Trump’s Washington

How President Trump is changing government, the country and its politics.

Good evening. Tonight, we’re looking at President Trump’s renewed push to prosecute his adversaries. The news is first.

New prosecutors, old enemies

President Trump’s efforts to use the Justice Department to exact new punishments on people against whom he nurses old grudges appear to be ramping up.

Over the weekend, in a remarkably direct post on his social media website, Trump instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi to “move now” to prosecute his adversaries, defying a principle of independence that has characterized the relationship between the Justice Department and the White House going back to Watergate.

And today, one of his former personal lawyers, Lindsey Halligan, was sworn into a key prosecutorial role in Virginia. Days earlier, her predecessor indicated that he was unlikely to bring charges against one Trump foe — Attorney General Letitia James of New York — because of a lack of evidence. He also raised concerns about a potential case against the former F.B.I. director James Comey.

This is an important moment, one that could be easy to miss in the crush of news. So I called my colleague Devlin Barrett, who covers the Justice Department, and asked him to explain why it matters. Rank-and-file prosecutors, Devlin explained, are becoming increasingly concerned about pressure to bring indictments even when evidence seems flimsy. It’s all shaping up to become a bigger battle over what their department is really for.

It’s unusual for a president to order an attorney general to essentially prosecute his enemies. Why?

For basically two generations, there has been a generally understood principle that the president and his direct advisers simply do not direct criminal investigations, because that is a tool that could be used improperly to go after opponents and help political allies. That’s what the Nixon administration got in trouble for.

Trump has made similar statements in the recent past. In an interview about a month ago, he said essentially that Comey, whom he blames for launching what became known as the Russia investigation, should be arrested. I don’t think that was widely noticed at the time. He has been sending this signal far and wide, and now the signal is getting stronger and more urgent and demanding.

What has been the response to Trump’s post inside the Justice Department, and what was the subtext of that post?

The president’s post on Saturday was really about who would be the next person to run the prosecutor’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia — the role into which Halligan, who has no prosecutorial experience, was sworn on an interim basis today. That office is important, because it has been running investigations into Comey and Letitia James. She is another person that Trump really despises because she won a half-billion-dollar fraud judgment against him in court, although the financial penalty was thrown out on appeal.

Both of those cases have been described to me by sources as incredibly weak. That issue came to a head last week when Erik Siebert, the U.S. attorney for that district, relayed to his superiors that there was not a chargeable case against Letitia James, and the Comey case isn’t good either. Within a matter of days of relaying that information he was asked to resign, and he did.

In the rank and file, there’s a great deal of concern that line prosecutors are being pressured, or are going to be pressured, to seek indictments that don’t have the facts and the law behind them, solely because the president wants them.

Is this about only one district, and a couple of cases? Or is there a broader trend here?

This is part of a larger issue that’s really alarming many current and former Justice Department officials. If you look just back to August, the very newly installed U.S. attorney in the Western District of Virginia, whose office was overseeing a related but separate investigation of Comey, suddenly resigned after having been in that job only about a month. He has offered no explanation, but it raises serious questions about whether he, too, was forced out over White House displeasure with the way he was handling a politically sensitive investigation.

In addition to that, we know there’s been pressure growing on the U.S. attorney in Maryland, who was tasked with a different investigation related to another person Trump detests, Senator Adam Schiff of California.

What I’ve been told by sources is that Schiff’s case, like the Letitia James case, is based on an allegation made by Trump allies that he lied on mortgage loan documents. The evidence in both cases has been described to me as quite weak.

The concern is that there is just this alarming pattern of pushing prosecutors to do things they don’t think are right.

I’m also reminded of the prosecutor who left the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office when she refused to drop charges against Mayor Eric Adams.

That was sort of an inverse of this dynamic where the argument being made by the Trump administration was this already indicted case should be dismissed because they wanted the mayor to be more cooperative on immigration issues.

One thing to keep in mind about these folks that have been forced out at the top of these offices is that many of them are Republicans. For all of Trump’s anger and rhetoric around the so-called Deep State, these disputes shouldn’t be simply thought of as one political worldview clashing with another political worldview. This is a fight over what is right and proper for the Justice Department to do and what is wrong and improper for the Justice Department to do.

What does Bondi think the department’s role should be?

Bondi has made the point since, even before she got the job, that she would be a very aggressive supervisor, pushing out people who were not viewed as loyal to Trump. What Bondi has signaled, time and time again, is that she will tolerate no dissent from within the Justice Department about what the president wants.

Trump has always wanted to pursue his grievances. That was true when he was a businessman and a reality TV star. As the president, he has very different tools at his disposal to pursue those grudges. All of this is using the Justice Department in ways it has not been used in many decades. We’re really testing the limits of what the criminal justice system can and should be used for.

IN HIS WORDS

Trump praises another strongman

“I just concluded a wonderful call with the Highly Respected President of Kazakhstan, Kassym-Jomart Kemeluly Tokayev. They have signed the largest Railroad Equipment Purchase in History.”

— President Trump, Truth Social, Monday, Sep. 22

Highly respected. It is a phrase Trump often attributes to foreign leaders he finds agreeable, including autocrats and dictators.

The latest one to be showered with his praise, Tokayev, is the leader of the former Soviet Republic country known for its brutal crackdown on dissent and imprisonment of opposition leaders and independent journalists, according to Human Rights Watch, an international watchdog.

Other autocratic leaders who recently received Trump’s acclaim include the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un (“very good with me”); President Vladimir Putin of Russia (“we got along great”); President Xi Jinping of China (a “very smart man”); the Belarusian president, Aleksandr Lukashenko (“highly respected”); and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, who has pushed to dismantle its independent judiciary (“one of the most respected men”).

— Minho Kim

IN ONE IMAGE

A memorial’s seating arrangements

There are a lot of ways to measure the political weight of the memorial yesterday for Charlie Kirk. One is to look at the crowd, as my colleagues did.

The V.I.P seating area was studded with some of President Trump’s closest aides and allies, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, and Kash Patel, the director of the F.B.I. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, was right up front, too.

Their presence made the event look a little bit like a state funeral, and it sent an unmistakable message during a service that was part memorial, part Trump rally: Loyalty to the right-wing youth organizer’s memory and to the Trump administration are one and the same.

ONE LAST THING

The frenemy files

They say that if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.

If you want a frenemy, though, get a vice president.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris has laid out some of the tensions between herself and former President Joe Biden in her new book. Jill Biden quizzed Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, about the couple’s loyalties when Democrats were clamoring for the president to drop out of the presidential race. Once he did, Harris wrote, he created distractions for her in key moments. An excerpt from the book, my colleague Peter Baker writes, has already angered Biden’s loyalists.

Biden and Harris are certainly not the first president and vice president to find themselves at loggerheads. The tension goes all the way back to Adams and Jefferson.

Peter went through all the drama here.

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