After Comey, here’s who is next on Trump’s political hit list

With the indictment of former FBI director James Comey, US President Donald Trump’s efforts to deploy the Justice Department against his enemies have entered a new phase, and the question now is who’s next.

Federal prosecutors across the US are facing increasing pressure to quickly produce results in other investigations aimed at subjects of Trump’s scorn, in some cases despite objections over the weakness of the evidence.

Trump is expanding his list of possible targets, suggesting in an Oval Office ceremony that the FBI should investigate Democratic figures such as George Soros and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman as funders of domestic terrorism and the “radical left”.

US attorneys in at least half a dozen jurisdictions are pursuing investigations of perceived political foes such as Democratic Attorney-General of New York Letitia James, former national security adviser John Bolton, and Democratic California senator Adam Schiff.

Trump on Friday predicted more indictments. Speaking to reporters about the Comey case, he insisted it was about “justice – not revenge”.

“There will be others. I mean, they’re corrupt,” Trump said, adding later: “You can’t let this go on. They are sick, radical left people, and they can’t get away with it.”

The acceleration and audacity of Trump’s efforts threaten to obliterate what remains of long-standing Justice Department traditions of independence from White House interference.

And tensions are rising among career prosecutors who are increasingly worried the president’s pressure campaign could soon put them in a position to violate their constitutional oaths.

Jon Hooks, head of the public corruption and fraud unit in the US attorney’s office in Washington, resigned last week amid a dispute with the Trump-appointed top prosecutor for the region, Jeanine Pirro.

While their falling out stemmed from multiple investigations, Hooks’ team had recently been tasked with handling a possible inquiry into a philanthropic foundation tied to Soros, three people familiar with the matter said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

Democrats decried what they viewed as the Justice Department’s transformation into “a political tool of a vengeful president”.

“President Trump ... defies anyone daring to challenge him,” said Senator Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “The attorney-general willingly complies with every order from the White House.”

But in the face of such criticism, Attorney-General Pam Bondi remained undeterred, vowing on Friday that “this is just the beginning”.

“Whether you’re a former FBI director, whether you’re a former head of an intel community, whether you are a current state or local elected official, whether you’re a billionaire funding organisations to try to keep Donald Trump out of office, everything is on the table,” she told Fox News’s Sean Hannity.

Thursday’s indictment charging Comey on allegations of lying to Congress brought to a climax an unusual four-day race by Lindsey Halligan, Trump’s newly installed interim US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, to deliver a result specifically called for by the president.

Halligan presented the case to a grand jury, over objections from career prosecutors in her office and after the resignation of her predecessor, Erik S. Siebert, who had concluded there was insufficient evidence to move forward.

Even while those events were playing out, federal prosecutors in Maryland handling an investigation of Bolton’s alleged mishandling of classified material faced a quandary of their own.

Senior Justice Department officials were pushing Kelly Hayes – the interim US attorney overseeing that case – to secure an indictment by the end of the week, according to three people familiar with that request, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.

Multiple people familiar with case against Bolton, a veteran diplomat turned fierce Trump critic, have described it as generally stronger than the Comey case, though they cautioned that the investigation was ongoing. Some in Hayes’s office raised concerns that rushing to indict Bolton could compromise their chances of a successful prosecution, the three people said.

Bolton had not been charged with a crime. His attorney, Abbe Lowell, has described the investigation as politically motivated and undertaken by a Justice Department “under pressure to satisfy a president out for political revenge”.

Hayes’ office is juggling a separate mortgage fraud case against Schiff, who led the House investigation that resulted in Trump’s first impeachment.

The mortgage fraud inquiry is one of three similar real estate fraud investigations involving Trump adversaries being pushed by Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and Ed Martin, a senior Justice Department official who leads its “Weaponizations Working Group”.

Other targets include James, who secured a civil fraud judgment against Trump and his real estate empire last year, and Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, whom Trump has sought to fire from the board, citing the allegations against her.

In all three instances, defence lawyers have provided the Justice Department with documents they say exonerate their clients.

Siebert, the Trump-appointed US attorney in Virginia who resigned amid pressure to indict Comey, had concluded the evidence in the James case was too weak to move forward, people familiar with his decision said.

James, Schiff and Cook have denied wrongdoing. Schiff, in the hours after Comey was indicted on Thursday, called Trump’s efforts “a blatant abuse” of the Justice Department.

“The DOJ is now little more than an arm of the president’s retribution campaign,” Schiff said in a social media post.

Elsewhere, federal prosecutors’ offices are pushing ahead with criminal inquiries into another long-standing Trump grievance – the FBI’s handling of the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign.

And last week, the Justice Department ordered US attorneys in more than half a dozen cities – including Washington, Chicago and New York – to open investigations into Open Society Foundations, a grant-making group funded by Soros, the billionaire Democratic philanthropist.

According to a person briefed on those plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to publicly discuss them, investigators were instructed to consider charges including racketeering, material support for terrorism and arson in response to right-wing theories that Open Society and other organisations are funding violent attacks by the left.

In a statement, the foundation rejected the suggestion it was involved in financing domestic terrorism.

“These accusations are politically motivated attacks on civil society, meant to silence speech the administration disagrees with and undermine the First Amendment right to free speech. When power is abused to take away the rights of some people, it puts the rights of all people at risk,” it said.

Frustrations over a Soros-related investigation were, at least in part, behind the dispute that led to the departure of Washington DC corruption prosecutor Hooks from the US attorney’s office last week, according to the three people familiar with his decision.

His portfolio included other high-profile cases such as the investigation into whether Washington police had manipulated crime data to paint a rosier public safety picture.

Pirro upbraided him during a meeting with other supervisors over what she viewed as the slow pace of some investigations, the three people said.

Hooks offered to resign effective immediately, but had agreed to stay with the office through October. Days later, in the middle of a going-away party for two colleagues, he was informed he would be fired instead, the three people said.

A spokesperson for Pirro’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Liz Oyer, the Justice Department’s former pardon attorney who was fired by Trump Justice Department officials this year, said the investigations of Comey and other Trump critics exposed the limits of the justice system to provide a check on Trump’s will.

“We are realising now that our justice system really relies on those who are entrusted with power exercising that power in good faith,” she said.

“That has worked throughout our history, but it is no longer working because we have an elected leader who has intentionally decimated all of the safeguards within the system, has loaded the department with people who are blindly loyal to him and is willing to tear down the whole system to get what he wants, which is revenge against his enemies.”

The Washington Post

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.