In January, one of the first acts of the new Republican House majority was to establish a special subcommittee devoted to rooting out the ways the FBI and other federal bodies have supposedly been used as tools of political persecution.
“We have a duty to get into these agencies and look at how they have been weaponized to go against the very people they’re supposed to represent,” said Representative Jim Jordan, the Trump ally who chairs the body. Even less Trumpy members, like the establishment GOP stalwart Tom Cole, agreed: “It is undeniable that in recent years, the executive branch of the federal government has abused its authority and violated the civil liberties of American citizens often for political purposes.”
Since then, the subcommittee has held a string of meetings and pursued a variety of half-baked ideas, many of them related to Joe Biden’s son Hunter. What it hasn’t done is deliver any clear and convincing proof of government malfeasance, and certainly nothing on the caliber of the 1970s Church Committee, which Republicans have cited as a model.
Perhaps Jordan was just looking in the wrong places. The indictment obtained by Special Counsel Jack Smith yesterday offers a perfect example of exactly the kind of weaponization of the Justice Department that Jordan says he’s seeking. The only problem is that it was conducted by Trump and his allies, in an effort to stay in power, against the will of the American people.
Let’s start by defining weaponizing. Different administrations will have different policy desires and interpretations of the law. Sometimes that can veer into untoward behavior—Democrats griped that Trump was openly favoring red states early in the coronavirus pandemic, and Republicans complained that Barack Obama inappropriately bullied state governments into expanding entitlements—though it’s not inherently illegal or unethical.
But if a federal agency contrived to make false claims under official cover for the express purpose of obtaining a political or electoral outcome, that would seem to be a straightforward example of weaponizing government. That’s just what Smith alleges: “In late December 2020, the Defendant attempted to use the Justice Department to make knowingly false claims of election fraud to officials in the targeted states through a formal letter under the Acting Attorney General’s signature, thus giving the Defendant’s lies the backing of the federal government and attempting to improperly influence the targeted states to replace legitimate [Joe] Biden electors with the Defendant’s.”
During that time, according to the indictment, a co-conspirator—who circumstances indicate is Jeffrey Clark, then–assistant attorney general—met with Trump at the White House, in violation of Justice Department rules. Following those discussions, Clark drafted a letter to the Georgia legislature, which he proposed the acting attorney general and deputy attorney general sign, stating falsely that the DOJ had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States”; that the DOJ believed that two separate, valid sets of electors had been submitted to Congress; and that the legislature should hold a special session to decide which would go forth—apparently in the hopes that the GOP-led legislature would select the bogus Trump slate of electors.
Smith doesn’t connect all the dots in the indictment, but the House January 6 committee did. According to its investigation, the goal was not to have the DOJ take any other action beyond the letter. Trump just wanted the letter to create doubt and give a pretext to Republican members of Congress to reject the election results on January 6. “Don’t expect you to do that, just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R[epublican] Congressmen,” Trump said, according to notes taken by Richard Donoghue, the acting deputy attorney general.
The sham investigation is a favorite Trump tactic. He tried to employ it during his extortion of Ukraine in 2019, when he made clear that he didn’t care whether Ukraine actually investigated the Biden family’s business there, only that it announced an investigation he could use for political purposes. He tried the move again in late October 2020 after another nebulous story about Hunter Biden. Trump understood that the actual investigation didn’t matter—in fact, it might have hurt him if it had debunked allegations—but that the aroma of scandal could assist him.
Donoghue declined to sign Clark’s letter, and reiterated that the claims were false. But Clark didn’t relent. He told his bosses that Trump was going to name him acting attorney general but that he’d decline if they signed the letter. On January 3, Trump offered him the job, and Clark accepted. That evening, Donoghue and Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen came to meet Trump and told him that the DOJ would see mass resignations if Clark were appointed. Only then did Trump back down from the scheme.
These are allegations in the sense that they have not been proved in a court, but they don’t require much faith to accept. The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal all reported the basic thrust of the plot in January 2021, just weeks after it happened. The House January 6 committee added more detail in sworn testimony. (That committee perhaps better deserved the mantle of investigating the weaponization of government.) The Trump campaign, in its statement on the indictment yesterday, didn’t even bother to contest the allegations.
As the indictment notes, the goal of this alleged conspiracy was “to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate one or more persons in the free exercise and enjoyment of a right and privilege secured to them by the Constitution and laws of the United States—that is, the right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted.” Tom Cole was right: It is undeniable that the federal government abused its authority for political purposes. He just should have been more specific about which president and which party those abuses served.