Trump's revenge obsession just took an atrocious turn

Friends,

Trump’s Department of Injustice Justice has opened a criminal investigation into writer E. Jean Carroll.

First, some background:

In 2022, Carroll alleged that a chance encounter with Trump in at Bergdorf Goodman's Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan in the mid-1990s ended violently — that Trump slammed her against a dressing room wall, pulled down her tights, and forced himself into her.

In May 2023 a federal jury in New York unanimously found that Trump was liable for sexually abusing Carroll. The judge in that trial clarified that Trump didn’t just “sexually abuse” her. He “raped” her:

(When Trump sued ABC News over George Stephanopoulos’s assertion that Trump had raped Carroll, ABC chose to give in and pay Trump $16 million rather than rely on the judge’s clarification.)

The jury also found that Trump had defamed Carroll by saying she had lied about the assault. The jury awarded Carroll $5 million.

Trump appealed, but the verdict was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. A three-judge panel unanimously rejected Trump’s request for a new trial, concluding that he had “not demonstrated that the district court erred in any of the challenged rulings.”

(Last November, Trump asked the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling. It has yet to decide whether to hear the case.)

After the verdict, Trump denied he had assaulted Carroll and called her claims "a complete con job," a “Hoax and a lie,” and saying she was not his "type."

Trump’s comments caused Carroll to charge Trump with defaming her once again. After this second trial, a unanimous jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million.

The verdict included $65 million in punitive damages. The jury found that Trump had acted with malice in defaming Carroll a second time. Her lawyers had argued that a large verdict was necessary to “make him stop” his attacks on her — which he continued at news conferences, in social media posts and during the trial itself.

The $83.3 million verdict was upheld by a Second Circuit appeals court in a unanimous three-judge ruling, in which the judges found that Trump “never wavered or relented in his public attacks” on Carroll, and that she was subjected to public harassment as a result of his statements, including death threats and threats of physical injury.

Trump has vowed to appeal this case to the Supreme Court as well.

And now Trump is using the Justice Department as another cudgel against the woman he sexually abused.

The mainstream media is characterizing this as “the latest chapter” in Trump’s retribution campaign carried out by the Justice Department — following the department’s criminal investigations of former FBI director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and other Trump opponents.

Wrong. This investigation marks a dangerous escalation of Trump’s use of the Justice Department for personal vendettas.

In going after Carroll, Trump is no longer simply weaponizing the Department against people he considers political enemies. Carroll has never been a politician; she’s never served in a president’s administration; she’s never been a prosecutor. She’s a private citizen whom a jury unanimously found Trump had sexually abused, and two juries unanimously found he had defamed.

Hell, if Trump can use his Justice Department to criminally investigate private citizens who have held him civilly accountable for past brutality, there’s no logical end to his potential vindictiveness. Any of us who has tried to hold him accountable, in any way, could be next.

A criminal investigation isn’t a party invitation. It’s hugely costly to the people targeted, time-consuming, often grueling and anxiety-provoking.

The Justice Department’s trumped-up criminal investigation is looking into whether Carroll committed criminal perjury when she said in a 2022 deposition before her first civil lawsuit against Trump that she hadn’t had outside help in funding it — although some of her legal bills were paid by a nonprofit financed by Reid Hoffman (a major Democratic donor and founder of LinkedIn, who may also be the target of a criminal investigation).

But this issue was already considered, and dismissed, in Trump’s appeal of that first verdict — in which Trump’s lawyers accused Carroll of concealing financial support from Hoffman, and her lawyers argued in response that Hoffman’s financial support was irrelevant to Carroll’s legal claims and that she had nothing to do with obtaining the outside funding.

The appellate court found that she had “plausibly … forgotten about the limited outside funding counsel obtained,” and that “Carroll simply was not involved in the matter of who was or was not funding her litigation costs.”

For Trump’s Justice Department to now launch a criminal investigation of Carroll on the same claim his lawyers made years ago, which was dismissed by an appellate court, is a transparent abuse of justice, harassment of a private citizen, and violation of the rule of law.

Even worse, Todd Blanche, Trump’s Acting Attorney General, was the lawyer who represented Trump in Trump’s appeals of Carroll’s verdicts, and who made the very argument that the appellate court rejected and the Justice Department is now turning into a criminal investigation.

Although Blanche is said to have recused himself from the probe because of his prior representation of Trump in Carroll’s cases, his fingerprints are all over it. Blanche is desperate for Trump to promote him to full Attorney General and, to this end, has been even more accommodating of Trump’s thirst for revenge than his predecessor, Pam Bondi. Moreover, officials from Department headquarters have been involved in the decision to investigate Carroll — officials who directly report to Blanche.

Friends, I was an attorney in the Justice Department soon after Richard Nixon had tried to turn it against his enemies and Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell had gone to jail for his role in Watergate. I was fortunate enough to work for Edward Levi, Gerald Ford’s Attorney General, who sought to insulate the Department from any similar abuses in the future, and regain the public’s trust in our system of justice. President Ford supported Levi’s efforts. Levi’s successors, Griffin Bell and Benjamin Civiletti, continued Levi’s work to depoliticize — and professionalize — the Department, with the support of Jimmy Carter.

The next President and Attorney General must rededicate themselves and the Justice Department to the same principles.

Nixon’s Justice Department was bad. Trump’s is far worse, and more dangerous.

• Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org