[NYT] Trump as President Used the DOJ Against Opponents

A frequent refrain we hear is that Trump is the victim of “lawfare” from a DOJ weaponized against him but he ran on chants of “LOCK HER UP!” and even now has vowed to use the tools of office to go after his enemies. This article shows that as President he did do that and while he was restrained by some who wanted to protect the independence of the DOJ he has vowed if he wins to appoint loyalists who will not respect that independence and also the USSC has given widespread immunity to even investigating a president’s actions regarding the DOJ.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/21/us/politics/trump-investigations-enemies.html
As President, Trump Demanded Investigations of Foes. He Often Got Them.

He has threatened to target his perceived enemies if elected again. A look at his time in the White House shows how readily he could do so.

It was the spring of 2018 and President Donald J. Trump, faced with an accelerating inquiry into his campaign’s ties to Russia, was furious that the Justice Department was reluctant to strike back at those he saw as his enemies.

In an Oval Office meeting, Mr. Trump told startled aides that if Attorney General Jeff Sessions would not order the department to go after Hillary Clinton and James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, Mr. Trump would prosecute them himself.

Recognizing the extraordinary dangers of a president seeking not just to weaponize the criminal justice system for political ends but trying as well to assume personal control over who should be investigated and charged, the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, sought to stall.

“How about I do this?” Mr. McGahn told Mr. Trump, according to an account verified by witnesses. “I’m going to write you a memo explaining to you what the law is and how it works, and I’ll give that memo to you and you can decide what you want to do.”

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The episode marked the start of a more aggressive effort by Mr. Trump to deploy his power against his perceived enemies despite warnings not to do so by top aides. And a look back at the cases of 10 individuals brings a pattern into clearer focus: After Mr. Trump made repeated public or private demands for them to be targeted by the government, they faced federal pressure of one kind or another.

The broad outlines of those episodes have been previously reported. But a closer examination reveals the degree of concern and pushback against Mr. Trump’s demands inside the White House.

And it highlights how closely his expressed desires to go after people who had drawn his ire were sometimes followed by the Justice Department, F.B.I. or other agencies. Even without his direct order, his indirect influence could serve his ends and leave those in his sights facing expensive, time-consuming legal proceedings or other high-stress inquiries.

The story of that period has a powerful resonance today as Mr. Trump, angered in part by the two federal and two state-level indictments of him since leaving office, threatens to carry out a campaign of retribution if he returns to the White House. He has signaled that a second Trump administration would be stocked not with people who served as guardrails during his first term, but with carefully vetted loyalists who would eagerly carry out his wishes.

If elected again, he would also return to the White House bolstered by the Supreme Court’s ruling in July that former presidents have broad immunity from prosecution for official acts taken while in office.


Interviews, court filings and secret White House documents shed new light on how Mr. Trump’s demands for prosecutions in the spring of 2018 ignited a behind-the-scenes push by some of his top aides to contain his impulses, protect the rule of law and insulate the White House from legal and political blowback — issues that some of them say are arguably even more acute today.

The memo that Mr. McGahn’s lawyers in the White House Counsel’s Office produced following Mr. Trump’s April 2018 tirade about prosecuting Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Comey amounted to a primer on presidential power — and the limits on it — when it comes to the justice system, according to draft copies of it.
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“You’ve asked what steps you may lawfully take if you disagree with the attorney general’s decision not to pursue criminal prosecution or not to conduct further criminal investigation,” a draft of the memo that ultimately went to the president began.


The lawyers acknowledged that presidents can have considerable, if indirect, influence over Justice Department decision-making, not least through the power to replace the attorney general.

But they made clear that Mr. Trump did not have the authority “to initiate an investigation or prosecution yourself or circumvent the attorney general by directing a different official to pursue a prosecution or investigation,” as one draft memo put it.

The main message to Mr. Trump in the memos was that presidential meddling in a prosecution — flouting a norm that had become deeply embedded in American politics and government in the wake of Watergate — could have profoundly negative consequences for Mr. Trump, including the potential for impeachment and electoral defeat.

Even as they made that argument, the lawyers remained so concerned about being ignored by Mr. Trump that they smuggled drafts of the memo out of the White House complex so they would have a record of their efforts to restrain him if his demands for retribution got him, and them, in political and legal trouble.

They were right to be worried.

Within a month, Mr. Trump plunged ahead with one of his most successful efforts to have a Democratic critic investigated. He publicly demanded and ultimately got an inquiry by federal prosecutors into whether John F. Kerry, the former secretary of state, had broken the law by remaining in contact with Iranian diplomats while Mr. Trump was moving to end a nuclear deal with Tehran that Mr. Kerry had helped to negotiate during the Obama administration.

The Kerry investigation was not an outlier.

Through the rest of Mr. Trump’s time in office, he never let up on pressuring federal agencies to take action against his perceived enemies even as he was counseled against it by aides like Mr. McGahn and John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff from the middle of 2017 until the beginning of 2019.

Those who would find themselves facing down the power of the federal government ranged from high-profile figures like Mrs. Clinton to F.B.I. officials like Mr. Comey to people formerly in Mr. Trump’s personal orbit like Michael D. Cohen, his former lawyer and fixer, and Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former contestant on “The Apprentice” who worked in communications at the White House in 2017.

Mr. Trump’s efforts were so sustained and troubling to top West Wing aides that at least two of them took from the White House notes they had written that memorialized how he said he wanted to use the powers of the federal government against his rivals.

In a few of the cases where Mr. Trump wanted investigations, there was legitimate basis for action. But in many others, there was little or no legal justification. None resulted in a criminal conviction.
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There is no record of the inquiries and other actions coming about as a result of a formal, signed order from Mr. Trump. Instead, he repeatedly signaled what he wanted, publicly and privately, leaving no doubt among subordinates.

His defenders often seek to explain away Mr. Trump’s threats to take legal action against opponents as campaign trail bluster. But those who worked directly for him in the White House said Mr. Trump should be taken at his word.

“When Trump says things like this, he’s serious about it — I know from experience that he constantly voiced the idea and it’s something he will come back to until it gets done,” said John R. Bolton, who served as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser and said he had witnessed the president discussing whom he wanted investigated before himself becoming one of Mr. Trump’s targets.

‘Strong Constitutional Norms’
After his 2016 campaign, when chants of “lock her up” punctuated his rallies, Mr. Trump professed that he was ready to set aside his longstanding calls for Mrs. Clinton to be prosecuted. And during his tumultuous first year in office, as the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia gained traction, his main focus was on fending off that inquiry, which only expanded after he fired Mr. Comey.
But by late 2017 into early 2018, Mr. Trump’s attention shifted back to an old preoccupation and he wanted to go the offensive. He told aides he wanted to use the I.R.S. to target Mr. Comey; Peter Strzok, the lead F.B.I. agent from the Russia investigation; Lisa Page, a top F.B.I. aide; and Andrew G. McCabe, the bureau’s deputy director, according to federal court records and previous public statements made by Mr. Kelly, the White House chief of staff at the time.


Repeatedly, Mr. Kelly and Mr. McGahn, the White House counsel, strongly cautioned Mr. Trump against such talk. To them, using the federal government to go after those he saw as his enemies was a tactic from an authoritarian playbook. Mr. Kelly specifically told Mr. Trump that along with being immoral and self-destructive, weaponizing the I.R.S. was illegal.

By April 2018, Mr. Trump took the idea to another level.

Early that month, Mr. Trump learned that the F.B.I. had searched the New York office of Mr. Cohen, his longtime lawyer, who had channeled hush money payments in the final days of the 2016 campaign to a p*rn actress who said she had a sexual liaison with Mr. Trump.
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“However good the president’s intentions, there are those who would view any political involvement in a prosecution or criminal investigation as violating the constitutional norm and the president’s constitutional obligations,” one draft said. “It may prove difficult to explain in an easy, understandable way why intervening in a particular proceeding was necessary and would not compromise its fairness.”

There was a distinction, the lawyers wrote, between what a president technically could do and what he should do.

“The gulf between the overwhelming power of the federal government and the vulnerability of the individual citizen may be nowhere starker than in the criminal prosecution or an investigation,” they wrote.


A polished version of the memo was delivered to Mr. Trump. Whether he read it is not known. But in the West Wing, there was continued concern that Mr. Trump could do something politically catastrophic or even illegal, creating potentially serious problems for him and those working for him.

 

The article is pretty long and unfortunately behind a pay wall. But to summarize Trump
Did pressure DOJ to investigate and attempt to prosecute John Kerry, to get Micheal Cohen out back in prison after he was released early, and investigate many others including former Apprentice contestants who had said unflattering things about Trump. He also pressured Bill Barr to launch the John Durham investigation that concluded a year into the Biden Administration without any significant findings of wrong doing.