As Donald Trump’s legal troubles mount at the federal, state and local levels, the ex-president and his lawyers are banking on their political allies in the Republican party to make attacks on a New York prosecutor who has charged Trump with criminal offenses, and to also get them to help derail investigations that endanger his 2024 campaign.
Former prosecutors and members of both parties have voiced strong criticism about the drives by Trump, his lawyers and Republican House allies to attack prosecutors who have filed charges against Trump or are investigating him, calling such moves antithetical to democratic principles and the rule of law.
Such criticism has not deterred Trump, his lawyers or pliable Republicans from trying to discredit prosecutors with political attacks that in part reflect Trump’s lack of success in convincing courts to curb prosecutors.
In April, the House judiciary committee chairman, Jim Jordan, a key Trump ally, publicly launched an inquiry into the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, soon after he filed a 34-count indictment of Trump for falsifying business records tied to alleged hush money payments that Trump made in 2016 to Stormy Daniels, the porn star who claimed Trump had an affair with her.
In a Fox News interview last month, Jordan echoed Trump’s attacks on Bragg for “interfering” in the coming election charging that “Alvin Bragg used federal tax dollars to go after a former president, to indict a former president for no crime, [which] interferes with the federal election”.
The House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, too has supported Trump by calling the Bragg charges “not a real case”, after downplaying the investigation by saying the payments were just “personal money”.
For his part, Trump has repeatedly launched his own feverish attacks on several prosecutors including calling Bragg, who is black, an “animal”, a “degenerate psychopath” and a “racist”.
Two Trump lawyers also last month wrote to the House intelligence committee chairman, Michael Turner, blasting special counsel Jack Smith for pursuing a criminal inquiry into Trump’s retention of hundreds of classified documents at his Florida home Mar-a-Lago after he left the White House.
The letter asked Turner to tell Smith to “stand down”. It came amid signs Smith’s inquiry may be in its closing stages with fresh testimony from Trump insiders and was sent to Turner even though Congress does not have the authority to control justice department (DoJ) criminal investigations.
Trump’s own attacks on Smith escalated in mid-May with posts on his Truth Social platform charging Smith with “harassing, terrorizing and threatening people who work for me, probably illegally”.
Separately, Trump and his lawyers have mounted harsh attacks on the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, who since early 2021 has been investigating drives by Trump and his allies to block Joe Biden’s win in Georgia including a high-pressure Trump call with the secretary of state, and is expected to file charges this summer against Trump and several others.
Trump has labeled Willis, who is black, a “racist”, and his lawyers are trying to have a special grand jury report, which is mostly under seal, but reportedly recommended charges against more than a dozen people “quashed and expunged from the record”, a move Willis is challenging.
Taken together, the efforts by Trump and his lawyers to ratchet up House attacks on prosecutors and investigators fuel concerns amid experts.
“Casting doubt on the legitimacy of investigations is another attack on democracy,” said former US attorney for eastern Michigan Barbara McQuade. “The strategy seems to be to undermine all efforts to hold Trump accountable for misconduct. The logical extension of that practice would be to allow Trump to violate the law with impunity. The rule of law demands that all of us be held to the same standard.”
Other ex-prosecutors express similar criticism and stress that politicians seeking to do Trump’s bidding in this regard could be participating in a public cover-up.
“The folks who Trump is enlisting to help him with a legislative fix need to be reminded of how easy it is to potentially become part of a cover-up to the American people after the fact,” said former Georgia US attorney Michael Moore. “A prosecutor can easily argue that these continued efforts to generate help are both proof of his guilt and proof that he knows he’s caught.”
Moore added: “Given the status of the multiple inquiries involving Trump, I wouldn’t want to be the one getting the call to help. I’d feel like a fireman answering the alarm yet knowing I was the one likely to get burned.”
Similarly, current and former House members say moves to undermine prosecutors by Trump, his lawyers and House allies are dangerous to US civic life.
“All the attacks on judges, prosecutors and the courts are a thoroughgoing assault on any part of the judicial system that takes up a case related to Trump,” the House Democrat Jamie Raskin told the Guardian. “It’s an astounding violation of our proper federal role. It demonstrates the willingness to use any lever of institutional power over other parts of the government to advance Trump-related objectives.”
Former Republican congressman Charlie Dent agreed.
“I would never have intervened in a pending federal, state or local criminal matter. At the very least it would have felt inappropriate. The members who are attempting to shield Trump from federal, state or local investigations should stand down.”
Such qualms didn’t slow Jordan from aggressively attacking Bragg’s 34-count indictment of Trump and echoing Trump’s claims that the charges were politically driven.
Soon after Trump blasted the Bragg charges, Jordan issued a subpoena to Bragg which the prosecutor rejected as improper interference in a pending criminal case. Then Jordan subpoenaed a top ex-prosecutor in the DA’s office, Mark Pomerantz, who penned a book about the long-running inquiry into Trump’s hush money payments.
While Pomerantz is expected to comply with the subpoena, Jordan may not be pleased with the results, say critics. Paul Pelletier, a former acting chief of the fraud section at the justice department, told the Guardian that Jordan’s move to haul Pomerantz before his committee “is going to boomerang because Mark Pomerantz, as he detailed in his book, is likely to shiv Trump”.
Separately, to help Trump fend off Smith’s investigation into the hundreds of classified documents he took to Mar-a-Lago, other Trump lawyers are prodding Congress to intercede and short-circuit the special counsel’s inquiry.
“DoJ should be ordered to stand down, and the intelligence community should instead conduct an appropriate investigation and provide a full report to this committee, as well as your counterparts in the Senate,” the Trump lawyers wrote to Turner.
The letter lamely faulted “the staff’s packing processes and not any criminal intent by President Trump”, to explain how the classified documents wound up in Mar-a-Lago. Trump, though, may have undercut his own lawyers during his CNN town hall last week when speaking of the removal of the documents, he boasted: “I had every right to do it, I didn’t make a secret of it.”
Some House veterans ridicule the Trump lawyers’ missive. “I think the letter to Turner was stupid,” the former Republican congressman Tom Davis said. “Why they would do that is bonkers.”
Trump’s efforts to mobilize House allies to go after the criminal investigations into his conduct set dangerous precedents and will not succeed, say critics.
“Not long ago, a savvy legislator would try hard to keep away from pending criminal or civil enforcement investigations, perhaps out of a sense of propriety, perhaps for fear of scandal,” the Columbia law professor and ex-prosecutor Daniel Richman said.
“Maybe this is no longer true, and what otherwise would seem like naked obstruction for partisan gain or out of partisan loyalty can hide behind a claim of fighting the alleged weaponization of the federal government.”
Other justice department veterans are adamant that prosecutors won’t be deterred by political pressures on them.
“The attempted infusion of political influence into the work of DoJ’s career prosecutors rarely if ever benefits the target of such an investigation. It is viewed by prosecutors as an attempt to corrupt and improperly influence their investigation, and that’s a line DoJ’s prosecutors won’t cross,” said Pelletier.
