NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump’s unprecedented retribution campaign against his perceived political enemies reached new heights as his Justice Department brought criminal charges against a longtime foe and he expanded his efforts to classify certain liberal groups as “domestic terrorist organizations.”
Days after Trump publicly demanded action from his attorney general and tapped his former personal lawyer to serve as the top federal prosecutor in Virginia, former FBI Director James Comey, a longtime target of Trump’s ire, was indicted by a grand jury for allegedly lying to Congress during testimony in 2020.
Hours earlier Thursday, Trump signed a memorandum directing his Republican administration to target backers of what he dubbed “left-wing terrorism” as he alleged without evidence a vast conspiracy by Democrat-aligned nonprofit groups and activists to finance violent protests.
The developments marked a dramatic escalation of the president’s extraordinary use of the levers of presidential power to target his political rivals and his efforts to pressure the Justice Department to pursue investigations — and now prosecutions — of those he disdains. It’s an unabashed campaign that began soon after Trump returned to office and one that critics see as an abuse of power that puts every American who dares to criticize the president at risk of retaliation.
The first former president convicted of a felony — for falsifying business records to hide hush-money payments to conceal an alleged affair — Trump won the White House despite a host of other legal troubles over his alleged retention of classified information after leaving the White House in 2021 and his role in stoking denials of his 2020 electoral defeat that culminated in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
