Breaking: Trump's Campaign to Prosecute his Enemies Goes into Overdrive

In the last 36 hours, there have been three massive scandals involving Trump and the DOJ

Much of the political and media world is rightly focused on Trump’s post-Kirk assassination government censorship campaign and Disney’s cowardly decision to suspend Jimmy Kimmel indefinitely.

This is a huge story. Trump is undertaking one of the most aggressive government assaults on free speech and the media in American history.

But, as is almost always true with Trump, there is really dangerous stuff happening right outside the spotlight.

Over the last couple of days, we have seen signs that Trump’s campaign to politicize the Justice Department and prosecute his political enemies is going into overdrive.

I want to go through all of them, because it’s very possible they slipped under the radar amid all the other news and everyone’s busy weekends.

First, Trump pressured the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia to resign because of his unwillingness to bring charges, despite insufficient evidence against New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director Jim Comey.

Second, the President publicly chastised Attorney General Pam Bondi for not aggressively going after other political opponents as part of a vengeance campaign related to the prosecutions for Trump’s crimes. The President’s message to Bondi came in the form of a bizarre post on Truth Social, which reads like a direct message that was inadvertently posted publicly.

Not the biggest issue, but this raises real questions about whether the President is communicating with cabinet secretaries via direct messages. From an information-security standpoint, this would be insanely risky. Every foreign intelligence agency in the world probably has its eyes on everything happening on Truth Social. Additionally, this would be a massive evasion of the Presidential Records Act. Trump later posted another Truth praising Bondi, which is a de facto admission of the authenticity of the first.

Third we learned that Tom Homan, the person in charge of Trump’s mass deportation effort, was previously under investigation for bribery. According to NBC News:

In an undercover operation last year, the FBI recorded Tom Homan, now the White House border czar, accepting $50,000 in cash after indicating he could help the agents — who were posing as business executives — win government contracts in a second Trump administration, according to multiple people familiar with the probe and internal documents reviewed by MSNBC.

The FBI and the Justice Department planned to wait to see whether Homan would deliver on his alleged promise once he became the nation’s top immigration official. But the case indefinitely stalled soon after Donald Trump became president again in January, according to six sources familiar with the matter.

Yes: a current Trump official with massive power and influence allegedly accepted $50,000 in cash in a paper bag in exchange for a promise to steer federal contracts their way once Trump was in office.

Now, even if you take the Trump DOJ at face value (which would be an absurd thing to do) and concede that it would be too difficult to prosecute Homan under the ridiculously high standards for bribery convictions set by the Supreme Court, there is no way he should be working in the White House. If even he can’t be criminally convicted, the videotape is prima facie evidence that Homan is corrupt and lacks the judgment for government service.

And yet Homan is still in office directing an incredibly aggressive, extra-legal mass deportation operation carried out by masked ICE agents.

I know we are all uncomfortably numb to Trump’s authoritarian corruption, but each of these is a Watergate-style scandal and should be treated as a big deal.

This Is Not What People Want

I can’t believe I have to say this, but people do not want their president using taxpayer-funded prosecutors and FBI agents to settle scores with their political opponents.

A recent YouGov poll found that half the country believes Trump is directing the Justice Department to go after his political enemies. More importantly, 61% of Americans think Trump would not be justified in directing the Justice Department to go after his political enemies.

The Bondi Truth above is an explicit admission of using the Department of Justice to investigate political opponents. In this deeply polarized moment, it’s always notable when you see 60% opposition to a Trump action. That means a significant number of people who voted for Trump oppose him.

Defeating MAGA One Share at a Time

In a normal world with a normal president and a functioning media ecosystem, each of these revelations would be massive stories that broke through to everyone and dominated the discourse for weeks. There would be a media feeding frenzy and congressional hearings. Yet these stories will likely barely make a ripple before we are on to the next unconstitutional outrage du jour.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Each of us has the power to make sure that the people in our lives know about Trump’s corrupt weaponization of the federal government. In an era where people distrust the media and politicians, we are the most powerful messengers for our friends and family. Sending these stories in the group chat or mentioning them at family dinner can go a long way.

There are 165,000 members of the Message Box community. If we each share these stories with five people, we will reach a number of people larger than the margin of the last few presidential elections.

Going forward, I will call on this community more often to serve as a megaphone for the anti-Trump movement.

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Thank you for reading, sharing, and subscribing. Now, I’ll let you get back to your late summer Sunday.