WASHINGTON CNN —
Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance falsely claimed on Sunday that former President Donald Trump “did not pursue political opponents” during his presidency, a claim refuted by mountains of evidence. has been done.
Mr. Vance said Friday that the attorney general would be the most important government official other than the president in the second Trump administration, but in a Sunday interview he told ABC News host Martha Raddatz that Mr. Trump would go after his political opponents. I was asked if I intended to do so. Vance answered no, adding, “Martha, he was president for four years and he didn’t go after his political opponents.”
Facts First: Vance’s claims are false. As president, Mr. Trump publicly and privately pressured the Justice Department and administration officials to investigate or prosecute numerous political opponents.
Mr. Trump waged extensive behind-the-scenes efforts to have his political opponents indicted. But you don’t need to rely on investigative reporting or the memoirs of former administration officials to know that Trump went after his political opponents as president.
He often followed them in public.
As CNN reporter Marshall Cohen pointed out, there is a long list of political opponents that President Trump has publicly called on the Justice Department and others to investigate and prosecute. The list includes 2016 election opponent Hillary Clinton and 2020 election opponent Joe Biden, as well as Biden’s son Hunter Biden and former Democratic Secretary of State John Kerry. , John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser turned critic, former Democratic President Barack Obama, and an unknown member of the Obama administration. Officials, anonymous author of a New York Times op-ed by Trump administration officials critical of Trump, MSNBC host and Trump critic Joe Scarborough; James Comey, former FBI director turned Trump criticother former FBI officials, including former British spy Christopher Steele (author of the controversial dossier against Trump), and various Congressional Democrats. former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, California Congressman Adam SchiffRepresentative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut; Senator Mark Warner (Virginia).
Asked for comment for this story on Monday, Vance spokeswoman Taylor Van Kirk accused the media of biased “double standards” and said, “Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s Justice Department There is no dispute that under President Trump, Republican presidential candidates have been targeted and prosecuted against Democrats he faced in 2016 and 2020. Nothing happened.”
But that doesn’t mean President Trump isn’t trying hard enough.
As president, Mr. Trump repeatedly pressed the Justice Department to prosecute both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Biden, and he also sought to have foreign countries investigate Mr. Biden. The fact that the Trump-era Justice Department declined to prosecute Clinton and Biden does not mean that it is true that Trump did not “go after” them or others. (In fact, Trump literally said in 2017 that he wanted the department to “go after” Clinton.)
John Kelly, whom President Trump appointed as Secretary of Homeland Security and then White House Chief of Staff, told the New York Times in 2023 about President Trump: It’s relentless and relentless, and it’s exactly what he claims is being done to him right now. ”
And in contrast to Vance’s claims against Raddatz that Harris herself sought to arrest political opponents, which Van Kirk echoed in a statement to CNN on Monday, it was clear that Harris had not been involved in the Justice Department’s investigation into Trump’s There is no public evidence that he pressured other candidates to prosecute. The decision to file two criminal lawsuits against Trump, one over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the other over his retention of classified documents after he took office, The decision was made by a special prosecutor appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland.
President Trump has repeatedly called for investigations and prosecutions of his political opponents.
In some cases, President Trump’s calls for investigations, arrests, and prosecutions of political opponents resonated. something like vague dissatisfaction than any sincere attempt to encourage official action. But Trump repeatedly applied explicit and sustained public pressure on the Justice Department generally and the attorney general to go after his opponents.
For example, in 2017 and 2018, Trump frequently criticized then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions in tweets and public statements as he investigated various allegations against Clinton.
“Attorney General Jeff Sessions is taking a very weak position regarding Hillary Clinton’s crimes,” he wrote in one tweet. “So where is the Bureau of Investigation?” he said. I wrote In another tweet. In another tweet, he wrote, “So many people are asking why the AG and the Special Council aren’t investigating Hillary Clinton and Comey’s many crimes.” In yet another tweet, he addressed the allegations about Clinton, writing, “At some point the Justice Department and FBI have to do the right and right thing.”
President Trump directly and publicly called on Ukraine and China to open investigations into Joe Biden and Hunter Biden in 2019, but Trump was already privately pressuring Ukraine to investigate. was exposed to criticism. And in 2020, President Trump sued then-Attorney General William Barr over his alleged role in the investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia. He publicly called for many to be prosecuted.
“Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes that are the greatest political crime in the history of this country, unless I win, we will hardly be satisfied, and we will not forget that. , they just have to go. But these people should be prosecuted. This was the greatest political crime in the history of our country, and that included Obama. “There is,” President Trump said.
Trump privately pressured the Justice Department
In a Fox News interview, Trump hinted that he may have brought up the topic of indicting Biden and Obama with Barr, saying, “Honestly, he has all the information he needs. I want more and more and more and more.I said, “I don’t need any more.” You have more than anyone will ever have. ”
Trump privately pressured the Justice Department and Trump administration officials to go after other political opponents, according to former officials and reports. And while it is impossible to conclusively prove a direct connection between his demands and the department’s actions, he appears to have been successful at times.
According to Mueller’s report, Sessions asked special counsel Robert Mueller to waive Trump’s recuse from an investigation related to the 2016 election in order to prosecute Clinton in 2017. He said he applied pressure. Mr. Sessions did not do so, but in March 2018 (in November 2017) he announced that he had appointed federal prosecutors to investigate various allegations against Ms. Clinton. She was never charged.
The New York Times reported earlier this year that in April 2018, President Trump told aides that if Sessions did not indict Clinton and Comey, Trump would do so himself, and that he told White House counsel that the president’s The report urged him to write a memo outlining the limits of his authority.
In his 2020 book, Bolton accused Kerry of continuing to communicate with Iranian officials after leaving office to preserve the nuclear deal Kerry helped negotiate, violating an old law that was rarely enforced. He wrote that he was “obsessed” with prosecuting the case. “In meeting after meeting in the Oval Office, President Trump will ask Attorney General William Barr, or anyone listening, to begin prosecution,” Bolton wrote.
According to a book by Jeffrey Berman, a former federal prosecutor who was ousted by President Trump in 2020, the Justice Department released a statement in 2018, the same week that Trump tweeted that Kelly may have broken the law. has ordered federal prosecutors to investigate Kelly. Trump tweeted about Kelly in 2019, Berman said, and Justice Department officials called one of his prosecutors to press him further on the case. Mr. Kelly was not charged.
In 2019, Barr responded to a request from President Trump’s investigators by tasking federal prosecutors with investigating the origins of the FBI’s investigations related to Russia and the 2016 election. At the end of 2020, with about three months left in President Trump’s term, Barr appointed his prosecutor, John Durham, as special counsel.
Then, in early 2020, Barr asked another federal prosecutor for information from the public, including Trump’s then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani, regarding allegations regarding the Biden family and Ukraine that Trump had focused on publicly and privately. ordered to be collected. .
