Trump’s Revenge Campaign, Live on Morning TV

Opinion|Trump’s Revenge Campaign, Live on Morning TV

Less than 12 hours after President Trump’s inauguration in January, he revoked the security detail protecting John Bolton, his former national security adviser turned critic, despite credible threats from Iran. Since then, Mr. Trump has repeatedly ridiculed Mr. Bolton on social media, including by calling him one of the “stupid people” making it harder to end the Ukraine war. The president has also continued his yearslong accusations that Mr. Bolton leaked classified information, without offering any evidence.

None of Mr. Trump’s pressure tactics stopped Mr. Bolton from pointing out the president’s many foreign policy failures. On Thursday evening, Mr. Bolton was back on CNN, saying that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had managed to “roll” Mr. Trump at their recent Alaska summit, and criticizing the administration for being unable to explain the outcome of the summit or the future of peace talks.

On Friday morning, the intimidation ratcheted up several notches. At dawn, the F.B.I. conducted a search of Mr. Bolton’s house in Bethesda, Md., and his office in Washington. Agents carried out boxes of papers and put them into vehicles with flashing blue lights in front of the amassed cameras. The Times reported that officials were investigating whether Mr. Bolton had improperly leaked national security information to the news media and other parties to damage the Trump administration. Mr. Bolton, notably, has not held government office in six years.

It is too early to know what the F.B.I. will claim to find in all of those boxes but not too early to surmise that the search for incriminating documents was not the real goal of Friday’s search. Even if it turns up documents that should not be there, the administration has damaged any presumption of good faith by flinging weightless accusations of criminality at those who challenge it. That approach was evident in the snide social media posts that accompanied the search. “NO ONE is above the law,” wrote Kash Patel, the bureau’s director. “@FBI agents on mission.” Mr. Patel’s deputy Dan Bongino jumped to an accusation of guilt with his response: “Public corruption will not be tolerated.” And Attorney General Pam Bondi declared: “America’s safety isn’t negotiable. Justice will be pursued. Always.”

The search is a new chapter in Mr. Trump’s campaign of retribution against his critics. The White House and its loyalists in the Justice Department and the F.B.I. are sending a clear message: Keep quiet, or we will use the extraordinary power of federal law enforcement to threaten your job or your liberty and put you under a lasting cloud of suspicion. And they are using the fearsome punitive authority of the government to conduct this campaign.

Mr. Trump has accused former President Barack Obama of “treason,” claiming his predecessor was behind the effort to reveal how Russia helped Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. “He’s guilty,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Obama in July, acting as both judge and jury. Almost immediately the Justice Department created a task force to investigate the allegation. Jack Smith, the former special counsel who brought two federal indictments against Mr. Trump, is now under a federal investigation after Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, accused him of violating the Hatch Act.

The White House is also using accusations of mortgage fraud against three people for whom Mr. Trump holds special grievances. The F.B.I. has begun a criminal investigation into whether Letitia James, the attorney general of New York and a Democrat, lied on mortgage documents. Ms. James, who denied the charge, won a fraud judgment against Mr. Trump in a state court last year. (This week a New York appellate court tossed out the half-billion-dollar fine against him as excessive but upheld the judgment.) The Justice Department has even issued a subpoena to Ms. James for records related to her lawsuit against Mr. Trump, an extraordinary intrusion into a state legal matter that directly affects Ms. Bondi’s boss.

The second target is Senator Adam Schiff, a California Democrat and an outspoken adversary of Mr. Trump, whom the president has accused of similar deception on a mortgage application; a federal investigation is underway. The third is Lisa Cook, a member of the board of the Federal Reserve (appointed by President Joe Biden), whom Mr. Trump threatened to fire on Friday, claiming the grounds of mortgage deception. The allegations initially came from Bill Pulte, Mr. Trump’s appointee as the Federal Housing Finance Agency director, who has not explained how Ms. Cook’s federal mortgage application came to his attention. The move fits with Mr. Trump’s intention to take control of the central bank, despite its independence from the executive.

It is possible none of these investigations will result in a criminal charge. Still, they can do great harm to their targets. The cost of mounting a defense can be ruinous, and in some cases the reputational damage can be impossible to fix. Whatever the outcome, they instill fear in anyone who might consider challenging the president, and they erode trust in the justice system.

Mr. Trump seems convinced that he is doing nothing to his rivals that was not done to him in earlier prosecutions and lawsuits. That is untrue. There is little comparison between the substantial evidence amassed in his cases — in particular, that he tried to break the nation’s election laws in 2020 and refused to return classified White House documents — and the frequent lack of evidence lobbed at his adversaries.

We do not pretend to know how any of these cases will turn out. But it is clear that Mr. Trump and his appointees are perverting the justice system to serve their political interests and intimidate their critics. Given this pattern, Mr. Bolton and the rest of Mr. Trump’s targets deserve every benefit of the doubt. Despite the justice system’s many imperfections, Americans long had reason to trust that federal officials would not target people for investigations without evidence. Under the Trump administration, that assumption is disappearing. The president has given all Americans reason to believe that justice is now applied selectively and unfairly.