Trump Will Use the Justice Department to Destroy His Enemies in a Second Term, Former Officials Warn

Earlier this year, Rolling Stone reported that Donald Trump had taken to asking close advisers for the names of Justice Department staffers and senior FBI agents who have worked on federal probes involving him, because, in the event he wins the 2024 election, he wants them “quickly” and “immediately” fired. That level of petty retribution is, of course, totally within character for the ex-president, who regularly fired people over Twitter when he was in office and then insulted their intelligence to boot. But apparently it’s nothing compared to what former administration officials fear he’ll do to his perceived enemies—a group that includes Joe Biden—in the event he wins a second term.

In a story for New York magazine published on Monday, former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori writes that a number of individuals who served in Trump’s Justice Department the first time around are deeply concerned about Trump’s thirst for retribution in the event he retakes power. “I would not want to be attorney general under Donald Trump,” one person who would conceivably be under consideration for the job told Khardori; the others, who included “Senate-confirmed officials at the highest levels of the Trump Justice Department” agreed, per Khardori, that their “most pressing concern was that Trump would follow through on his threats to target his political enemies—and that he could be much more effective next time.” Said one former official: “During the first administration, the president talked a lot about pursuing political enemies. He spoke about it during the campaign, he spoke about it while he was president, but the Justice Department did not act on it.… My concern is in a second term. I think the president would be very focused on finding people who would act on his desire to retaliate against political opponents.”

One person who would no doubt be at the top of Trump’s retaliation list? The guy who cost the ex-president a successive term.

Per New York:

Against this backdrop, Trump’s threat to prosecute President Biden deserves serious attention. Ever since Biden’s election, conservative politicians and media figures have portrayed him and his family as self-evidently corrupt, and a probe by House Republicans that began this year continues apace. Thus far, the baroque theory that they have spun up—some sort of criminal foreign corruption scheme involving Hunter Biden’s overseas work—has remained unsubstantiated, held together by aggressive rhetoric and various scraps of information that they have not managed to pull together into anything approximating a coherent theory, let alone an actual alleged criminal scheme.

All Trump would need to do is find someone in his Justice Department—his attorney general or perhaps the head of the criminal division—who would accede to his demand for a Biden investigation, which could be conducted either by a hand-picked prosecutor in the department or a special counsel recruited from outside and appointed by the attorney general. A prosecutor could easily spend years trawling through the Biden family’s business dealings. And even if Biden were never actually charged, a criminal investigation along these lines would be incredibly burdensome both psychologically and financially, at the same time potentially chilling other figures who dare to oppose Trump.

Of course, people would have to agree to do Trump’s dirty work for him, and the hope is that enough people would say no. But as one former official warned: “My fear is in a second Trump administration, he would keep firing people until he found people who were willing to act on his requests. And ultimately, eventually, he’ll be able to find people like that, and I think he did. He was surrounded by people like that at the end of the first administration.” As former Trump administration aide Miles Taylor warns in his forthcoming book, a second term for the ex-president will be “a revenge machine.”

Which seems like reason enough to deny him a follow-up!

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