much of official Washington. It was the most intrusive and aggressive law enforcement action taken by the Trump administration against the president’s critics and political opponents to date. Many in the political press corps certainly treated it as a milestone: Donald Trump’s much-anticipated prosecutorial revenge tour was upon us.
In fact, the news concerning Bolton was just the latest in a string of attacks on Trump critics and former career government officials who became enemies of the administration simply by doing their jobs. Aside from the bold face names like Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security advisor in the first administration before turning against him, the targets include the prosecutors and federal agents who were forced out of the DOJ and FBI because they investigated the siege of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 and Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.
Some of these people’s lives have already been upended.
“We’ve had very real and very scary threats from stalkers,” Miles Taylor, a former senior Department of Homeland Security official in the first Trump administration who became a persistent critic, told me. “Even if the president doesn’t believe his own language about [accusing Taylor of] treason — a crime punishable by death — his own supporters do, and they’ve made sure to let us know that they feel that way.”
Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order directing the Justice Department to criminally investigate Taylor, and as a result of Trump’s threats, Taylor, who has an 11-month-old child, has already lost his business and many of his friends. On top of that, he said, “we’ve taken very, very extensive measures on the physical safety front.”
Taylor is not alone. “Some DOJ alumni who fear they may be targets of the president’s lawless retribution campaign have retained lawyers or sought security support as precautionary measures,” Stacey Young, a former DOJ lawyer who created the organization Justice Connection, told me. Young created the group to provide support to current and former DOJ lawyers who find themselves in the administration’s crosshairs for one reason or another.
As we follow the growing number of criminal investigations loosely gathered together under the heading of Trump’s prosecutorial revenge tour, there are some useful rules of thumb and some important distinctions to keep in mind. The key points: We do not know how any of this ends, and some of the Trump administration’s moves are worth taking more seriously than others. Not everyone in Trump’s crosshairs will see a trial, let alone a conviction.
At the same time, every American should be disturbed that the president is using the powers of the state to try to prosecute his adversaries. It is not what happens in a healthy democracy, and it will inflict real harm on real people.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s list of prosecutorial targets grows practically by the day. Just this week, Trump posted on social media that Democratic megadonor George Soros and his son “should be charged with RICO because of their support of Violent Protests, and much more, all throughout the United States of America.”
There was already a DOJ “Weaponization Working Group” focused on prosecutors who pursued Trump and the Jan. 6 rioters, as well as a grand jury probe concerning the 2016 election (again). The order that Trump signed about Taylor also directed the Justice Department to investigate Chris Krebs, who led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in Trump’s first term and refused to go along with Trump’s false claim that he had won the 2020 election.
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has also opened criminal mortgage fraud investigations into New York Attorney General Letitia James, who brought the civil fraud case against the Trump Organization, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a Trump antagonist going all the way back to the Trump-Russia investigation. On Monday, Trump cited similar mortgage fraud allegations in an effort to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, though that appears to have less to do with revenge per se than Trump’s desire to take over the Fed, which he has been trying to force to lower interest rates.
Over the weekend, Trump said that former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie should be criminally investigated over the 2013 “Bridgegate” scandal. Trump appears to have been set off after watching Christie criticize the administration on a Sunday show. And more targets are surely coming.
It’s a lot to take in, so we start with two basic but helpful propositions when following a high-profile criminal investigation or prosecution.
First: Try to keep an open mind and maintain a healthy level of skepticism in every direction — toward the government and the targets.
Second: Take it one step at a time. At the moment, we know little about what precipitated the searches of Bolton’s home and office, and predicting the end of a complex and politically charged criminal case can be hazardous business.
Plenty of political and legal observers, for instance, cheered on Fulton County DA Fani Willis’ criminal case against Trump, only to see the whole thing fall apart after Willis’ own significant lapse in professional judgment came to light. Others confidently predicted during the Biden administration that Trump would “spend the rest of his life in jail,” and yet here we are, with Trump very much not in jail.
Trump supporters have come away similarly disappointed by their favored prosecutors. For years, many of them salivated over the investigation of special counsel John Durham into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, but the principal results of that effort were two failed prosecutions and millions of taxpayer dollars down the drain. Special counsel David Weiss was supposed to ensnare President Joe Biden and his family in a massive, years-long public corruption scheme, but the ultimate output was two criminal cases against Hunter Biden that had little to no apparent precedent.
Trump, for his part, excels at “rule by law” — deploying the force of federal law selectively in order to punish his enemies and help his allies. You might even call it “the weaponization of the federal government.” This can produce results even without a criminal conviction, since a high-profile criminal investigation can itself take a serious professional and personal toll on the target.
“I can’t overstate what the social impacts have been, and I don’t say that for any sympathy whatsoever,” Taylor told me. “We have lost super close friends who’ve said to us, ‘We really can’t stay in communication while you guys are going through this because we don’t want to put our business in danger,’ or ‘We’re worried about our security clearances.’” Taylor’s own government-relations firm collapsed because his business partners didn’t want to attract Trump’s scrutiny. Taylor also struggled at first to find a lawyer at a large law firm to represent him — a result, he said, of Trump’s intimidation campaign against the firms, another instance of government weaponization — but eventually put together a team led by Abbe Lowell (who also now represents Cook).
Some of the Trump administration’s prosecutorial intimations are more credible on their face than others.
The suggestions of mortgage fraud against James, Schiff and Cook — which were first made by Bill Pulte, a fiercely partisan Trump appointee who leads the Federal Housing Finance Agency — are not compelling, at least based on what is publicly available. For starters, the DOJ does not typically go rooting around specific individual’s home mortgage applications in the hopes of finding discrepancies that they can characterize as federal criminal fraud. It’s almost certain that Pulte has used the power of his office to pursue those in Trump’s way — an extraordinarily alarming development, to say the least.
But it is one thing for a federal official like Pulte to run around making accusations on social media, and another thing entirely for prosecutors to develop a credible and legally sound fraud case that will persuade a jury at a trial. Federal law generally requires prosecutors to show both that the misstatement(s) at issue were material and that the defendant made them with the intent to defraud, and these are much more difficult things to do than tweet.
There is also a distinct Keystone Cops vibe that has been given off by Pulte as well as Ed Martin, who is overseeing both the DOJ investigations into mortgage fraud and the DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group. Even a bad prosecutor can make his targets’ lives miserable, but if you want to successfully prosecute your political opponents — on charges that are real or contrived — you should have a competent lawyer in charge.
Martin, of course, has never actually prosecuted a case in his life, though he briefly served as the acting U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C. before his nomination to serve in the post fell apart in the Senate amid bipartisan opposition. In his brief time in the position, Martin became (in)famous for professionally amateurish and impetuous screeds threatening some of Trump’s political opponents.
Just last week, Martin was spotted with a colleague giving a bizarre and frankly buffoonish performance staking out James’s home in in Brooklyn in the middle of the day as part of a photo op for the New York Post. As a practical matter, that caper alone — political, unprofessional and self-discrediting — could doom any effort by Martin to convict James of anything before a jury, assuming he gets that far. A Washington, D.C. grand jury just rejected the Justice Department’s push for a felony indictment against the man who threw a sandwich at a federal agent — an extremely rare and embarrassing brushback to the U.S. attorney’s office now led by former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, whose unseemly video taunting the guy now looks even worse than it already did.
The threat of prosecution over Bridgegate is also unlikely to keep Christie up at night. For one thing, the conduct occurred over a decade ago — well outside the five-year statute of limitations that typically applies in federal criminal cases.
As importantly, the Justice Department already investigated that episode. Although prosecutors convicted two Christie aides at trial, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned those convictions in 2020 after concluding that the criminal statute used by the government to charge them did not actually extend to the underlying misconduct. At the time, Trump himself publicly congratulated Christie on “a complete and total exoneration” for “the Obama DOJ Scam referred to as ‘Bridgegate.’”
These are not the makings of a compelling federal criminal case.
In the case of someone like Bolton, the legal threat is more acute.
The mishandling of classified information has tripped up plenty of prominent political figures in the past, and Bolton is not necessarily the “careful lawyer” and “fastidious person” that some of his conservative defenders have recently claimed.
When the DOJ in Trump’s first term tried (and failed) to block the publication of Bolton’s 2020 tell-all memoir about his time in the Trump White House, the presiding federal judge in D.C. — a Ronald Reagan appointee — took Bolton to task for profiteering with the book, and he said that Bolton had “likely jeopardized national security by disclosing classified information in violation of his nondisclosure agreement obligations.” Long before that, when Bolton served in the George W. Bush administration, he was credibly accused of dishonesty and of abusing his power in the government to punish his enemies. (Sound familiar?)
On top of all that, there is another important distinction worth keeping in mind: It is possible for a criminal case to begin with dubious, perhaps even corrupt, motives, and also for it to end up being supported by the facts and the law. These two questions — the motives behind a criminal case and the quality of the prosecution itself — are separate, though not wholly distinct, from one another.
When I alluded to all this in my discussion with Taylor, he gently pushed back.
“If a bartender poisons a guy’s drink, you don’t say, ‘Well, did the guy forget to pay his tab?’” Taylor said. “Even if John Bolton had done something wrong,” he continued, “that’s not the point here. The point is, this was likely an investigation that started off with the president wanting him to be guilty of a crime and sending his team on a fishing expedition to go find that crime.”
Indeed, the focus on a single person like Bolton can obscure the stakes and broader implications of Trump’s revenge tour.
In some ways, the people whose names we tend to recognize — the prominent political and media figures like Bolton, James, Schiff and Christie — are the people we should be least worried about. They generally have more access to top-notch lawyers, more access to money to fund their legal defenses and more access to the media to rally support in the court of public opinion. (Schiff has signed up former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who said in a statement, “The allegations against Senator Schiff are transparently false, stale and long debunked.”)
The people to worry most about are the ones whose names we do not know — the people and the government officials who may unfairly end up in the Trump administration’s crosshairs and have their lives upended for no good reason.
“I worry about people who want to engage in politics and speak out against the administration,” Taylor said, “because [Trump has] made clear he’s going to go after the opposition. I worry about people in business who, if they decide to show any daylight with the president’s policies, he’s going to use the organs of state to coerce them into falling in line — and on and on and on.”
“The same tactics they would use and have been using to intimidate us,” Taylor said, “are what he’s using to really warp our whole society.”
