The cascade of election coverage, commentary and speculation about how Donald Trump might use the power of the presidency to retaliate against his perceived political enemies has overlooked important context: Trump has done just that, while he was president, at least a dozen times.
What follows is a chronological list of specific instances in which the former president in fact used the Department of Justice and other levers of government power — including by directly, publicly or privately, pressuring officials — to target his chosen political adversaries. The record includes several cases in which he apparently succeeded more than might be imagined or remembered.
Two asides are worth addressing before we detail the chronology:
First, the kinds of issues we examine here are related to concerns that a president may also abuse his or her authority by relieving friends and allies from accountability in the justice system. We do not discuss such cases here, but it should be recalled that Trump’s time in office included extraordinary interventions to save Paul Manafort from conditions of confinement, the lighter sentencing of Roger Stone (with federal prosecutors resigning in protest), and dropping the prosecution of Michael Flynn. Along these lines, one might also include pardons and commutations of sentences for individuals such as Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner’s father Charles Kushner, Stone, Manafort, Flynn; and more (not to mention the dangling of pardons).
Second, we do not also chronicle President Joe Biden’s use of the Justice Department because there is no evidence that he or anyone at the White House ever took similar actions. The closest are media reports that Biden confided to his inner circle that he thought Trump should be prosecuted (New York Times) and privately told his aides and advisers that he was disappointed with Attorney General Garland in the speed of the Justice Department’s pursuing the criminal case against Trump (New York Times and Politico). “The president has never communicated his frustrations directly to Mr. Garland,” the New York Times added. The Garland Justice Department also prosecuted the sitting president’s son, without any known interference from the White House.
Trump’s campaign spokesperson did not respond to an email requesting comment by press time.
1. Trump asks then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to “unrecuse” himself to investigate and prosecute Hillary Clinton
Date: Sometime after May 17, 2017 and before July 19, 2017
After Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment on May 17, 2017, Trump urged his then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to “un-recuse” himself from overseeing that investigation and any matters arising from the Clinton presidential campaign and instead pursue his own probe of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Sessions recounted this episode in his interview with federal prosecutors, which is summarized in the Mueller report:
“According to Sessions, the President asked him to reverse his recusal so that Sessions could direct the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute Hillary Clinton, and the ‘gist’ of the conversation was that the President wanted Sessions to unrecuse from ‘all of it,’ including the Special Counsel’s Russia investigation. Sessions listened but did not respond, and he did not reverse his recusal or order an investigation of Clinton.”
The report does not provide an exact date of this conversation.
2. Trump publicly scolds Justice Department for not investigating Clinton
Date: November 2017
In a radio interview on November 2, 2017, Trump said, “I look at what’s happening with the Justice Department. Well, why aren’t they going after Hillary Clinton and her emails and with her, the dossier?;” “The saddest thing is that because I’m the President of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department;” and “I am not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing. And I am very frustrated.” The following morning, Trump posted a tweet thread saying, “Everybody is asking why the Justice Department (and FBI) isn’t looking into all of the dishonesty going on with Crooked Hillary & the Dems,” followed by, “People are angry. At some point the Justice Department, and the FBI, must do what is right and proper. The American public deserves it!”
3. Sessions directs US Attorney for Utah John W. Huber to investigate Hillary Clinton and Uranium One conspiracy
Date: November 2017 to January 2020
In November 2017, Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro told Trump in the Oval Office that the Justice Department should appoint a special counsel to investigate the (already debunked) conspiracy theory involving Hillary Clinton and Uranium One, according to the New York Times. Shortly after the meeting, on Nov. 13, 2017, Assistant Attorney General Stephen E. Boyd sent a letter to lawmakers informing them that Attorney General Sessions had directed senior federal prosecutors to examine whether to appoint a special counsel to investigate the Uranium One allegations and dealings related to the Clinton Foundation and “whether any matters not currently under investigation should be opened.” On Nov. 22, 2017, Sessions sent a letter to John W. Huber, the U.S. Attorney for Utah, assigning him responsibility for examining these matters. On March 29, 2018, Sessions sent a letter to lawmakers informing them that “Mr. Huber is conducting his work from outside the Washington, D.C. area and in cooperation with the Inspector General” and assured them, “I receive regular updates from Mr. Huber.”
After Trump fired Sessions in November 2018, what once may have been an act by the Office of the Attorney General to simply placate Trump became something different. Trump appointed Matthew Whitaker as acting Attorney General (more on Whitaker below). Whitaker apparently took a different approach than Sessions. “Whitaker, according to people familiar with the conversations, tried to push Huber to be more aggressive in his work, but Huber felt he had looked at everything he could and that there was not much more to do,” the Washington Post reported.
Huber’s probe “effectively ended with no tangible results” by January 2020. “Current and former law enforcement officials said they never expected the effort to produce much of anything,” the Washington Post reported. In a tweet, Trump publicly criticized Huber, calling the U.S. Attorney a “garbage disposal unit.”
4. Criminal investigation of the Clinton Foundation
Date: On or before January 2018 to January 2021
In January 2018, the New York Times reported that “F.B.I. agents have renewed questions about the dealings of the Clinton Foundation amid calls from President Trump and top Republicans for the Justice Department to take a fresh look at politically charged accusations of corruption.” Career prosecutors had shut down the case in 2016.
In early 2018, prosecutors in Little Rock reportedly issued a grand jury subpoena for Foundation records (see also FOIA document on Jan. 19, 2018). That step was reportedly followed by the FBI “detail[ing] personnel to examine donor records” and “Investigators also interviewed the former chief financial officer for the foundation.”
Remarkably, “the Justice Department kept open the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s family foundation for nearly all of President Donald J. Trump’s administration, with prosecutors closing the case without charges just days before he left office,” the New York Times’ Charlie Savage reported in 2023. “The investigation stretched long past when F.B.I. agents and prosecutors knew it was a dead end.” On Jan. 8, 2021 and Jan. 15, 2021, prosecutors in the Arkansas office closed the case and notified the local FBI office (FOIA documents).
5. Criminal investigation and near-prosecution of former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe
Date: March 16, 2018-February 14, 2020
Given his prominent role in the Russia investigation and his rocky relationship with then-President Trump, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe’s sudden ouster appeared suspicious the day it happened on March 16, 2018.
The next day, Trump heightened those concerns by openly and gleefully celebrating the dismissal on Twitter.
“Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI – A great day for Democracy,” Trump tweeted on March 17, 2018. “Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy. He knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!”
Attorney General Sessions fired McCabe just 26 hours before his scheduled retirement, in a move that, at the time, imperiled the ex-FBI deputy’s pension. Then, McCabe’s problems got worse.
Roughly a month later on April 13, 2018, the Justice Department’s inspector general released a report finding that McCabe “lacked candor” when he told the FBI that he did not authorize disclosures about two Clinton-related probes to the Wall Street Journal years earlier. The internal DOJ watchdog concluded that McCabe authorized the release of information that appeared in two stories the newspaper ran about the Clinton email investigation and another Clinton Foundation probe. Trump exulted in what he called a “total disaster” for McCabe.
“He LIED! LIED! LIED!” Trump tweeted that day, referring to McCabe.
That inspector general report — and the appearance of Trump’s urging — sparked a yearslong criminal investigation into whether McCabe lied to federal agents about whether he disclosed the information to the Journal. As the FBI’s deputy director, McCabe was one of two officers in the bureau authorized to release information about the investigations, but the inspector general found that the way McCabe released the information violated the Justice Department’s media policy. McCabe denied deliberately misleading investigators.
In August 2019, a little more than a year later, McCabe accused Trump of a campaign to fire, discredit and investigate him in a lawsuit alleging: “It was Trump’s unconstitutional plan and scheme to discredit and remove DOJ and FBI employees who were deemed to be his partisan opponents because they were not politically loyal to him.”
With his criminal probe stalled more than a year after the inspector general’s referral, McCabe’s defense attorneys asked whether the grand jury had rejected charges. The Justice Department never answered that question, but several indicators suggest the grand jury declined to return an indictment. That would be further evidence of the profound weakness of the case, since federal grand juries indict nearly 100 percent of the time.
Prosecutors repeatedly requested extensions, until the judge overseeing McCabe’s investigation, George W. Bush appointee Reggie Walton, sharply criticized the Department’s actions. “I don’t think people like the fact that you got somebody at the top basically trying to dictate whether somebody should be prosecuted,” Walton remarked, according to transcripts brought to light during an open records lawsuit by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).
“I just think it’s a banana republic when we go down that road, and we have those types of statements being made that are conceivably, even if not, influencing the ultimate decision,” Walton continued. “I think there are a lot of people on the outside who perceive that there is undue inappropriate pressure being brought to bear.”
On Feb. 14, 2020, the Justice Department dropped charges against McCabe, but more than a year would pass before the Department ultimately settled McCabe’s lawsuit, awarding him back pay and restoring his pension.
6. Trump demands investigation into his debunked “Spygate” conspiracy theory
Date: May 20, 2018
In May 2018, Trump sent out a tweet to federal prosecutors and law enforcement to investigate his predecessor, stylizing it as a demand from his White House.
“I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!” Trump wrote on May 20, 2018.
There was never any evidence that former President Barack Obama ordered his FBI to infiltrate or surveil the Trump campaign — or that any “spying,” as Trump put it, happened at all. The “Spygate” theory cast a retired professor named Stefan Halper, a figure with a history inside Republican politics and the U.S. intelligence community, as a sort of Obama-linked mole inside the Trump campaign. The notion caught on in far right-wing lore, becoming the juice of books, merchandise, and numerous Trump tweets. The former president’s campaign even hawked T-shirts with Obama donning spy glasses and hiding in the bushes.
The cartoonish imagery belied the far more grave reality: Trump had accused his predecessor of a form of espionage—and demanded a criminal investigation into that fiction.
At least on the surface, Trump’s top Justice Department official Rod Rosenstein appeared willing to oblige, or at least humor the then-president.
“If anyone did infiltrate or surveil participants in a presidential campaign for inappropriate purposes, we need to know about it and take appropriate action,” Rosenstein said in a statement at the time.
In December 2019, then-Justice Department Inspector General Horowitz said he “found no evidence that the FBI attempted to place any [Confidential Human Sources] within the Trump campaign, recruit members of the Trump campaign as CHSs, or task CHSs to report on the Trump campaign.”
One might consider any investigation to have, accordingly, be terminated. However, the Durham investigation, discussed below, arguably subsumed the “spygate” probe.
7. Trump privately told White House Counsel he wanted to order the Justice Department to prosecute James Comey and Hillary Clinton
Date: Spring 2018
Trump “told the White House counsel in the spring that he wanted to order the Justice Department to prosecute” Clinton and Comey, the New York Times reported in Nov. 2018. (See also Washington Post reporting, “Trump told White House aides in spring that Comey, Clinton and former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe should be charged with crimes.”)
The Times also reported how the White House Counsel pushed back:
“The lawyer, Donald F. McGahn II, rebuffed the president, saying that he had no authority to order a prosecution. Mr. McGahn said that while he could request an investigation, that too could prompt accusations of abuse of power. To underscore his point, Mr. McGahn had White House lawyers write a memo for Mr. Trump warning that if he asked law enforcement to investigate his rivals, he could face a range of consequences, including possible impeachment.”
Trump did not relent, however. He “repeatedly expressed disappointment in the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, for failing to more aggressively investigate Mrs. Clinton,” and “Trump repeatedly pressed Justice Department officials about the status of Clinton-related investigations, including Mr. [Matthew] Whitaker when he was the chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions.” Trump also repeatedly pressed the DOJ official on investigating Comey.
During the 2016 presidential race, Whitaker, in publicly criticizing Comey, wrote that he personally would have indicted Clinton for mishandling government emails. He discussed the case on conservative-leaning radio and television shows throughout 2016 and 2017, including saying he was confident Clinton had committed a felony and calling for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate and prosecute Clinton. Trump’s asking the White House Counsel about getting the Justice Department to prosecute Clinton and Comey “took on additional significance … when Mr. McGahn left the White House and Mr. Trump appointed a relatively inexperienced political loyalist, Matthew G. Whitaker, as the acting attorney general,” the New York Times explained.
8. Trump publicly urges Sessions to investigate a long list of perceived political enemies
Date: Aug. 23, 2018
The Mueller report recorded how Trump criticized Sessions for his refusal to take over the Russia investigation, and Sessions publicly responded that he would not let the Justice Department be “improperly influenced by political considerations.”
Trump publicly responded with a laundry list of topics and people he wanted the Justice Department, through Sessions, to investigate, including James Comey, Robert Mueller, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr, Christopher Steele, and the Clinton Foundation.
The Mueller report recounts the exchange:
On August 23, 2018, the President publicly criticized Sessions in a press interview and suggested that prosecutions at the Department of Justice were politically motivated because Paul Manafort had been prosecuted but Democrats had not. The President said, “I put in an Attorney General that never took control of the Justice Department, Jeff Sessions.” That day, Sessions issued a press statement that said, “I took control of the Department of Justice the day I was sworn in … While I am Attorney General, the actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations.” The next day, the President tweeted a response: “‘Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations.’ Jeff, this is GREAT, what everyone wants, so look into all of the corruption on the ‘other side’ including deleted Emails, Comey lies & leaks, Mueller conflicts, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Ohr, FISA abuse, Christopher Steele & his phony and corrupt Dossier, the Clinton Foundation, illegal surveillance of Trump campaign, Russian collusion by Dems – and so much more. Open up the papers & documents without redaction? Come on Jeff, you can do it, the country is waiting!”
9. The Durham investigation: Directed at law enforcement and intelligence officials, as well as Hillary Clinton
Date: April 18, 2019 to May 2023
On the day of the Mueller report’s release, Trump thirsted for “revenge.”
That was according to the headlines in the New York Times, Politico, MSNBC, Business Insider and other news outlets, describing Trump’s mood in the wake of the Mueller report. Trump’s reelection campaign released a video titled “Time to Turn the Tables!” and his then advisor Kellyanne Conway told reporters: “Let’s investigate the investigators.” Trump took that line up as his rallying cry.
The furor predated the release of the actual report. At a political rally held on March 29, 2019, four days after Attorney General Bill Barr’s issuance of a highly misleading summary of the Mueller report, Trump’s supporters put a new spin on an old slogan: “Lock them up.” (Barr released the Mueller report itself over two weeks later.)
Whether taking these cues or acting on his own, Barr quickly deputized U.S. Attorney John Durham, who was not yet a special counsel, to look into the origins of the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane,” the bureau’s code name for the investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with the Russian government. Trump agitated to even the score, and he claimed that the supposed crimes against him were “bigger than Watergate.”
Several months later on Oct. 19, 2020, Barr appointed Durham as a special counsel for this investigation, and the three-and-a-half year probe did not rise to anywhere near Trump’s billing. Durham brought three criminal cases, ultimately convicting one low-level FBI attorney: Kevin Clinesmith, who pleaded guilty to altering an email while renewing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against former Trump advisor Carter Page.
Two other cases Durham brought against attorney Michael Sussmann and Russian analyst Igor Danchenko ended in their acquittals, an extraordinary rarity in the federal criminal justice system. As of June 2023, Pew Research Center found that fewer than one percent of U.S. federal criminal defendants were acquitted the previous year, and the vast majority pleaded out before trial. That was the same year as Sussmann and Danchecko’s acquittals. Durham’s conviction rate was one in three, with federal juries rejecting every case that went to trial.
By contrast, Mueller indicted 34 people and entities, securing eight convictions. There were no acquittals, and the remaining defendants were beyond the reach of the U.S. justice system, including 13 Russian nationals and 12 Russian military intelligence officers. Five of Trump’s allies were among those convicted.
Whatever one believes of the merits of the Durham investigation — and the report that it produced — it was a criminal probe that Trump agitated for openly and repeatedly against his perceived rivals for many months, in an earlier example of his taste for revenge. Durham also cast a wide net, apparently going after FBI officials, former prosecutors and other intelligence and law enforcement officials including those involved in the Crossfire Hurricane and Special Counsel Mueller investigations.
Durham’s investigation was not simply about investigating the investigators. It had become a probe of Clinton and her inner circle, as the theory of the (failed) case against Sussmann showed, as well as large sections of his final report (eg pp. 88-97) and his office’s court filings. By September 2020, Durham focused as well on how federal law enforcement officials handled prior allegations of political corruption at the Clinton Foundation. It was considered so “highly unusual” that some former law enforcement officials reportedly declined to speak with Durham’s team.
After revealing that his office interviewed Clinton herself (on May 11, 2022, according to a statement by her attorney, David E. Kendall) and Clinton’s senior presidential campaign staff, Durham’s final report states: “The Office considered the validity of the allegations and evaluated whether the conduct of these individuals or entities [with ties to the Clinton campaign] constituted a federal offense and whether admissible evidence would be sufficient to obtain a conviction for such an offense.”
10. Trump urges Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to open a criminal investigation of Joe Biden
Date: July 25, 2019
Some five years and a second impeachment later, it is easy to forget that Trump’s first impeachment began with his effort to gin up a prosecution of Joe and Hunter Biden — in Ukraine.
After asking a “favor” of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump alluded to a “CrowdStrike” conspiracy theory to absolve Russia of the hack on Democratic National Committee servers in 2016.
“I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it,” Trump told Zelenskyy during the infamous call on July 25, 2019.
Later in the phone call, Trump peddled the discredited theory that Biden and his son Hunter pushed to oust former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin in 2016 to prevent the investigation of Burisma, the energy company where the younger Biden was a board member.
“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great,” Trump told Zelenskyy during the call. “Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it … It sounds horrible to me.”
Indeed, this was not just a matter of a foreign investigation. The declassified transcript of the phone call shows that Trump referred Zelenskyy to working with Attorney General Barr five times. “I am also going to have.Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it,” he said in one of those instances.
For context: In the United States and the European Union, officials widely viewed Shokin as pro-Kremlin and corrupt. Republicans and Democrats alike sought Shokin’s ouster, including Biden and Trump’s GOP allies, like Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson. The bipartisan consensus surrounding Shokin’s corruption partly involved Shokin’s failure to prosecute companies like Burisma, poking a hole in Trump’s central defense at his impeachment.
Ukraine’s government never brought the case against the Bidens that Trump wanted, and the 45th president’s demand — backed by his threats to deprive the country of defensive Javelin missiles to repel Russian aggression — resulted in Trump’s first impeachment, in which several Trump administration officials were witnesses against him.
11. Criminal investigations of Comey
First Date: uncertain — August 2019
Second Date: From at least January 2020 – December 2020/January 2021
In 2018, the Times wrote: “Mr. Trump’s lawyers also privately asked the Justice Department last year [in 2017] to investigate Mr. Comey for mishandling sensitive government information and for his role in the Clinton email investigation. Law enforcement officials declined their requests.”
The report of law enforcement’s rejection, however, turned out not to be fully accurate — or at least did not remain so. The Trump Justice Department conducted two investigations of leaks potentially involving Comey, according to subsequent Times reporting.
First, New York federal prosecutors investigated Comey for providing memos to a personal lawyer and friend to share with a reporter in spring 2017. The memos contained Comey’s notes of his interactions with Trump. By July-August 2019, the Justice Department declined to prosecute Comey.
Second, Justice Department prosecutors were, as of January 2020, investigating whether Comey illegally provided reporters in 2017 with highly classified information concerning Russian intelligence documents. A month earlier, on Dec. 15, 2019, Trump tweeted, “So now Comey’s admitting he was wrong. Wow, but he’s only doing so because he got caught red handed. He was actually caught a long time ago. So what are the consequences for his unlawful conduct. Could it be years in jail?” As the Times noted, “Prosecutors and F.B.I. agents typically investigate leaks of classified information around the time they appear in the news media, not years later.” The investigation continued until the end of the Trump administration. “During the transition to the Biden administration, at least one official wrote in a memo for the incoming Biden team that the Comey leak investigation … should be closed,” the Times reported.
12. Trump threatens to prosecute Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger if he doesn’t overturn his election defeat in Georgia
Date: Jan. 2, 2021
Four days before the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Trump made a last-ditch attempt to overturn his electoral defeat in Georgia by threatening its Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger with criminal prosecution.
The remark came shortly before Trump asked Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes, exactly one vote more than Joe Biden’s margin of victory in that state.
After making false claims that the ballots were “corrupt,” Trump told Raffensperger that refusing to overturn the race was “dangerous” because he had a duty to report alleged fraud by others.
“It is more illegal for you than it is for them because you know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” Trump told Raffensperger. “That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen.”
In his memoirs and in testimony before Congress, Raffensperger said he viewed Trump’s phone call to him as a “threat.” The Georgia secretary of state compared Trump’s social media footprint to his as a “match going up against a blowtorch.”
Conclusion: “Weaponization,” Real and Imagined
When Trump’s allies accuse the Justice Department of “weaponization,” they generally are not referring to the examples during his presidency. Our list does not even include Trump’s pressure on the Justice Department to stop criminal investigations into himself or his associates, nor does it include pressure on U.S. attorneys that led to at least three ousters: two in the Southern District of New York and one in the Northern District of Georgia.
This deeper understanding of the past events is not simply about Trump himself. It is also a lesson in how political leaders then and now choose to overlook or excuse it. How some of the best fact checkers don’t account for it. And how American institutions have not fully reckoned with it.
