When Donald Trump appeared on “Meet the Press” a month after winning a second term, NBC News’ Kristen Welker asked the then-president-elect whether he intended to “seek retribution” against his perceived political enemies. “I’m not looking to go back into the past,” the Republican replied.
A week into his second term, however, Trump’s interest in the recent past is tough to miss. Indeed, the new president has launched a revenge tour without modern precedent — with actions ranging from the petty to the potentially dangerous.
The retribution campaign has also reached the Justice Department. NBC News reported:
The Justice Department said Monday that it fired several career lawyers involved in prosecuting Donald Trump, escalating the president’s campaign of retribution against his perceived enemies. The employees worked on special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation that led to now-dismissed indictments against Trump over his handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“Today, Acting Attorney General James McHenry terminated the employment of a number of DOJ officials who played a significant role in prosecuting President Trump,” a Justice Department official wrote to NBC News. “In light of their actions, the Acting Attorney General does not trust these officials to assist in faithfully implementing the President’s agenda. This action is consistent with the mission of ending the weaponization of government.”
Of course, in our system of government, it’s not necessarily the job of career prosecutors to “faithfully implement” Trump’s wishes. Indeed, given the circumstances, it’s only natural to wonder whether the ousted officials might take legal action, pointing to civil service protections afforded to officials who are not political appointees.
What’s more, it’s important to appreciate just how twisted the broader context is. After compiling voluminous evidence, federal prosecutors alleged that Trump, in the wake of his 2020 election defeat, committed a variety of crimes. Years later, prosecutors who did nothing wrong find themselves unemployed, while a convicted felon finds himself in the Oval Office.
Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney, told NBC News: “Firing prosecutors because of cases they were assigned to work on is just unacceptable.” The NBC News legal contributor added that such a move is “anti-democracy.”
It’s also not the sort of dynamic that one expects to find in a nation that values the rule of law. As for the idea that such a move is part of “ending the weaponization of government,” Team Trump obviously has this backward. From a political perspective, however, there is a possible backlash to all of this. The president has already made a variety of unpopular moves, and there is some recent polling that suggests much of the public is opposed to Trump targeting his perceived political foes. Democrats eager to push back against White House abuses have plenty of targets to consider, but it wouldn’t pose much of a challenge for the party to tell voters something along the lines of, “Trump said he’d fight for you, but he’s instead settling scores for himself.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
Latest Post
Recommended
