President Trump is once again “weaponizing the legal system to fulfill his personal vendettas,” said The New York Times in an editorial. One day after former FBI director James Comey was arraigned in federal court, a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia indicted New York Attorney General Letitia James on “flimsy charges” relating to mortgage paperwork on a 2020 house purchase in Virginia. Trump wants revenge because James, as attorney general, successfully sued him and the Trump Organization for civil fraud for repeatedly inflating his net worth to get loan, tax, and insurance benefits; the whopping $354.8 million penalty on Trump was later thrown out by an appeals court. In response to Trump’s thirst for vengeance, the Justice Department alleged that James lied to bank officials by listing the residence as a second home instead of an investment that she later rented out. The original, Trump-appointed federal prosecutor assigned to the case found insufficient evidence to pursue charges, so Trump replaced him with MAGA loyalist Lindsey Halligan, who has no prosecutorial experience.
“The charges against James will present an uphill battle at trial,” said Barbara McQuade in Bloomberg. In the courtroom, the onus will be on the government to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that James knowingly intended to defraud a financial institution when she signed the mortgage papers, so she could save $19,000 in higher interest rates over the life of the loan—a very small sum for a federal case. In white-collar cases like this, the challenge is “proving what was in someone’s mind.” Trump, however, may not care about the trial’s outcome, finding satisfaction in forcing James to “face the financial and emotional costs” of defending herself in court. “In that case, Trump has already won. But at the loss of the rule of law.”
The indictment is a show of Trump’s power “to pursue trumped-up charges to harass and intimidate enemies,” said Ed Kilgore in New York. He used similar tactics in his business career, filing over 4,000 lawsuits against creditors, former business partners, and rivals. Now he has the entire Justice Department to cater to his “mob boss” instincts. Even if the James and Comey prosecutions fail, said Andrew Prokop in Vox, Trump’s DOJ can simply bring another vindictive indictment, “perhaps even against the same person.” For everyone on Trump’s long enemies list, the retribution campaign has just begun.
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