“He was always telling me that we need to use the FBI and IRS to go after people,” Kelly told the Times last year, adding that “it was constant and obsessive and is just what he’s claiming is being done to him now.”
This lawsuit by Lisa Page and Peter Strzok is focusing attention once again on Trump’s abuse of power. Former Chief of Staff John Kelly testified that he wanted him to use the IRS to go after them, his political enemies. His abuses were extensive and a lot of it was right out in the open. I’m not talking about the rank corruption — running his business out of the White House, signing hush money checks in the oval office, accepting unlimited graft and access in the form of both foreign and domestic money at his hotels and resorts. Nobody seems to care about that at all. I’m talking about the abuse of his power as president.
Aaron Blake has a short, incomplete, list:
Trump also wanted the IRS to investigate former FBI director James B. Comey and former deputy director Andrew McCabe, along with Hillary Clinton, former secretary of state and Trump’s presidential challenger, and other perceived foes, Kelly said last year. Comey and McCabe were audited, the odds of which happening randomly is infinitesimal. (An inspector general report last year found no connection between Trump and the audits, but raised concerns that warranted further investigation.)
Trump publicly and repeatedly pushed for McCabe’s firing before McCabe was due to receive full retirement benefits, ultimately succeeding mere hours before that would have taken place.
Trump told his White House counsel that he wanted to order probes of Clinton and Comey, per the Times. (His press secretary in late 2017 also said prosecuting Comey was “something that certainly should be looked at” at the Justice Department.)
Trump said publicly in late 2020 that former president Barack Obama and former vice president Joe Biden should be indicted and indicated he had made such a case to his attorney general, William P. Barr.
He said in 2019 that it would be “appropriate” for him to ask for an investigation of Biden.
He withheld security assistance from Ukraine while seeking to have the country say it was opening an investigation involving Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, releasing the aid only when the situation became public. Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney effectively confirmed this was the arrangement before backing off those comments. Trump was impeached for this, and many Republicans acknowledged it was at least improper. A key figure — European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland — indicated it was probably illegal.
A Justice Department office was tasked with investigating former secretary of state John F. Kerry in 2018, two days after Trump tweeted about Kerry’s “possibly illegal” activities and the same day Trump said Kerry “should be prosecuted,” according to former U.S. attorney Geoffrey Berman’s book.
A Trump political appointee in 2018 asked Berman to prosecute a prominent Democratic lawyer, Gregory Craig, and to do so before the midterms, Berman also said. (When Berman declined, it was prosecuted in Washington, where the jury acquitted Craig of lying to the Justice Department.)
Berman recalled several other examples of political influence seeping into the Justice Department. “Throughout my tenure as U.S. attorney,” Berman wrote, “Trump’s Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically, and I kept declining — in ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired.”
Trump repeatedly applied public pressure on the Justice Department to take it easy on his allies, prompting Barr to remark that Trump’s comments “make it impossible for me to do my job.”
This is a necessarily incomplete list. It doesn’t include, for example, Trump’s pardoning of political allies at a historic rate. This was his prerogative as president, but it certainly plays into the idea that Trump intended to wield the government for political benefit.
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The sheer gall of these Republicans to spend all this time and money investigating Joe Biden and his alleged “weaponization” of the government against poor little Donnie Trump who never did anything wrong in his whole virtuous life is almost too much to bear. They just do their thing and the Democrats have to react and on and on it goes.