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No White House is immune to hypocrisy. What makes the Trump administration’s justice system remarkable is not just the depth of its hypocrisy but its tenacity.
last night, CNN reported that the Department of Justice is pursuing a criminal investigation against E. Jean Carroll, the author who has accused Donald Trump of raping her in the 1990s, and won nearly $90 million in civil judgments against her. The investigation is reportedly focusing on whether Carroll committed perjury during his testimony in connection with two civil cases against him, both of which he won.
The news comes less than 10 days after Trump—acting as a private citizen—announced an agreement with the same Department of Justice to create Fund of 1.8 billion dollars reward his political allies, possibly including those who sacked the White House on January 6, 2021.
“The use of government authority to target individuals or institutions for inappropriate and illegitimate political, personal, or ideological reasons should not be tolerated by any Administration,” DOJ official Trent McCotter said when announcing the settlement. The quote came in writing statementwhich mercifully freed him from keeping a straight face while speaking. In fact, using government power to target individuals for political and personal reasons seems like a fitting explanation for the Carroll investigation as well as for many of the Justice Department’s actions in recent months.
The Carroll cases angered Trump. The president has been accused of sexual harassment by many women; He has denied all the charges, although he also boasts about hugging celebrities without consent. Get to Hollywood tape. Carroll, however, brought a lawsuit where a jury found him liable for sexual harassment. Judge Lewis Kaplan he wrote that although “Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Code,” the court found that Trump “exactly did so” in the ordinary understanding of “rape.” Trump insulted Carroll repeatedly on Social Reality as well as on the stand during one of the tests. He insisted in court that he did not know her, despite the photo showing them together, and said she was not his “type”, but when he was shown the photo in the archives, he thought it was his ex-wife Marla Maples.
Trump hasn’t been able to beat Carroll in court (though ongoing appeals efforts mean he still hasn’t paid), but he has a Justice Department that has shown a willingness to bring frivolous lawsuits against his political enemies, and an acting attorney general who seems determined to prove he can succeed in retaliating where his fired predecessor did not. (CNN reported that Todd Blanche, who holds that title, was recused from the case because of his previous work as Trump’s personal attorney in the Carroll case.)
The accusation centers on false financial support for Carroll’s legal efforts from Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and a major donor to liberal causes. In a 2022 filing, Carroll said he had no outside support for his case, but two weeks later, his attorneys told the judge and Trump’s attorneys that they had received funding from Hoffman’s nonprofit.
There are several reasons to be skeptical of the false claims here. First, Kaplan, the judge presiding over the civil cases, has already considered and dismissed concerns about the testimony. Carroll’s lawyers said he had no contact with Hoffman or the group, but Kaplan allowed Trump’s team to question him one more time. The judge then concluded that Carroll’s credibility was beyond question and prevented Trump’s lawyers from questioning him about the funding during the subsequent trial.
Second, the DOJ investigation is is reported it was not managed by the US attorney in New York, where the case occurred, but by Andrew Boutros, the US attorney in Chicago. While this is legal, it is not common (or was until this Trump administration, where the DOJ has regularly assigned remote offices to handle political cases). The record of the Chicago U.S. Attorney’s Office is a red flag of sorts: The office was in the news recently when prosecutors dropped the only remaining charges against members of the “Broadview Six,” a group of people arrested in a protest at an ICE facility last summer. They had already moved to drop the criminal charges, which were based on prosecutorial misconduct.
April Perry, the federal judge presiding over the case, said he was “I’m so shocked” for the conduct of the prosecutors during the main court cases. “I’ve never seen the kind of behavior by a prosecutor in front of a grand jury that I saw in those articles,” he said. Individual prosecutors testified to the credibility of the evidence before the grand jury, which is not allowed. When they failed to get an indictment, they excused the grand jury who voted against the charges and tried again. They also spoke to senior judges outside the courtroom. Later, they made a copy to hide it all from Perry.
Perry called Boutros into his courtroom, where he reprimanded him. “Your only goal is to do justice. Your client is justice itself,” he told her. “I really believe in the concept of due process and that most state attorneys are doing everything they can to do the right thing. That trust has been broken.”
Any investigation into Carroll faces the same problem: Boutros and the Trump Justice Department as a whole no longer have the benefit of the doubt that their actions are fair and impartial, and that they are not just attacking Trump’s enemies, real or perceived. Even if the investigation was disruptive, a criminal investigation is an unusual form of punishment. Defendants must spend time and money on lawyers; The Southern Poverty Law Center also recently found out cut off from financial means because it faces a dubious charges.
Trump ran for office condemning what he called the “weaponization” of the Justice Department, and promised to change it. But what was clear then and indisputable now is that Trump had no problem with the political right—he just wanted it on his side. The Broadview and Carroll cases show how he achieved that.
Related:
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Today’s news
- US and Iranian officials reached a tentative agreement to ease tensions in the Strait of Hormuz and begin 60 days of talks on Iran’s nuclear program, although the deal still needs approval from President Trump and Iran’s supreme leader, US officials said. The move came after the United States and Iran exchanged strikes throughout the night.
- Yesterday, Trump filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over a report alleging that he sent a sexually suggestive birthday message to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The new complaint comes after a federal judge threw out Trump’s previous lawsuit, ruling that he failed to show the newspaper committed the “actual malice” required to win a defamation claim.
- In her upcoming memoir, Jill Biden said she fears that her husband, former President Biden, he had a stroke during his much-criticized 2024 debate performance.
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Evening Read
I urge you to Read Terry Pratchett
Written by Helen Lewis
Will we ever live to see a successful screen adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s novel? Amazon television series Greetingswhich ended this month, came closest—but the book, a comedy about angels and devils teaming up to prevent Armageddon, was co-written by Neil Gaiman, and the source material ended after the first season anyway.
Pratchett is the funniest English writer since PG Wodehouse, with a sharp ironic edge hidden by the trappings of the fantasy genre—vampires, dwarfs, witches and wizards. Many fans thought that the original covers of Pratchett’s novels were too heavy on pregnant girls and strapping men with big swords, undermining their literary quality, and a similar problem has plagued various screen adaptations from Sky and the BBC. I suspect that casual viewers can’t wrap their heads around the idea of watching something with the comic voice of a Charles Dickens or Tobias Smollett novel while being distracted by CGI trolls.
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Take a look. Over five seasons, Hacking (now on HBO) redefined greatnessSophie Gilbert writes.
Investigate. And Back rooms (now in theaters), director Kane Parsons brings half-remembered dreams of the collective consciousness of the Internet to light, writes David Sims.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this journal.
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