Trump, Soros and a weaponized DoJ

In 2013, the IRS targeted the Tea Party and other conservative organizations for special scrutiny. Four years later, the federal government reached a settlement and the IRS apologized. Is it about to be déjà vu all over again?

The Trump administration is embarking upon a major campaign against leading liberal organizations. The first shot came in late August when President Trump demanded that the liberal billionaire George Soros and his son, Alex, be charged under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act for supporting violent protests across America. The libertarian CATO Institute, a redoubt for decades of free speech advocates, promptly observed that “the call to prosecute may be bluster.”

Wrong.

The New York Times reports that a new Justice Department directive suggests targeting Soros and his Open Society Foundations for a gallimaufry of sins, including arson and material support of terrorism. Like his ally Viktor Orbán, who has demonized Soros, a survivor of the Holocaust, as a dangerous international banker who poses a threat to Hungarian sovereignty, Trump appears intent on quashing him by whatever means necessary. Whether he will succeed is another matter.

Over the past several months, Trump has been systematically targeting what he sees as his internal foes. They include his former national security adviser John Bolton, New York attorney general Letitia James, and former FBI head James Comey. So fixated is Trump with prosecuting James and Comey that he drummed out longtime Republican prosecutor Erik Siebert from his post in Virginia, replacing him with Lindsey Halligan, a confidante with no experience as a prosecutor. Presumably, she has been installed to do Trump’s bidding, which is to ensure that Comey is busted for lying to Congress. The prosecutors in the Virginia office have already indicated that insufficient evidence exists for an actual conviction, but that is a mere detail for Trump. Trump’s approach seems redolent of Stalin’s henchman Lavrenti Beria who declared, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”

But even with Trump’s elastic interpretation of legality, it may prove difficult to persuade a grand jury of the malfeasance of Soros or James or Comey. The cases appear to be more than a little rickety. Comey is a drip, but hardly the type to try and bamboozle Congress. It was his moral vanity that prompted him to declare that the FBI was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails on the eve of Election Day – a move that helped push Trump over the top in 2016.

How the inexperienced Halligan is supposed to proceed in the face of defiance from her own prosecutors is a pertinent question. For its part, the Open Society Foundations avers that the accusations directed against it are “politically motivated attacks on civil society, meant to silence speech the administration disagrees with and undermine the First Amendment right to free speech.”

As the Trump administration gins up lawfare, it is also putting the American military in its gunsights, so to speak. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has summoned several hundred generals and admirals to meet at a military base in Quantico, Virginia, where they will be told… what? Speculation ranges from mass firings to a speech from Trump demanding their personal loyalty.

Trump does not wish to govern America. He wants to rule it. He is upping the ante almost by the day as he targets his real and perceived foes.

Still, he is encountering opposition, whether it is from Soros or from Senator Ted Cruz who recently likened Federal Communication Commission head Brendan Carr to a mob boss for trying to evict Jimmy Kimmel from the airwaves. The Economist has pronounced that Trump is trying to silence his critics, but “he will fail.” Will he?