Republicans hoping their party’s standard-bearer will stay focused on voters’ priorities heading into the November midterms caught no relief on Tuesday as the Trump administration announced charges against former FBI director James B. Comey and an aide to former chief medical adviser Anthony S. Fauci, as well as a review of Disney’s broadcast licenses.
The latest instances of turning government power against President Donald Trump’s critics and pursuing years-old grievances added to frustrations felt by Republicans who say the president isn’t doing enough to address the signature issues that won him a second term.
Two-thirds of Americans said Trump hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems in a CNN survey conducted late last month, up from 52 percent in February 2025 and higher than at any point in his first term.
“No Republican wants to run on ‘I stand with Donald Trump’s retribution tour’” while gas prices are so high, said Barrett Marson, a GOP strategist in Arizona. “There is no doubt that the vast majority of non-MAGA voters want Trump to focus on anything but his personal animus toward a wide variety of people.”
The White House said the Comey prosecution has no bearing on Trump’s efforts to bring down costs — moves that include signing a tax-cut bill, adding discounted drugs to a government-run portal, expanding domestic beef production, releasing oil reserves and easing restrictions on tankers moving fuel between U.S. ports.
“The idea that President Trump and his Cabinet agencies cannot execute multiple actions simultaneously is so laughably false,” spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said. “The insinuation that a grand jury returning an indictment is mutually exclusive with the administration’s strong efforts on the economy is objectively false.”
Other Republicans, however, asked about the administration’s priorities. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, questioned whether the Comey case was the best use of time and resources for the acting U.S. attorney from his state who brought the charges, W. Ellis Boyle. Trump renominated Boyle to the position in January after the Senate took no action on his nomination last year.
“Eastern North Carolina, I-95, we’ve got a corridor full of really bad people coming through this state,” Tillis said. “Drug traffickers, human traffickers, everybody else. I want to make sure Mr. Boyle, when he gets confirmed, is focusing on that sort of stuff. So somebody’s going to have to convince me that this rises to the level of that kind of bad.”
Tillis said he wanted to review the indictment but was skeptical that an image Comey posted online — of seashells on a beach arranged to write out “86 47″ — was enough to justify indicting him. Comey quickly removed the post after receiving criticism that “86,” a shorthand originating in restaurants for running out of an item or refusing a customer, could also be slang for threatening violence.
“If it really is a picture that says ‘86 47’ — I’ve used ‘86’ a lot of times,” Tillis said. “I’ve never said it with the intent of killing somebody.”
Acting attorney general Todd Blanche has pushed prosecutors to accelerate efforts to charge longtime Trump critics, including Comey and former CIA director John Brennan. He has also issued reports and actions designed to appeal to Trump’s base. A leading contender to be Trump’s choice to permanently lead the Justice Department, Blanche has argued that the president is entitled to order investigations, rejecting the customs that developed after the Watergate scandal of the 1970s to insulate law enforcement from politics.
Blanche denied that the Comey case was politically motivated, likening it to dozens of other threat cases the Justice Department has brought in the past year.
“While this case is unique and this indictment stands out because of the name of the defendant, his alleged conduct is the same kind of conduct that we will never tolerate and that we will always investigate and regularly prosecute,” he said at a news conference on Tuesday.
The Justice Department previously attempted to prosecute Comey last year over testimony he gave in a 2020 hearing on the FBI’s handling of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Career prosecutors argued the charges had insufficient evidence, and a judge dismissed the indictment in November, finding that the U.S. attorney on the case, former Trump lawyer Lindsey Halligan, wasn’t properly appointed.
Americans reacted coolly to that prosecution at the time. In a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll in October, 42 percent of registered voters said the case was politically motivated, compared with 28 percent who said the charges were justified. Thirty percent said they weren’t sure.
Republican lawmakers including Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana and Rep. Mark Alford of Missouri defended the indictment in television interviews on Tuesday. Former Trump advisers Jason Miller and Mark Meadows also cheered the case on social media.
“This is what we voted for!” Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff at the end of Trump’s first term, wrote on X.
Trump did campaign on “retribution” for much of 2023, saying he would target specific people he blamed for his past investigations and impeachments. In 2024 he started saying, “my retribution will be success,” but never ruled out prosecuting his critics.
“That’s exactly the opposite of what most Americans would like to see the president and the Department of Justice focused on,” Republican political consultant Whit Ayres said. “They’re worried about inflation and the economy, and many of them are worried about how the war in Iran will end. Spending time relitigating old disputes is exactly the opposite of what most Americans want,” said Ayres, who has been a sharp critic of Trump.
Historically, midterms tend to be a referendum on the sitting president, with a strong correlation between his job approval and the House seats his party loses, Ayres said. Trump’s political advisers are encouraging Republicans to change the focus by going on offense against Democrats.
Also on Tuesday, the Justice Department announced charges against David M. Morens, who worked under Fauci from 2006 to 2022, accusing him of concealing emails, which Blanche termed “a profound abuse of trust.” The emails involved exchanges with the head of a nonprofit whose work with Chinese scientists had drawn scrutiny from the public and Congress as part of the controversy over whether the coronavirus developed naturally or escaped from a Chinese lab.
The Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday ordered a review of broadcast licenses for local ABC stations. The agency said it was investigating possible discrimination related to hiring practices, but the review came as Trump demanded the removal of the network’s late-night talk show host, Jimmy Kimmel.
Scott Clement and Jeremy Roebuck contributed to this report.
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