For Trump, Justice
Means Vengeance
Jan. 17, 2026
The
editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by
expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.
President Trump is
celebrating the anniversary of his return to power by accelerating his attack
on the rule of law. He has spent the week leading up to Jan. 20 using the
mighty powers of the Justice Department as an extension of his personal and
political interests. The department has started a fabricated criminal
investigation of the Federal Reserve chair, searched the home of a Washington
Post reporter and created a White House-controlled fraud unit that would
streamline partisan prosecution.
Mr. Trump does not
attempt to hide his use of law enforcement powers for vengeance. He glories in
it. Last week, The Wall Street Journal
reported, he hosted federal prosecutors at the White House and
complained that they were not moving fast enough to punish the rivals, critics
and truth tellers he wished to target. This followed months of pressure by the
president on his attorney general to do more to prosecute those who oppose his
actions and those who tried to hold him accountable under the law in the past.
These efforts have
become a defining feature of Mr. Trump’s second term, and it can be easy to
become numb to them. We urge you not to. His usurpation of law enforcement
power threatens us all. His meddling with the independence of the Fed undermines the economy. His attacks on members of
Congress and the news media threaten people’s right to speak freely and hold
the government accountable. His move to control investigation and prosecution
from the White House portends an America where the state uses force to
promote the political interests of its leaders, rather than uphold the laws
passed by our representatives.
One year into his second term, America
risks losing a central feature of our democracy: that we are a country ruled by
laws, not by one man.
Among the many corrosive consequences of Mr. Trump’s actions is a
loss of faith in almost anything that his Justice Department does. Consider the
situation in Minnesota that attracted so much of the nation’s attention in
recent days. On Jan. 7 an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot to
death Renee Good, who was protesting ICE’s raids in Minneapolis. Under any
other modern president, the next steps would have been clear. The government
would have conducted a sober-minded inquiry about whether the agent had acted
appropriately.
Under Mr. Trump, the
verdict was preordained. The ICE agents on the scene prevented a bystander who
identified himself as a doctor from treating Ms. Good as she sat slumped and
bleeding in her car. The ICE agent who shot her sped away shortly afterward, videos
suggest. Mr. Trump quickly posted a misleading description of the confrontation
on social media. Later that day, the F.B.I. barred state investigators from
joining them in collecting and analyzing evidence from the scene.
Senior Trump officials
accused Ms. Good of “domestic terrorism,” and the Justice Department made a
mockery of itself by opening an investigation into Ms. Good and her
partner for their political activism. At least 10 federal lawyers in Washington
and Minnesota have since resigned or retired. Their response is honorable,
although it leaves even fewer principled officials to stand up to future
abuses.
The Justice Department
was hardly perfect before Mr. Trump took the oath of office a year ago. Still,
between Richard Nixon’s resignation in disgrace and Mr. Trump’s second term,
the department under both political parties took steps to remain independent from the White
House so that Americans could have confidence that federal law enforcement was
nonpartisan. If the government investigated somebody — or decided not to — the
reasonable assumption was that it was on the merits. That assumption is in tatters,
as the events in Minneapolis demonstrate.
After hollowing out the functions of the federal
government’s system of justice that ensure fairness and guard against
misconduct, the Trump administration has turned what remains into the agent of
Mr. Trump’s personal and political impulses. If you are on the president’s
side, you will be protected and even pardoned of crimes. If you threaten his
interests, you risk retribution from federal law enforcement.
On Sunday, Jerome
Powell, the Fed chair, said the Justice Department had served him with subpoenas in a bogus criminal
investigation. The department claimed it was looking into whether he had misled
Congress about the cost of renovations to the Fed’s headquarters, but he said
he had provided exhaustive details to Congress and had the bank’s internal
watchdog examine the construction costs. Mr. Trump’s real motive is obvious. He
wants to replace the Fed’s leadership with officials who betray its tradition
of independence from partisan politics and rapidly cut interest rates to goose
the economy before midterm elections this year. The targeting of Mr. Powell,
who will leave his role in May, serves to remind his successor that there is a
cost to independence.
Three days after Mr.
Powell’s announcement, federal agents took the extraordinary step of searching the home of
Hannah Natanson, a reporter for The Washington Post, and seizing her phone as
part of a leak investigation. This violates traditional government policy and
appears designed to chill valuable reporting by making sources nervous about
talking to journalists. Ms. Natanson had helped expose some of the negative
consequences of the Trump administration’s policies.
The list of Trump
critics and opponents who face or have faced legal action by the administration
also includes another Fed governor, Lisa Cook; the former F.B.I. director James Comey; Attorney General Letitia James of New York; Senator Adam Schiff, Democrat of California; and
Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California. This month
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he would begin administrative proceedings against Senator
Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona — which could result in the reduction of Mr.
Kelly’s military retirement rank and pension — after the senator participated
in a video urging military service members to resist illegal orders. The five
other Democratic lawmakers who participated in the video said they are also
under federal investigation. On Monday, Mr. Kelly sued Mr. Hegseth and the Pentagon on free-speech
grounds.
At the same time, a
parade of actual criminals who curry Mr. Trump’s favor receive clemency, and
investigations into suspicious behavior by his cronies are canceled or never opened. Many of the
president’s uses of the pardon power seem partly aimed at
diminishing confidence in legitimate past prosecutions — and trying to make
previous administrations look as unethical as the current one.
Janet Yellen, a former Fed chair and
Treasury secretary, summed up this inversion of the basic principles
of American justice: “If you can bring charges for no reason whatsoever against
your enemies, we’re no longer living in a society governed by the rule of law,”
she said.
More than 200 of the
department’s career lawyers have been fired, and thousands more have resigned. “I
wouldn’t even call it the Justice Department anymore,” Dena Robinson, a lawyer
who formerly worked in the civil rights division, said last year. “It’s become
Trump’s personal law firm.”
The administration
crossed another line last week when Vice President JD Vance announced that the White House would run an
unnecessary new Justice Department division on fraud. The department already
has an anti-fraud section, but it has been depleted by administration cutbacks; what’s different
about this new division is that the White House controls it directly. The new
outpost is particularly suspicious, given Mr. Trump’s loose and expedient
definition of fraudulent behavior as occurring only in states run by Democrats.
The announcement suggests it will be another piece of his partisan use of legal
powers. For now, the new division is centered on the social-service fraud that
has occurred in Minnesota, though he has his eyes on other Democratic states as
well.
The Minnesota fraud is
real, and the people who perpetrated it deserve to face charges. Many already
have; one of the prosecutors who resigned Tuesday over the response to the ICE
shooting had overseen the sprawling investigation. But Mr. Trump’s interest in
fraud is selective, applying exclusively in jurisdictions that have opposed
him. As KFF Health News reported,
he gave pardons or commutations to at least 68 people convicted of
fraud-related crimes during his first and second terms. And he fired or demoted more than 20 inspectors general
responsible for rooting out fraud.
As the second year of Mr. Trump’s second term begins next week, there
are some modestly encouraging signs of resistance — but not nearly enough.
Several Republicans in the House and Senate have said they do not believe Mr. Powell is a
criminal, and Senator Thom Tillis said he would oppose the confirmation of any
Fed governor until the investigation is concluded.
But the Republican Party has largely
been a silent partner as its leader removes all sense of justice from the
Justice Department. Some seem to grasp the danger to the economy of having
Trump control the Fed, but they need to see the larger picture and grasp the
danger to democracy of controlling law enforcement, too. On behalf of Americans
who are now living without a functioning system of federal law and order,
Congress should step up and end this self-interested destruction.
