1/28/24, 5:06 PM Trump Vows to Prosecute Critics and Rivals — But it's Not Quite That Easy - The

t it's Not Quite That Easy - The Messenger

Politics.

TRENDING NOW | Biden Warns About Trump, But Here’s Why His Own Presidency Has Failed

Trump Vows to Prosecute Critics and Rivals — But it’s Not

Quite That Easy
The Republican presidential frontrunner's second-term retaliation plans may be catnip for his
MAGA audiences but will be far more difficult to implement in real life
Published 11/26/23 05:00 AM ET | Updated 11/26/23 12:15 PM ET
Darren Samuelsohn

onald Trump’s plans for a second presidential term include appointing a special
prosecutor to investigate Joe Biden and his family, ordering up criminal indictments
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against anyone who is beating him politically and making it his “personal
mission to restore the scales of justice in America.”

To the average voter, the Republican 2024 frontrunner’s campaign pledges sound like
he envisions a mandate that allows him to jail his opponents, smash institutions and
break even more norms compared to his first presidential term.

But the reality for how Trump’s rhetoric would play out is much different.

Trump’s well-publicized retaliation and revenge strategy may be catnip for his MAGA
audiences but will be far more difficult to implement in real life, and would cause
loud howls of protest about authoritarianism and the demise of democracy. The
guardrails holding Trump back from a vengeance strategy in a second term would
come from inside the Justice Department, the federal courts and Congress, according
to more than 20 people interviewed by The Messenger from across the political
spectrum, including Democratic and GOP lawmakers, former senior DOJ leaders,
Trump critics and the former president’s first-term lawyers, aides and advisors.

“I’m sure that things will be adversarial,” said Missouri GOP Sen. Josh Hawley, who
acknowledged in an interview the impossible expectations that befell both Jeff
Sessions and Bill Barr as establishment conservatives who clashed with Trump while
serving as attorney general during the first term.

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US President Donald Trump (R) and US Attorney General William Barr step off Air Force One upon arrival at Andrews Air Force Base in
Maryland on Sept. 1, 2020. MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

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Even for someone who has twice survived impeachment and who can expect to be
successful in making it his top priority upon inauguration to redirect the DOJ from
prosecuting him to becoming one of his biggest defenders, legal experts told The
Messenger that Trump may be a bit overconfident if he thinks he could also achieve
his goals by taking absolute command of the nation’s most powerful arm of law
enforcement to direct at his leisure.

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“Those Article III judges will come out ready to filet you if they think you’re in there
on behalf of the president of the United States in a criminal case directed by Trump,”
said a former senior DOJ official. “That’s why I say the easy part is killing cases. It's
one thing to tell a court the president directs us to pardon him. It’s another thing to
say we didn't have any real good evidence, but we did X, Y and Z.”

The Comey, Cohen and Biden examples

Being in Trump’s cross-hairs has prompted different degrees of retaliation before,

with mixed consequences for everyone involved.

Consider the firing of James Comey, who the president ousted less than four months
into his first term following the FBI director’s public testimony that confirmed an
active bureau investigation on potential collusion between Russia and the 2016
Trump campaign. The president’s move there ignited a chain of events leading to
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment, which kept Trump’s White House

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stuck playing defense for a giant chunk of their four-year term and resulted in a costly
series of guilty pleas, legal trials and court convictions for Trump associates that gave
way to a series of controversial presidential pardons.

U.S. President Donald Trump, left, shakes hands with James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), during an
Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception in the Blue Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on
Sunday, Jan. 22, 2017. Andrew Harrer/Getty Images

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For some, the retribution felt personal. Former Trump attorney and fixer Michael
Cohen wrote last week in an op-ed about being put into solitary confinement while
serving a federal prison term as “a form of retaliation” after he pleaded guilty and
started speaking publicly about how Trump had wronged him.

Another Trump personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, sparked the first House impeachment
of the president in the aftermath of his mission to conjure up an investigation of the
Biden family in Ukraine. John Durham’s appointment as a special counsel to examine
the origins of Mueller’s Russia probe amounted to a final prosecutorial record of one
guilty plea and two jury losses via acquittal.

Fast forward to 2023: Revenge was front of mind when Trump denied Minnesota GOP
Rep. Tom Emmers of the chance to become House speaker due to his vote in support
of certifying Biden as the winner of the2020 election.

Or on another front, Hunter Biden’s lawyers earlier this month asked for a federal
court’s permission to subpoena Trump, Barr and other senior Trump-era DOJ officials
as they argue against “a vindictive or selective prosecution arising from an
unrelenting pressure campaign beginning in the last administration, in violation of
Mr. Biden’s Fifth Amendment rights under the Constitution.”

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Republican presidential candidate former U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during the Florida Freedom Summit at the Gaylord
Palms Resort on Nov. 04, 2023 in Kissimmee, Fla. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

“It’s a question of priorities for him. How low do you go? How petty do you become?”
said Ty Cobb, the former Trump White House attorney who worked on the Mueller
investigation. “But I think you can reasonably expect he’ll pressure whomever is in
the government to be aggressively unkind to anyone who’s ever crossed him as he
possibly can. This guy is a full blown narcissist. It’s all about him.”

Trump has already got a MAGA-minded surrogate army that’s prepping the building
blocks for a potential second term and his potential investigative targets. On Capitol
Hill, Republicans have kept the fire lit against President Biden, with articles of
impeachment looming in spite of lacking evidence of high crimes or misdemeanors.
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Outside interest groups are also looking ahead to 2025 by compiling lists of targets for
future prosecutions in a second Trump term.

“I’d strongly advise President Biden to pardon himself and his family because, believe
me, they’re next,” said Mike Davis, a former Senate GOP staffer whom Donald Trump
Jr., recently mused would make an ideal pick for his father as an acting attorney
general. “Does anyone really think President Trump is going to turn the other
cheek?”

Hunter Biden (C), son of President Joe Biden, and his defense attorney Abbe Lowell (L), leave the J. Caleb Boggs Federal Building in
Wilmington, Del., on Oct. 3, 2023. ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images

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Who is on the Trump target lists? The Washington Post earlier this month said the
former president has specifically mentioned to his friends and advisers he’d like to
see investigations into Barr and Cobb, as well as former White House Chief of Staff
John Kelly and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.

Asked in October by an audience member who’d just won a Mike Lindell autographed
pillow what job he’d want in a second-term Trump White House, former Trump
economic advisor Peter Navarro answered, “I want to prosecute Fauci.”

Could Trump be bluffing?

People who have worked with Trump said they don’t know who to believe at this
point in terms of any real prosecutorial plans. They note he didn’t do everything he
promised after the 2016 campaign in terms of the famous “lock her up” chants about
Hillary Clinton while also recognizing this is the same person who wrote in August in
all-caps on Truth Social “IF YOU COME AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU” soon
after being arraigned on federal criminal charges for trying to overturn the 2020
election.

“There’s always been a bit of a disconnect between what he says publicly and what he
says on the policy side,” said a former senior DOJ Trump official. “To his credit at the
time he kind of got it. Then he felt he got screwed, and now he’s on the warpath.”

For Trump, the second-term revenge talk has come almost in lockstep with his own
personal legal troubles getting more serious, and at the very same time he’s grown his
standing as the GOP’s likely 2024 presidential nominee.

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A man holds up a 'LOCK HER UP!" sign referring to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during the Republican National
Convention on July 20, 2016, at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

His campaign video promising to make it his “personal mission to restore the scales of
justice in America” came out in mid-April, nine days after Manhattan prosecutors
made history with the first-ever criminal indictment of a former president. His vow to
appoint a Biden-focused special prosecutor came hours after his June arraignment in
Miami on federal charges he mishandled classified documents and obstructed justice
after leaving the White House. After three of his former campaign lawyers pleaded
guilty in Georgia, Trump at the end of October told an Iowa audience he would direct
“a completely overhauled DOJ to investigate every radical DA and AG in America for
their illegal, racist-in-reverse, enforcement of the law.”

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Few of the people interviewed said they would dispute that Trump can speak up from
the White House about wanting new criminal cases opened against rivals and critics.
But they also express concern about whether it’s something a president should be
doing given the political hits that would follow, plus the problems it can cause for his
own administration appointees.

“The one norm that has stood the test of time that separates us from other countries
in terms of interactions of the president and Department of Justice is that the
president should not direct prosecutions,” said a former senior Trump White House
official who requested anonymity to speak candidly.

The former top White House aide, who described themselves as a big believer in the
controversial “unitary executive” concept that a president has enormous power
leading the federal government, still predicted blowback for Trump should he try to
turn his campaign talk about prosecuting enemies into reality.

“The president can set DOJ policy,” the former White House aide added. “He can shift
resources. He can appoint someone in the civil rights division that’s not an activist.
There’s a number of ways a White House may impose its policies on the DOJ just like
any other department. We’d not be having this conversation if it was HUD. But the
one thing we all agree on is that the president should not be demanding the DOJ
prosecute particular individuals because then you do become a banana republic.”

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An exterior view of the U.S. Department of Justice headquarters, July 25, 2017 in Washington, DC. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

A deep state revolt

Beyond the courts standing up to Trump should he demand the U.S. government
pursue political investigations, former George W. Bush-era acting Attorney General
Peter Keisler warned that career government officials might revolt to such an extent
that the entire department itself suffers.

“You have the institutional Justice Department. A lot of people in it wouldn't stand
for this and would resign,” said Keisler. “But the problem is you go through all that,
you’ve just decimated the Justice Department.”
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Keisler, a former chief of the DOJ's civil division whom Bush tried without success to
appoint to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, said a war
between the DOJ and a second-term Trump “destroys the department's ability to do
all the other important things that it does. So, you know, I do think he would have
great difficulty actually effectuating this plan, but we'd all suffer the consequences.”

Additional potential pushback depends in no small part on who runs Congress, with
many expecting it’d take Democratic control of the House to even open the door to a
third impeachment. But now in the minority, leaders of the party’s previous efforts to
see Trump removed from office and permanently barred from serving as president
are dubious about trying again.

“I don't think we should be looking to impeachment as our best method to hold

anyone accountable,” said Rep. Dan Goldman, a New York Democrat who before
being elected to Congress served as House counsel during the first Trump
impeachment in late 2019 and early 2020.

“If Donald Trump was not convicted for what he did on January 6 by the Senate
— because Republicans have more fealty to their party than they do to their country
— then it's hard to imagine anything that he would do that would warrant them to get
to the two-thirds requirement in the Senate to convict him,” Goldman said.

‘Not a pleasant experience’

While Trump has demonstrated he may be one of the only people to benefit politically
from facing one or more sets of criminal charges, few others see that path as a viable
one with a positive outcome.

An FBI investigation, a grand jury summons or even a federal indictment all add up to
serious costs with respect to hiring defense lawyers, the time suck of giving the matter
the attention it deserves, plus the reputational damage and roll-the-dice risk if
convicted of a federal crime of facing any amount of prison time.

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Daniel Demoura from Boston protests outside the Fulton County Jail in Georgia before Donald Trump's arrest on Aug. 24,
2023. Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon/The Messenger

“It’s not a pleasant experience,” said William Jeffress, a longtime DC defense lawyer
who represented Richard Nixon after his presidency. “There’s a lot of damage you can
do just by investigating people. It’s not just going to trial and convicting somebody,
which I don’t fear so much because I have great confidence in the courts.”

Making potential investigative targets squirm is a main point of the revenge rhetoric,
Davis said.

“Let these Democrat defendants spend their life savings and years of their lives going
through this process like the Democrats are doing to Republicans," he said. "The only
way we’re going to come back as a country from what the Democrats have done to
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Trump, his top aides and his supporters, is to give Democrats a healthy dose of their
own medicine.”

Davis, who runs the Article III Project that helped Trump in his first term deliver
lifetime appointments to more than 230 federal judges, also acknowledged in an
interview he is trying to troll the former president’s critics.

“I hope people read this and their f***ing heads explode,” he said. “A big part of my
hyperbole is to make a point. This weaponization of law enforcement, this election
interference, is highly destructive to our country. This is how the Roman republic
fell.”

Warren Rojas contributed to this report.

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