Trump Is Asking Top DOJ Officials to Use the Agency to Prosecute Those Charged With Investigating His Criminal Actions

Oct 15, 2025

Every accusation Donald Trump makes about the abuse of power by his political opponents turns out to be a confession of how he intends to use power. Thus, Trump has been using complaints about “weaponization” of the Justice Department as an excuse to do precisely that—most recently, by openly giving orders to top officials to persecute his enemies.

The New York Times reports:

The nation’s three most powerful law enforcement officials—Attorney General Pam Bondi and her top deputy, Todd Blanche, along with Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director—padded into the Oval Office on Wednesday for a public show of unity and to herald some recent successes.
They left about an hour later, after President Trump tossed out, offhandedly, three names of people he wanted prosecuted: Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought two criminal indictments against him; Andrew Weissmann, a former F.B.I. official who was a lead prosecutor for the team investigating the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia in the 2016 election; and Lisa Monaco, the deputy attorney general under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“Deranged Jack Smith, in my opinion, is a criminal,” he told the three administration officials, who have tried—with a few notable exceptions—to do what he wants.
They smiled, nodded and shuffled in place as he spoke.
“His interviewer was Weissmann—I hope they’re going to look into Weissmann, too—Weissmann’s a bad guy,” Mr. Trump added, referring to a recent event in which Mr. Smith appeared alongside Mr. Weissmann. “And he had somebody, Lisa, who was his puppet, worked in the office, really, as the top person. I think she should be looked at very strongly.” …
The president, who vowed to go after the “scum” who once investigated him, often calls for investigations of people he hates, including Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen.
But those threats appear to be gaining legal force.

It is important to grasp how far beyond civilized norms this is. Nixon’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, went to jail for much less. But at least in Haldeman’s case, he and Nixon plotted in secret to interfere with the Watergate investigation. Today, Trump is openly treating top law enforcement officials as his personal lackeys at a press conference in the Oval Office.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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