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No White House is immune to hypocrisy. What makes the Trump administration’s approach to justice so astonishing is not just the depth of the hypocrisy but its brazenness.
Last night, CNN reported that the Department of Justice is pursuing a criminal investigation against E. Jean Carroll, the writer who has accused Donald Trump of raping her in the 1990s, and won nearly $90 million in civil judgments against him. The probe reportedly focuses on whether Carroll committed perjury during her testimony related to two civil lawsuits against him, both of which she won.
The news comes less than 10 days after Trump—putatively acting as a private citizen—announced an agreement with that same Justice Department to create a $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his political allies, potentially including those who sacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
“The use of government power to target individuals or entities for improper and unlawful political, personal, or ideological reasons should not be tolerated by any Administration,” the DOJ official Trent McCotter said while announcing the settlement. That quote came in a written statement, which mercifully freed him from having to keep a straight face while saying it. In truth, using government power to target individuals for political and personal reasons seems like an apt description of the probe into Carroll as well as many of the Justice Department’s steps in recent months.
Carroll’s lawsuits infuriated Trump. The president has been accused of sexual assault by many women; he has denied all accusations, although he also boasts about nonconsensual groping in the infamous Access Hollywood tape. Carroll, however, brought a case where a court actually found him liable for sexual abuse. Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote that although “Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law,” the jury found that Trump “did exactly that” in the common understanding of “rape.” Trump insulted Carroll repeatedly on Truth Social as well as on the stand during one of the trials. He insisted before the trial that he did not know her, despite a picture showing them together, and said she was not his “type,” but when shown the photograph in a deposition, he mistook her for his ex-wife Marla Maples.
Trump couldn’t beat Carroll in court (though ongoing appeals efforts mean he has not yet had to pay up), but he does have a Justice Department that has shown a willingness to bring preposterous cases against his political enemies, and an acting attorney general who appears determined to prove he can succeed at political retribution where his fired predecessor did not. (CNN reported that Todd Blanche, who holds that title, was recused from this case because of his previous work as Trump’s personal lawyer in Carroll litigation.)
The accusation of perjury centers on financial support for Carroll’s legal efforts from Reid Hoffman, a LinkedIn co-founder and major donor to liberal causes. In a 2022 deposition, Carroll said she did not have any outside support for her litigation, but two weeks later, her lawyers told a judge and Trump’s attorneys that they had secured funding from a nonprofit Hoffman leads.
There are a couple of reasons to be skeptical of claims of perjury here. First, Kaplan, the judge overseeing the civil cases, already considered and dismissed concerns over the testimony. Carroll’s lawyers said she had no communication with Hoffman or the group, but Kaplan allowed Trump’s team to question her once more. The judge then concluded that Carroll’s credibility was not in doubt and barred Trump’s attorneys from questioning her about the funding during the subsequent trial.
Second, the DOJ investigation is reportedly being overseen not by a U.S. attorney in New York, where the trial occurred, but by Andrew Boutros, the U.S. attorney in Chicago. Although this is legal, it is unusual (or it was until this Trump administration, during which DOJ has repeatedly assigned faraway offices to handle political cases). The track record of the Chicago U.S. Attorney’s Office is a red flag of its own: The office was recently in the news when prosecutors dismissed the only remaining misdemeanor charges against members of the “Broadview Six,” a group of people arrested at a protest at an ICE facility last fall. They had already moved to dismiss felony charges, which turned out to be a result of misconduct by prosecutors.
April Perry, the federal judge presiding over the case, said she was “incredibly shocked” by prosecutors’ conduct during grand-jury proceedings. “I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts,” she said. Prosecutors personally vouched for the credibility of evidence before a grand jury, which is impermissible. When they failed to get an indictment, they excused grand jurors who voted against charges and tried again. They also spoke with grand jurors outside of a courtroom. Later, they redacted transcripts to hide it all from Perry.
Perry summoned Boutros to her courtroom, where she scolded him. “Your sole goal is to do justice. Your client is justice itself,” she told him. “I do believe deeply in the presumption of regularity and that most government attorneys are doing the best 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 aren’t just attacking Trump’s enemies, real or perceived. Even if the probe sputters, a spurious criminal investigation is a form of extrajudicial punishment. Defendants must spend time and money on attorneys; the Southern Poverty Law Center also recently found itself cut off from financial channels because it is facing a dubious indictment.
Trump ran for office decrying what he alleged was the “weaponization” of the Justice Department, and he promised to reverse it. But what was apparent then and is beyond dispute now is that Trump had no problem with politicized justice—he just wanted it on his side. The Broadview and Carroll cases show just how effectively he has achieved that.
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Today’s News
- U.S. and Iranian officials reached a tentative agreement to ease tensions in the Strait of Hormuz and begin 60 days of talks over Iran’s nuclear program, though the deal still requires approval from President Trump and Iran’s supreme leader, U.S. officials said. The development came after the United States and Iran exchanged strikes overnight.
- Yesterday, Trump refiled a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over a report alleging that he sent a sexually suggestive birthday message to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The new complaint comes after a federal judge dismissed Trump’s earlier case, ruling that he had failed to show the newspaper acted with the “actual malice” required to win a defamation claim.
- In her forthcoming memoir, Jill Biden said she feared that her husband, former President Biden, was having a stroke during his widely criticized 2024 debate performance.
Dispatches
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Evening Read
I Am Begging You to Read Terry Pratchett
By Helen Lewis
Will we ever live to see a successful screen adaptation of a Terry Pratchett novel? The Amazon television series Good Omens, which ended this month, came closest—but that book, a comedy about an angel and a devil teaming up to avert Armageddon, was co-written with Neil Gaiman, and the source material ran out after the first season in any case.
Pratchett is the funniest English writer since P. G. Wodehouse, with a sharp, satirical edge disguised by the trappings of the fantasy genre—vampires, dwarfs, witches, and wizards. Many fans thought the original covers of Pratchett’s novels went too heavy on busty maidens and strapping men with big swords, undermining their literary merit, and a similar problem has beset the various screen adaptations from Sky and the BBC. I suspect that casual viewers can’t compute the idea of watching something with the comic tone of a Charles Dickens or Tobias Smollett novel while being distracted by CGI trolls.
Read the full article.
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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