Trump Promised Revenge. He’s Using the DOJ to Make It Happen

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1:07Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution. Retribution was a key theme of President Donald Trump's return to the White House. Here he is in 2022, speaking about the injustice he saw in the convictions of January 6th writers. And if it requires ardents, we will give them ardents because they are being treated so unfairly. And in 2023, talking about the injustice of the cases brought against him. But remember, it's a Democrat charging his opponent. Nobody's ever seen anything like it. That means that if I win and somebody wants to run against me, I call my attorney general.

1:57I say, listen, indict him. Well, he hasn't done anything wrong that we know. I don't know. Indict him on income tax evasion. You'll figure it out. Going into his second term, it was an open question about how much time would be spent on policy versus how much time would be spent on revenge. Bloomberg's senior national political reporter, Nancy Cook, has covered Trump for a decade. and interviewed him at Mar-a-Lago a couple days before the first 2024 presidential debate. I think there were people around him who wanted him to really build a big policy agenda and were steering him away from the retribution agenda.

2:36But what we've seen in office so far is that the retribution agenda is alive and well, and even more so than I think Republicans and even people close to Trump thought were possible.

2:51I'm Sarah Holder, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, how Trump is upending norms and expanding presidential powers to target his perceived political enemies. A major weapon in that fight? The Department of Justice.

3:14Bloomberg's Nancy Koch says that when Trump took office in January, he made it clear that retribution wasn't just a campaign theme. It was a key part of his second-term agenda. The tools at his disposal are quite large at this point because his administration is taking a very broad view of presidential executive power. And I would say that unlike the first term, this time they have really approached the retribution campaign with real military style precision, a lot of savviness about how to use the levers of the federal government. We saw him very quickly go after law firms that had done work for people he didn't like, using social media to go after people, pulling security clearances.

3:55And then lately we've seen him go after specific people who have been personally critical of the Trump administration. The Department of Justice has indicted former FBI Director James Combs. President Trump's former national security advisor, John Bolton, has just been indicted. Attorney General Letitia James has been indicted. Part of what's enabled the Trump administration to pursue these targets is the cooperation of the Department of Justice. Pam Bondi said during her confirmation hearing to be attorney general that she wasn't going to have an enemies list at the Justice Department. But she doesn't need an enemies list because she has been given Trump's enemies list.

4:37Chris Strome covers the Department of Justice for Bloomberg. Across the board, Bondi and her top staff have been carrying out essentially a purge at the Justice Department where hundreds of people, career prosecutors and staff, have been fired or resigned. And in concert with that, they've been investigating and now prosecuting individuals who Trump has identified as being his political enemies. They are carrying out broad, sweeping investigations into what Trump and his allies have said is a grand conspiracy against Trump. dating back to 2016, starting with the Russia investigation, going into the Mueller investigation, going into the investigation into Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and then the investigation into Trump retaining classified documents.

5:42It seems he doesn't view this as weaponizing the justice system. He views this as using the justice system in the same way that it was used against him. Is that fair? Yeah. One of the really interesting approaches that Trump and his allies are taking is to say that the Justice Department was weaponized against them. And therefore, they're trying to correct the record. They're trying to prosecute people who carried out criminal actions up to and including treason against Trump. And if you look at the actions that are being taken now against Jim Comey or Letitia James or John Bolton, a lot of it is finding any kind of charge that they possibly can to hang on to somebody.

6:31It doesn't matter that these charges don't have anything to do with the grand conspiracy. All that matters is that these people are under investigation and now being prosecuted. And so Trump can claim that he's been right all along in saying that these people are dirty and these people are corrupt and therefore they deserve to go to jail. Are there any mechanisms in place that are supposed to prevent the president from using the Department of Justice in this way? One of the really interesting lessons from the Trump era is that what we thought were rules and regulations governing how the Justice Department operated and how criminal prosecutions were conducted actually don't really exist.

7:16What Trump has exposed is that we've been relying on a series of norms and traditions where the Justice Department would willingly have a distance and an independence from the administration. Multiple attorney generals and Justice Department officials across administrations have enforced policies and rules that would separate the Justice Department from the White House when it came to conducting investigations and making decisions about prosecutions. Trump has obliterated that. He's come in with a wrecking ball and essentially has declared himself as being the chief law enforcement officer of the country and the person who can make decisions about who should be prosecuted and even how they can be prosecuted.

8:08Nancy Cook says that change in norms is something you can actually see. One thing that has struck me just visually about Trump in his second term is Pam Bondi is over in the Oval Office a lot at public events. I covered the first Trump term. I covered two years of Biden's White House. Like, I don't remember Merrick Garland being over in the Oval Office all the time for events. Pam Bondi is over there often. Standing behind Trump as he makes pronouncements, standing there with other officials. I would say they're upending a lot of the legal agencies, including the FBI, the CIA. But it's like she is visorily aligned with the president in these photo ops all the time as well.

8:49The distance and independence the White House has traditionally kept from the Department of Justice is a modern phenomenon that only dates back to the aftermath of Richard Nixon's presidency and the Watergate scandal. Nixon tried to use the powers of the presidency in order to investigate his political enemies. And Nixon tried to actually tell the Justice Department how to carry out investigations. Members of Congress actually stood up to the president and determined that the actions that were being taken were offensive, that there had to be certain guardrails put in place. And so that's when you began to see laws that were actually passed, such as creating inspector generals within these agencies.

9:33But during this Trump administration, those safeguards have just been knocked down. Trump fired a bunch of inspector generals. He has declared that he can do what he wants with the Justice Department. And you're not seeing the same pushback in Congress that you did 40 years ago. Coming up, what's next in the cases of former FBI Director James Comey and New York State Attorney General Letitia James? And what kind of new precedent Trump's norm-breaking DOJ could set?

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11:21It's been over half a century since Nixon's Watergate scandal pushed Congress to create firmer boundaries between the Department of Justice and the president. But now, Trump has started breaking them. Critics have said that many of the indictments Trump's DOJ has opened so far are motivated by the president's quest for revenge. Trump doesn't see it that way. It's about justice, really. It's not revenge. It's about justice. In late September, he was asked about the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey as he boarded Air Force One. Comey was charged with making a false statement and obstructing a congressional proceeding related to his 2020 testimony at a Senate Judiciary hearing.

12:02He's pleaded not guilty. It's also about the fact that you can't let this go on. They are sick, radical left people. And they can't get away with it. And Comey was one of the people. He wasn't the biggest. Comey first got on Trump's bad side back in 2016, when Comey opened an investigation into alleged ties between Trump's first presidential campaign and Russia. That was the original sin. Bloomberg DOJ reporter Chris Strom. As the investigation continued, Trump fired Comey in May of 2017. and Comey then leaked some of his written memos about his interactions with Trump. And the public revelations were very damaging to Trump and actually led the Justice Department at that time to appoint special counsel Mueller to carry on the Russia investigation.

12:59And ever since then, Trump has vilified Comey and called for his prosecution. So it was something he couldn't get done in his first term and became a big priority and part of how he shaped the Justice Department in his second term. Yeah, he was not getting the results he wanted during the beginning of his second administration. And so he put out a very public demand on social media, essentially in order to Bondi, demanding that Comey and others like Letitia James be prosecuted. And it was only days later that the White House installed one of Trump's White House aides, Lindsay Halligan, who Trump abruptly put in as the interim U.S.

13:47attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. And just days after she was inserted into that position, she brought an indictment against James Comey. And then a couple of weeks later, she brought an indictment against Letitia James. James had launched a federal civil fraud case against Trump and the Trump Organization in 2022, and won. In October, she was charged with mortgage occupancy fraud and for making false statements to a financial institution. She's also pleaded not guilty. The career prosecutors working in the Eastern District of Virginia had reached a decision that there was no justification to bring these cases against Comey and James, and that most likely these cases would fail in court.

14:34I'm wondering how Trump being very open about his dislike of Comey might play into this case because I know Comey has asked for the charges against him to be dismissed, arguing that he is being personally targeted. Comey has already filed a motion to say that the indictment against him should be dismissed because it represents a vindictive and selective prosecution. and his legal team has cited the multitude of times that Trump has disparaged Comey or called for his prosecution. These motions have already been made. They're under consideration by the judge. And trying to succeed with a motion claiming vindictive and selective prosecution is very difficult.

15:17A lot of defendants do it, but don't have success. Comey might be the poster child for a case that can actually succeed. And if Comey's motion succeeds, it most likely will also be replicated by Letitia James in her motion and others who are still to come. Comey and James, for their part, are both determined to fight their charges in court. Their trials are set for January. And over the past year, several DOJ attorneys have resigned in protest over directives they were given in other investigations. But Chris says, Trump's DOJ is facing resistance that's much more muted than it was in the Nixon era.

15:58Congress has largely been absent. I mean, Democrats don't have any power. They don't control either the House or the Senate. And so in order to have oversight hearings or to demand information from the administration or issue subpoenas, you know, that can only come from the Republican majority and they're not doing it. You do have individuals inside agencies, such as the Justice Department that are questioning what the White House and what Trump are doing. There have been some examples where even Attorney General Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche have resisted certain steps that Trump and his allies want the Justice Department to take.

16:39There's still some open questions about what the Justice Department is going to do with some of these cases that they haven't been fully on board with what Trump has been demanding that they do. I'm curious about long-term precedent here. It's something that comes up a lot when we talk about the way that Trump is operating as president. Is it possible and is it a concern that future U.S. leaders, Republican or Democrat, could turn around and do the same thing to their political opponents or use the DOJ to similar ends? Yes. I mean, that's one of the concerns that has been raised is that as Trump breaks down the walls that have existed between the Justice Department and the White House, he's setting a new precedent that any administration going forward can use.

17:30And there's really nothing to stop that from happening short of either a public outcry that becomes so overwhelming or congressional resistance. I think for Trump and his allies, it's not even a matter of getting a conviction. It's the process of indicting these individuals and forcing them to have to get legal representation and go through court processes. The process is the punishment. Not just the process is the punishment, but also the message that it sends to other people. Bloomberg's senior national political reporter, Nancy Cook again. If you speak out, there is a huge risk that we'll go after you.

18:14And I think that you're seeing in Washington, D.C., a lot of self-censorship, you know, with like maybe lawyers not speaking out as much or former Trump officials who were very vocal and on TV a lot going quieter. And so I do think that it's the message that, you know, you just keep it to yourself. In late September, Trump was asked who was next on his list after the Comey indictment, and he said he isn't done. It's not a list, but I think there'll be others. The next wave of indictments could come as soon as January, when a federal grand jury convenes in Florida that Trump's allies expect will investigate what they believe has been a long-running conspiracy by former government officials to undermine Trump.

18:56Trump has even said that the Justice Department needs to take a look at Merrick Garland, Chris Wray, Lisa Monaco, Jack Smith. These were all the key officials in charge of investigations that were against Trump. So that's the next phase of the retribution campaign that I'm really paying attention to right now and which individuals will get swept up into that. And also you have to keep in mind we're only in year one of his four years second term. So it's very unclear to me what does the Justice Department look like at the end of this?

19:39This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg.com, subscribe today at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. If you like this episode, make sure to follow and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.

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