President Trump is celebrating the anniversary of his return to power by accelerating his attack on the rule of law. He has spent the week leading up to Jan. 20 using the mighty powers of the Justice Department as an extension of his personal and political interests. The department has started a fabricated criminal investigation of the Federal Reserve chair, searched the home of a Washington Post reporter and created a White House-controlled fraud unit that would streamline partisan prosecution.
Mr. Trump does not attempt to hide his use of law enforcement powers for vengeance. He glories in it. Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported, he hosted federal prosecutors at the White House and complained that they were not moving fast enough to punish the rivals, critics and truth tellers he wished to target. This followed months of pressure by the president on his attorney general to do more to prosecute those who oppose his actions and those who tried to hold him accountable under the law in the past.
These efforts have become a defining feature of Mr. Trump’s second term, and it can be easy to become numb to them. We urge you not to. His usurpation of law enforcement power threatens us all. His meddling with the independence of the Fed undermines the economy. His attacks on members of Congress and the news media threaten people’s right to speak freely and hold the government accountable. His move to control investigation and prosecution from the White House portends an America where the state uses force to promote the political interests of its leaders, rather than uphold the laws passed by our representatives.
One year into his second term, America risks losing a central feature of our democracy: that we are a country ruled by laws, not by one man.
Among the many corrosive consequences of Mr. Trump’s actions is a loss of faith in almost anything that his Justice Department does. Consider the situation in Minnesota that attracted so much of the nation’s attention in recent days. On Jan. 7 an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot to death Renee Good, who was protesting ICE’s raids in Minneapolis. Under any other modern president, the next steps would have been clear. The government would have conducted a sober-minded inquiry about whether the agent had acted appropriately.
Under Mr. Trump, the verdict was preordained. The ICE agents on the scene prevented a bystander who identified himself as a doctor from treating Ms. Good as she sat slumped and bleeding in her car. The ICE agent who shot her sped away shortly afterward, videos suggest. Mr. Trump quickly posted a misleading description of the confrontation on social media. Later that day, the F.B.I. barred state investigators from joining them in collecting and analyzing evidence from the scene.
Senior Trump officials accused Ms. Good of “domestic terrorism,” and the Justice Department made a mockery of itself by opening an investigation into Ms. Good and her partner for their political activism. At least 10 federal lawyers in Washington and Minnesota have since resigned or retired. Their response is honorable, although it leaves even fewer principled officials to stand up to future abuses.
The Justice Department was hardly perfect before Mr. Trump took the oath of office a year ago. Still, between Richard Nixon’s resignation in disgrace and Mr. Trump’s second term, the department under both political parties took steps to remain independent from the White House so that Americans could have confidence that federal law enforcement was nonpartisan. If the government investigated somebody — or decided not to — the reasonable assumption was that it was on the merits. That assumption is in tatters, as the events in Minneapolis demonstrate.
After hollowing out the functions of the federal government’s system of justice that ensure fairness and guard against misconduct, the Trump administration has turned what remains into the agent of Mr. Trump’s personal and political impulses. If you are on the president’s side, you will be protected and even pardoned of crimes. If you threaten his interests, you risk retribution from federal law enforcement.
On Sunday, Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, said the Justice Department had served him with subpoenas in a bogus criminal investigation. The department claimed it was looking into whether he had misled Congress about the cost of renovations to the Fed’s headquarters, but he said he had provided exhaustive details to Congress and had the bank’s internal watchdog examine the construction costs. Mr. Trump’s real motive is obvious. He wants to replace the Fed’s leadership with officials who betray its tradition of independence from partisan politics and rapidly cut interest rates to goose the economy before midterm elections this year. The targeting of Mr. Powell, who will leave his role in May, serves to remind his successor that there is a cost to independence.
Three days after Mr. Powell’s announcement, federal agents took the extraordinary step of searching the home of Hannah Natanson, a reporter for The Washington Post, and seizing her phone as part of a leak investigation. This violates traditional government policy and appears designed to chill valuable reporting by making sources nervous about talking to journalists. Ms. Natanson had helped expose some of the negative consequences of the Trump administration’s policies.
The list of Trump critics and opponents who face or have faced legal action by the administration also includes another Fed governor, Lisa Cook; the former F.B.I. director James Comey; Attorney General Letitia James of New York; Senator Adam Schiff, Democrat of California; and Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California. This month Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he would begin administrative proceedings against Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona — which could result in the reduction of Mr. Kelly’s military retirement rank and pension — after the senator participated in a video urging military service members to resist illegal orders. The five other Democratic lawmakers who participated in the video said they are also under federal investigation. On Monday, Mr. Kelly sued Mr. Hegseth and the Pentagon on free-speech grounds.
At the same time, a parade of actual criminals who curry Mr. Trump’s favor receive clemency, and investigations into suspicious behavior by his cronies are canceled or never opened. Many of the president’s uses of the pardon power seem partly aimed at diminishing confidence in legitimate past prosecutions — and trying to make previous administrations look as unethical as the current one.
Janet Yellen, a former Fed chair and Treasury secretary, summed up this inversion of the basic principles of American justice: “If you can bring charges for no reason whatsoever against your enemies, we’re no longer living in a society governed by the rule of law,” she said.
More than 200 of the department’s career lawyers have been fired, and thousands more have resigned. “I wouldn’t even call it the Justice Department anymore,” Dena Robinson, a lawyer who formerly worked in the civil rights division, said last year. “It’s become Trump’s personal law firm.”
The administration crossed another line last week when Vice President JD Vance announced that the White House would run an unnecessary new Justice Department division on fraud. The department already has an anti-fraud section, but it has been depleted by administration cutbacks; what’s different about this new division is that the White House controls it directly. The new outpost is particularly suspicious, given Mr. Trump’s loose and expedient definition of fraudulent behavior as occurring only in states run by Democrats. The announcement suggests it will be another piece of his partisan use of legal powers. For now, the new division is centered on the social-service fraud that has occurred in Minnesota, though he has his eyes on other Democratic states as well.
The Minnesota fraud is real, and the people who perpetrated it deserve to face charges. Many already have; one of the prosecutors who resigned Tuesday over the response to the ICE shooting had overseen the sprawling investigation. But Mr. Trump’s interest in fraud is selective, applying exclusively in jurisdictions that have opposed him. As KFF Health News reported, he gave pardons or commutations to at least 68 people convicted of fraud-related crimes during his first and second terms. And he fired or demoted more than 20 inspectors general responsible for rooting out fraud.
As the second year of Mr. Trump’s second term begins next week, there are some modestly encouraging signs of resistance — but not nearly enough. Several Republicans in the House and Senate have said they do not believe Mr. Powell is a criminal, and Senator Thom Tillis said he would oppose the confirmation of any Fed governor until the investigation is concluded.
But the Republican Party has largely been a silent partner as its leader removes all sense of justice from the Justice Department. Some seem to grasp the danger to the economy of having Trump control the Fed, but they need to see the larger picture and grasp the danger to democracy of controlling law enforcement, too. On behalf of Americans who are now living without a functioning system of federal law and order, Congress should step up and end this self-interested destruction.
Source photographs by adogslifephoto and JodiJacobson, via Getty Images.
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