DOJ has a credibility problem

Trump’s DOJ has a credibility problem. Newsom is testing how far it goes.

The California governor says a possible probe is political payback.

By Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein

James Comey. Letitia James. Mark Kelly. Jay Powell.

The Justice Department has spent the last 18 months chasing President Donald Trump’s political adversaries in investigations that have more often than not crumbled under scrutiny. Now, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is adamant that he’s the next in a long line of vendetta cases brought at Trump’s direction.

And because of the recent prosecutorial misadventures of the Trump administration — which have dashed the Justice Department’s credibility in courts around the country — it’s become an argument that’s impossible to ignore. Even if it’s too soon to tell whether that’s actually what’s happening with the investigation surrounding Newsom’s wife Jennifer Siebel Newsom.

“This is a huge problem,” said Randall Eliason, former chief of the Public Corruption Section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C. “In any political corruption prosecution, the defense almost always claims it is a ‘political witch hunt,’ that prosecutors are targeting him or her for some political reason.”

“The best defense to that has always been DOJ’s tradition of independence from politics and long track record of pursuing corruption cases based only on the facts and law, without regard to political considerations,” Eliason added. “The Trump administration has abandoned that independence without even trying to hide it.”

Newsom on Monday preempted federal prosecutors with a four-minute video decrying an encroaching investigation — apparently aimed at his wife’s charity and his former chief of staff — as a politically motivated witch hunt. It mirrored a tactic Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, deployed earlier this year when he decried a nascent criminal probe as a baseless political attack.

A federal judge ultimately agreed and took the highly unusual step of blocking grand jury subpoenas in the probe, which was handled by Trump’s top prosecutor in Washington, D.C., Jeanine Pirro. Trump’s years of attacks on Powell’s fiscal policies, combined with flimsy allegations of misconduct, were clear evidence of a politically motivated probe, Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg concluded.

Newsom was quick to note that Trump has similarly spent years attacking him, even calling for him to be arrested. The California Democrat wants the world to equate him with Powell rather than another Trump adversary, former national security adviser John Bolton — who similarly claimed he was the target of a Trump-driven political probe only to later agree to plead guilty to mishandling classified information.

“Department of Justice prosecutors follow the facts and the law, not politics,” a DOJ spokesperson said. “This DOJ has returned to its mission of fighting crime, regardless of the name or status of alleged perpetrators. No bad actor is above the law.”

Whether Newsom is situated more like Powell or Bolton is a question previous Departments of Justice would never have had to contend with. But Trump has repeatedly and openly called for his adversaries to be prosecuted and even publicly directed his first attorney general, Pam Bondi, to do it quickly.

“At this point, it is safer to assume bad faith unless proven otherwise,” said Peter Zeidenberg, a former prosecutor at the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section. “There have been countless examples of bad faith prosecutions in the past 18 months, and good reason to assume this is another.”

Former prosecutors say the department is now witnessing the cost of stripping out longstanding insulation between law enforcement and the White House, as well as decisions to gut structures like the Public Integrity Section, where career prosecutors pursued politically charged cases with safeguards designed to limit political influence.

Particularly at the early stages of an investigation where the precise allegations and evidence remain sketchy, the result for the public — especially when information comes from the people being investigated, rather than court filings — can often be a confusing muddle.

So far, no charges have been leveled at Newsom or his wife.

Newsom’s former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, did plead guilty last month to campaign finance fraud and other charges stemming from her prior job. But her attorney has said she had no evidence of wrongdoing by Newsom.

A person familiar with the investigation related to the Newsoms, who spoke with POLITICO on condition of anonymity to share sensitive details, said the probe originated in California, not Washington, and had been underway for about a year.

The charges and counter-charges of “weaponization” of the Justice Department may be taking their toll in ways that go beyond the ability of prominent figures to parry allegations of wrongdoing.

Trump administration prosecutors have failed at a remarkable clip to convince grand juries to indict in sensitive cases, and they’ve had to abandon significant cases amid evidence of prosecutorial misconduct. Most pointedly, a federal judge concluded last month that Justice Department prosecutors had committed glaring misconduct in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, which he said was infected with “retaliatory taint” after Abrego won a legal victory against his illegal deportation that embarrassed the White House.

And the failures in high-profile criminal cases are only part of what is straining DOJ’s relationship with the courts. It has been under strain amid the deluge of immigration detention cases that has flooded court dockets since last year and been accompanied by innumerable violations of court orders and questions from judges about the department’s trustworthiness.

Of course, it’s difficult to know how much of DOJ’s struggles is attributable to increased skepticism about the credibility of federal prosecutors as opposed to the departure of seasoned litigators — leaving less experienced prosecutors at the helm — and institutional decisions to seek indictments in cases with weak evidence.