Every new piece of content from the dying media that casts the current Justice Department as “weaponized” against President Trump’s “political foes” or “political enemies” should serve as a reminder: Democrats haven’t yet got the message that the way they used that same agency during the Biden years can never happen again, and there’s only one way to ensure that it doesn’t.
The Washington Post this week ran an article on a press conference hosted by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who, the Post said, “defended investigations of the president’s political foes.” Over and over the article portrayed the DOJ as a threat to the normal political process that Democrats corrupted to hell long ago by this point.
“In his first news conference as the nation’s most powerful law enforcement official, acting attorney general Todd Blanche defended the Justice Department’s repeated attempts to indict President Donald Trump’s political enemies …” the paper said. The Post’s writers also asserted that now-former Attorney General Pam Bondi was fired for her “failure to prosecute his political foes” and that Blanche at the press conference “brushed off criticism the department has faced for going after Trump’s foes.”
This is the latest in an ongoing campaign to convince voters that Trump and his supporters are a threat to the normal rule of law — when it was Democrats and the dying media who cheered on the prosecution of the former president and his supporters for political disagreement.
True, it was once normal to assume that disputes on politics were off-limits when it came to imprisonment or other forms of legal pursuit. Former presidents weren’t supposed to be hounded for their conduct while in office, and while it was sometimes necessary to formally censure and reprimand political figures so that it was part of the historical record, we more or less had an unspoken agreement that the threat of legal jeopardy was a bridge too far.
All of that went out the window after 2020, when Democrats took control of the Justice Department and ferociously chased down anyone and everyone who dissented, including the former president, whom they attempted to bankrupt, bar from running for office, and ultimately imprison. They concocted wild, unheard-of legal theories that effectively made it illegal for Trump to run for president, broke precedent to justify raiding his home, and took it all the way to the Supreme Court in their efforts to make the threat of imprisoning former presidents standard procedure.
That the people who perpetuated that obscenity — Letitia James, Merrick Garland, Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis, and on and on — might face their own form of legal harassment isn’t a matter of “weaponizing” the Justice Department. It’s a matter of ensuring it stops being weaponized.