...Donald Trump has blown through all of this. From the first days of his second term, that much was clear. He granted clemency even to the most violent rioters on Jan. 6, including people found guilty of seditious conspiracy.
At the same time, he launched a purge against dozens of prosecutors who investigated and prosecuted the Jan. 6 rioters.
The Justice Department dropped its charges against the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, because the case was getting in the way of Adams’s enforcement of Trump’s immigration priorities. The judge in the case said it “smacks of a bargain,” one so transparently in violation of Justice Department standards and practices that it prompted the resignations of multiple prosecutors.
(There have been so many scandals since the Adams incident that it feels like ancient history — as if it happened during the First Continental Congress, and not mere months ago.)
Trump’s bias has extended not just to people who’ve shown individual loyalty to Trump, but also to favored and disfavored constituencies. Earlier this summer, his Justice Department sought an astonishingly light sentence for a Louisville police officer convicted of a civil rights violation after he fired wildly into an apartment on the night Breonna Taylor was killed.
At the same time, it has relentlessly pursued migrants, deporting hundreds to a brutal El Salvadoran prison without due process. Sadly, that incident was but the tip of an iceberg of brutality aimed at people who are suspected of being illegal immigrants.
And it all keeps escalating. I have no way of knowing whether John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, is guilty of a crime, but I do know that when Kash Patel, the director of the F.B.I., tweets triumphantly amid reports of a search of Bolton’s home that “NO ONE is above the law” and when the vice president of the United States confirms that Bolton is under investigation, they are breaking through the standards designed to remind us that every American is innocent until proven guilty.
Nor do I know whether Senator Adam Schiff of California, or Attorney General Letitia James of New York, or Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, is guilty of mortgage fraud, but the public accusation — in the absence of any adjudication — is yet another grave breach of the standards that preserve the presumption of innocence.
And when the president fired Cook on the basis of an unproven allegation, he not only violated the standards that preserve our system of justice, he may have violated the law as well. The president has to show “cause” before he fires a Federal Reserve governor, and an accusation of impropriety is not the same as the legal proof of improper conduct.
The very effort to use a Trump administration official, Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, to engage in targeted examinations of the financial records of prominent Democrats is yet another application of Trump’s relentless thirst for vengeance. It is certainly fine — even laudable — to police real accusations of suspected mortgage fraud. It is a gross abuse of justice to single out Democrats for special attention in this way.
On Wednesday, in fact, Trump made another reckless criminal accusation, declaring on Truth Social that George Soros and his son should be charged under “RICO,” the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. RICO is a statute typically deployed to combat organized crime.
But this is what authoritarian regimes do. They don’t simply declare that they’re prosecuting political opponents, they go ahead and do it — through trumped-up charges or selective prosecution.
