The White House is justifying President Donald Trump’s increasingly severe retribution campaign as turnabout that’s fair play. The Democrats did this, ipso facto, we should do it right back to them.
“It is not weaponizing the Department of Justice to demand accountability for those who weaponize the Department of Justice,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Monday.
But the last week has epitomized how Trump has, in fact, gone much further in leveraging the tools of government against his perceived foes.
Trump pushing out the US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia is a case in point.
Pressed on Trump going after his handpicked US attorney because he was unsatisfied with efforts to bring charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James, Leavitt doubled down on portraying James, a Democrat, as a politician “abusing their power” and quickly pivoted to the administration’s accusations of mortgage fraud against her.
It’s about retribution, yes. But it’s also clearly about escalation.
While Republicans often speculated about President Joe Biden nefariously weaponizing the government, Trump is doing it right out in the open – in ways not demonstrated in Biden’s term.
The ousting of the US attorney
US Attorney Erik Siebert announced Friday that he was stepping down after the president said, “I want him out.” And Trump made it abundantly clear that the reason he pushed Siebert out was that he had failed to charge prominent Democrats. (The president also told reporters he disliked that Virginia’s two Democratic senators had approved Siebert as part of a Senate custom.)
Trump went even further on Saturday, publicly complaining that Attorney General Pam Bondi also hadn’t more aggressively pursued charges against former FBI Director James Comey, Sen. Adam Schiff of California and James.
“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” he wrote on Truth Social.
Trump has spent years pushing the bounds on this subject. He’s floated criminal charges for his opponents and commented on pending investigations. Earlier this year he ordered investigations of two first-term critics.
But even for him, this is taking things to another level. He has basically fired a US attorney for not prosecuting his opponents. (Trump asserts he did, in fact, fire Siebert, while Siebert told staff he was resigning.) And now the president’s publicly pressuring Bondi over the same issue.
These are things presidents don’t generally do – and crucially, that there’s no evidence Biden ever did.
Leavitt said Monday that Trump was “rightfully frustrated” against those who prosecuted him.
“It was Joe Biden and his attorney general who weaponized the DOJ,” Leavitt said.
Indeed, Republicans have spent years accusing Biden of being behind Trump’s indictments. But there is no real proof that he played any role. He repeatedly avoided publicly commenting on the cases, citing the need for Justice Department independence. About the best evidence Republicans had was a 2022 New York Times report that stated Biden had privately told his inner circle that Trump should be prosecuted. But the report noted that the Democratic president hadn’t communicated these thoughts to then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Garland said he didn’t feel pressured.
Biden said in 2023 that he “never once, not one single time, suggested to the Justice Department what they should do or not do relative to bringing a charge or not bringing a charge.”
There is also no evidence Garland was instrumental in the decision to bring charges. He appointed special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the federal cases against Trump.
“No one has told me to indict,” Garland said in 2023. “And in this case, the decision to indict was made by the special counsel.”
Late in 2024, Biden briefly alluded to the need to “lock him up” – referring to Trump – but quickly qualified that he meant “politically.”
Leavitt and Trump are on somewhat firmer ground when it comes to James. The New York attorney general earned criticism even from some Democrats for playing up her intention to scrutinize Trump while she was campaigning for office. She said at one point said, “Donald Trump’s days of defrauding Americans are coming to an end.”
But James’ civil fraud case against Trump was ultimately successful (the $500 million judgment was later thrown out by an appeals court, but the judges said Trump remained liable for the fraud). By contrast, prosecutors appear to have struggled to build a case against James when it comes to accusations of mortgage fraud, as CNN has reported.
Jimmy Kimmel
The other big example last week was the Trump administration publicly pressuring ABC News to suspend Jimmy Kimmel over his comments on Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
Republicans have often compared this to the Biden administration urging social media companies to censor misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic.
But again, the comparison is not apples to apples.
In the Kimmel case, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, publicly threatened ABC if it didn’t push Kimmel out. He said ABC could do it “easy way or the hard way” and laid out almost exactly how local broadcasters would soon force ABC’s hand.
Trump himself has also celebrated his role in pushing out late-night hosts he didn’t like, and he even predicted two months ago that Kimmel would meet the same fate as CBS’ Stephen Colbert.
The pressure was overt, and it was rather explicit – in a way it never was with the Biden administration and social media companies.
The criticism of Biden back then was that, when the administration privately flagged Covid misinformation to social media companies, it was in effect using government power to censor people.
Meta chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a letter last year said his teams felt “pressured” by the Biden administration and that the administration “expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.” He called the pressure “wrong.”
But there is no evidence of explicit threats.
And the Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision last year cast doubt on the connection between the Biden administration’s communications and the decisions to censor specific plaintiffs.
The decision, which was decided on a technicality and not on the substance, was limited to the plaintiffs involved and wasn’t a full-scale endorsement of the Biden administration’s conduct. But the court, in an opinion written by conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, noted that the platforms censored such content both before and long after the Biden administration got involved.
About the closest the administration came to something that could be interpreted as a threat was when then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki in April 2022 talked about engaging with platforms and mentioned how the administration supported reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and “enacting antitrust reforms.”
The Supreme Court said this was used “perhaps as motivation,” but noted Psaki “did not mention content moderation or COVID–19 misinformation” in her answer.
The court concluded by saying the plaintiffs showed no “concrete link between their injuries and the defendants’ ” – i.e. the Biden administration’s – “conduct.”
The other examples
The story has aligned with a number of Trump administration moves in recent weeks and months.
While the president and his allies frequently cite Democrats’ alleged sins, the administration is often conducting asymmetric warfare.
They’ve justified their brazen efforts to redistrict more seats for Republicans ahead of the 2026 midterm elections by pointing to brutal Democratic gerrymanders. But both parties gerrymander extensively when they can. Where the GOP effort differs is the fact that it’s happening in the middle of the decade without being ordered by a court – that has almost always been a Republican thing – and the fact that Trump says expressly that it’s for partisan gain.
They have also justified their clashes with the courts – and possible flouting of court orders – by pointing to Biden supposedly ignoring a Supreme Court ruling on student loans. But Biden didn’t disobey the court; he instead pursued other means the court hadn’t addressed to try to achieve his goals.
And lastly is another aspect of the administration’s targeting of its foes.
The administration has repeatedly gone to extraordinary lengths to publicize mere allegations against people like James and Schiff, neither of whom have been charged with any crimes – moves that clearly disregard legal ethics.
By contrast, the Biden administration generally abided by the norm that you don’t comment on pending investigations and you speak through court filings.
A good example of the asymmetry was the reporting over the weekend that the Justice Department under Biden had caught Trump border czar Tom Homan on tape accepting a bag with $50,000 in cash just weeks before the 2024 election. (The payment arose from a probe that was not targeting Homan, The New York Times reported, and the DOJ under Trump shut down the case because it “found no credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing.”)
Leavitt on Monday defended Homan, saying he never took the money, and again lobbed weaponization accusations at the previous administration. “This was another example of the weaponization of the Biden Department of Justice against one of President Trump’s strongest and most vocal supporters,” she said.
Trump has often suggested that if the Biden Justice Department had derogatory information on him and his allies, they would simply have released it ahead of the election.
But in contrast to how the Trump administration has handled allegations against its foes, that didn’t happen with a pretty stunning piece of information about a top Trump ally.