On Politics: What Omarosa, John Kerry and Michael Cohen have in common
Good evening! As former President Donald Trump threatens to prosecute his political rivals, my colleague Michael Schmidt, an investigative reporter, has an important look at how Trump deployed his power against his perceived enemies during his presidency. And we're looking at the G.O.P.'s big bet on anti-trans ads. — Jess Bidgood
What Omarosa, John Kerry and Michael Cohen have in commonThe latest, with 28 days to go
Former President Donald Trump has threatened a campaign of retribution if he returns to the White House, signaling that he will seek to prosecute rivals and enemies while stocking a second administration with loyalists who will carry out his wishes. To underline the point, he has posted pictures on social media of political rivals like Vice President Kamala Harris, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wearing orange jumpsuits. Legal experts are deeply worried that he will follow through on these promises, as my colleagues at The New York Times Magazine have reported. His allies say that it's all bluster and that he won't try to carry out campaign-season threats if he were to gain control of the Justice Department and other government agencies. The truth is, though, as president he demanded investigations of his enemies and often got them. I'm an investigative reporter, and I spent the past several months trying to understand what a future Trump administration may hold by looking to the last one. In today's newsletter, I'll explain what I learned — and how Trump's open pledges to use the machinery of the federal government against his enemies make him an outlier among leaders around the globe. A demand for investigation, and then federal pressureI have been reporting on Trump's attempts to weaponize the government since his first year in office. I knew that, while president, Trump had publicly and privately pressured the Justice Department and the F.B.I. to go after his rivals, because I had covered it. But what I had failed to appreciate, in the blizzard of news, was that he had been far more successful than I thought in having the government's most powerful arms directed at his enemies. In 10 cases that I looked at, a demand from Trump that someone be investigated was followed by their facing major federal pressure. Even without evidence of Trump signing a direct order, after he expressed a desire for a person to be targeted, remarkably, the Justice Department, the F.B.I. or the I.R.S. ended up doing what Trump wanted. The list included many of Trump's enemies whom we're familiar with: Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Michael Cohen, John Bolton and members of the news media. In 2018, a day after Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former Trump aide, announced that she was writing a negative tell-all memoir, the White House asked the Justice Department to open an investigation into a seemingly unrelated paperwork dispute that led to a government lawsuit against her. The department ultimately filed the suit, and she was ordered to pay a $61,000 fine. Cohen, a former fixer for Trump, was given a three-year prison sentence for his role in the Stormy Daniels payment, but during the coronavirus pandemic he was allowed to serve it at home. When he refused to sign an agreement saying he would not write a book about Trump while serving his sentence, he was thrown back in prison — a move that a federal judge quickly reversed and ruled to be retaliatory. After it was revealed that former Secretary of State John Kerry was working behind the scenes to try to keep the Iran nuclear deal together, Trump publicly accused him of breaking the law for staying in touch with Iranian diplomats after he left office. The former U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Geoffrey Berman, said Justice Department officials in Washington repeatedly pressured his office to investigate Kerry. Nearly a year later, when Trump again raised questions about whether Kerry had broken the law, department officials again pressured Berman's office. An investigation was conducted into Kerry, but he was never prosecuted because prosecutors concluded that there was not enough evidence to show he had broken the law. Trump has, of course, claimed that he is the victim of a politicized prosecution by the Justice Department. But there's no evidence that the federal investigations he faced, carried out by a special counsel, were ordered by President Biden or the White House. A matter of freedom
While the news media often covers Trump's conduct extensively, we don't always explain why it is so unusual or questionable. So I asked Ian Bassin, an expert on the question of democracy and political meddling in prosecutions who leads a group called Protect Democracy, if he could help. Bassin explained that in the United States, Americans believe we are "free" because we are free to speak our minds, compete in the marketplace and associate with whomever we want without fearing the government will punish us for doing so. "The very definition of freedom is to be able to do those things without retribution or even just fear of retribution by the government," Bassin told me. And no matter who we are, we are all going to be treated the same way: based on the laws and the facts. But once the government shows that it is no longer moored to matters of law and evidence, and is instead acting based solely on the whims of a president, the entire system begins to unravel. "Once the government has made clear it can and will attempt to use the awesome power of the state to seek to punish you based on who you are, what you think, how you've exercised your rights or whether you've shown sufficient fealty to the leader, you are no longer truly free," Bassin told me. Any president who took these actions would further entrench himself in power. "Very few people are willing to risk the wrath of the government to express their opinion, and once people stop expressing their opinions openly, the lifeblood drains out of democracy and self-government," Bassin said. Other leaders around the world have weaponized the power of the state against their enemies, he said, including Vladimir Putin of Russia and Hosni Mubarak, who served as president of Egypt for 30 years. But they rarely spoke about it openly, the way Trump has. And rarely have they made it such a central part of a campaign for office. "Putin doesn't boast of killing his critics or enriching loyal oligarchs," Bassin said. "And yet unlike virtually every other despot, Trump says he's going to engage in punitive and retaliatory behavior out loud." "History has rarely seen anything like it," Bassin said.
The G.O.P.'s big bet on anti-trans adsRepublicans across the country are putting transgender issues at the center of their campaigns as Election Day approaches, in an attempt to win over suburban female voters. My colleague Shane Goldmacher explored how they are spending tens of millions of dollars on ads that tap into fears about transgender women and girls in sports and about taxpayer-funded gender transitions in prisons. Since the beginning of August, Republicans have poured more than $65 million into television ads on transgender issues in more than a dozen states, according to a New York Times analysis of advertising data compiled by AdImpact. The flood of ads in some of the country's most competitive races, including for the House, the Senate and the White House, inflame cultural divisions and cast Democrats as outside the mainstream. They are a sign that Republican strategists believe they have found a potent third leg for their messaging stool in 2024, along with the mainstays of inflation and immigration. Republicans are returning to a message that was tried, mostly unsuccessfully, in the 2022 midterms, as they attempt to motivate their base and curb their losses with female voters repelled by the party's stance on abortion. Republicans acknowledge that there are relatively few instances in which transgender athletes compete in youth sports. But they said that highlighting the unwillingness of Democratic politicians to break with their party's progressive wing on the issue was a powerful tool for depicting lawmakers as liberal or extreme. Up and down the ballot, Democratic candidates have mostly tried to ignore the onslaught, preferring to pivot toward more favorable policy terrain, such as abortion, rather than to be dragged into public debates on transgender issues. Read past editions of the newsletter here. If you're enjoying what you're reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We'd love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.
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