A matter of revenge? Trump is weaponizing criminal prosecutions against his opponents

The investigation into Comey was conducted by the federal prosecutor’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia, which is headed by Trump-appointee Erik Seibert. After reviewing all the evidence, Seibert opposed pursuing the case and soon afterward announced his resignation. Trump then declared that Seibert had been fired and appointed his own former lawyer, Lindsey Halligan, who had no prior prosecutorial experience. She compensated for her lack of qualifications with loyalty, personally signing the document charging Comey.

A couple of weeks earlier, the Justice Department had also dismissed James Comey’s daughter, Maureen, who had handled criminal cases against financier and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and rapper Sean Combs, better known as P. Diddy. Combs was sentenced to 50 months in prison for organizing prostitution and had already requested a pardon from Trump. Soon afterward, Comey’s son-in-law, Troy Edwards, also resigned from the Justice Department. Around the same time, an FBI agent who refused to organize a “perp walk” of Comey was dismissed.

Comey himself has pleaded not guilty and filed two motions requesting that the court drop the charges. His defense insists that Halligan was unlawfully appointed as prosecutor and that the criminal case is a politically motivated prosecution. More than a hundred former Justice Department employees have also expressed support for Comey and submitted a petition to the court to dismiss the case, calling it politicized. Among them are Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder and George W. Bush administration Deputy Attorney General Peter Keisler.

The trial of the former FBI director is tentatively scheduled for Jan. 5.

Letitia James

A similar scenario unfolded in the case of New York Attorney General Letitia James. In 2019, her office had initiated an investigation into Trump and filed a civil lawsuit against the president and the Trump Organization, accusing both entities of systematically understating the value of their assets for tax purposes and inflating asset values when using them as collateral for loans. In 2024, a court found Trump guilty of fraud, imposed a $355 million fine, and banned him from conducting business in New York for three years.

As early as April 2025, Bill Pulte, Trump’s appointment to serve as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, claimed he had sent the Justice Department information about possible mortgage fraud by James and Democratic Senator from California Adam Schiff. According to Pulte, James illegally collected rental income from tenants living in her second home. Journalists later discovered that it is not ordinary renters who live in the house but James’s grandniece, and that James herself occasionally resides there. Moreover, the mortgage agreement signed by James neither prohibited renting her from out the house nor required her to live there full-time.