Trump’s “Weaponization” Claim Is Total BS

Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Thursday. Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

Donald Trump’s pathetic and sleazy effort to create a slush fund of $1.776 billion that his lieutenants could dole out to his political allies, including, possibly, his violent January 6 brownshirts, appears to be dead. After even Republicans howled about this brazen corruption, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former (and, in a way, still) personal lawyer, proclaimed the so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund” kaput—though as of this writing there remains a possibility it could be revived. But in all the brouhaha over this attempt by Trump to swipe nearly 2 billion smackers from American taxpayers, one damn big point has gotten lost: The claim that past administrations weaponized government against Trump and his right-wing confederates is complete bullshit.

There was no need for such a fund, because there were no such victims. This chief grievance of Trump and his MAGA cult is a myth that’s been created to cover up the many transgressions of Trump himself. And any acceptance of this notion of weaponization is a win for Trump.

Trump has been braying for years that he has been the target of politically motivated investigations and prosecutions—what’s called lawfare. But that’s not true. The granddaddy of all this, as far as he is concerned, was the Russia investigation. He’s been moaning about the “Russia, Russia, Russia” probe for a decade, and through that stretch, he, his GOP lickspittles, and his right-wing media enablers have contended the investigation was a fraud cooked up by the Deep State, the Democrats, and the media.

But…no. Official reviews of the Russia investigation repeatedly declared it was a legitimate enterprise that was justifiably initiated and not a political hit job. This included a Justice Department inspector general report issued in 2019, a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee released in 2020 (when then-Sen. Marco Rubio chaired the committee), and the 2023 final report produced by special counsel John Durham, who had been appointed in 2019 by then–Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate the investigation.

Each of these reviews concluded that inquiry was neither a hoax nor a witch hunt, as Trump and his lackey have never stopped proclaiming. (The IG report and Durham did criticize elements of the Russia investigation, most notably the FBI’s improper surveillance of Carter Page, a former adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign.) And the Senate Intelligence Committee report reaffirmed (as did special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report) the intelligence community’s assessment that Moscow covertly attacked the 2016 election in part to help Trump win the White House.

There was no weaponization on this front. The Russia investigation led to solid indictments of several Trump aides, including Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, George Papdopoulos, and Roger Stone. Each of them either pleaded guilty or were convicted by a jury. It was Trump who then politicized the process by pardoning all four at the end of his first term. (Trump’s Justice Department in April handed Flynn $1.25 million to settle an iffy lawsuit he filed that alleged he had been maliciously prosecuted, and the department can be expected to be sympathetic to similar claims from other Trump devotees.)

Trump’s other two big gripes about supposed weaponization concern the federal investigations mounted by special counsel Jack Smith of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his alleged swiping of top-secret documents when he left the White House. Both these inquiries were fully justified. During the House January 6 committee’s investigation, multiple Republican witnesses testified that Trump took actions that were possibly criminal to try to retain power. And a bipartisan majority of the Senate voted to convict him of impeachment charges following his incitement of the January 6 riot. (It was not the supermajority needed for a conviction.)

As for the stolen-papers case, throughout 2021 and the first half of 2022, the National Archives and the Justice Department repeatedly tried to retrieve from Trump the sensitive records he held on to when he departed 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Had Trump returned the records, there would have been no prosecution. He did give back some of the material, and one of his attorneys certified that all documents had been sent back. But that was false, and an FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago found 25 boxes that contained documents of the highest classification. The subsequent criminal case was no witch hunt.

Neither the stolen papers nor the 2020 election case went to trial because Smith closed them after Trump won the 2024 election, citing a Justice Department policy that states that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted on federal charges. (That’s the reason Mueller did not file obstruction of justice charges against Trump during the Russia investigation.)

Trump also argues that he was unfairly investigated in New York for tax fraud and for falsifying business records to cover up the hush money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels, who claimed to have had an extramarital tryst with Trump. In each of these cases, a jury or judge found Trump guilty—a sign the cases had merit.

Beyond Trump’s own personal beefs, the MAGA crowd claims that the federal government in the Biden years was weaponized against right-wingers. They assert that the FBI targeted conservative Christians and school-board activists. An internal memo from the FBI’s Richmond, Virginia, field office, which was leaked in 2023, cited “radical-traditionalist Catholic” ideology as a possible pathway for domestic extremist violence. GOP officials and conservatives were outraged by this. But the memo was rescinded, and there was no evidence that it had resulted in any investigations or prosecutions. It was essentially the work of one junior analyst in a field office.

Right-wing groups also howled when the Biden Justice Department—following complaints that some parents protesting at school board meetings were threatening board members—issued a memo directing US attorney and FBI agents to discus this matter with local officials. They objected to comparing concerned parents—who often were religious conservatives—to terrorists. But this, too, did not lead to sweeping investigations of conservatives.

Then there’s January 6. MAGA luminaries—and Trump himself—have long championed the convicted rioters as victims of unfair and overreaching criminal investigations. A White House website—paid for with your tax dollars—makes this ludicrous case. And there was much worry that the Trump slush fund would dole out millions to these violent insurrectionists, thus endorsing and encouraging political violence.

To dub the prosecution of the J6 marauders “weaponization” of government is one of the biggest acts of gaslighting a White House has ever tried to pull off. It illustrates the fundamental absurdity of this propaganda campaign. We all saw what happened on that horrific day. Assailing the subsequent quest for justice as repressive federal overreach is bonkers and Orwellian in the extreme.

The investigations and prosecutions Trump bitches about were not acts of weaponization. They were appropriate government activity. But for years, Trump and his handmaids have been mounting this disinformation crusade without much opposition to its big lie. On top of that, Trump has shown us what the weaponization of government truly looks like with the criminal investigations he has ordered up of former FBI Director James Comey, New York state Attorney General Letitia James, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), former CIA Director John Brennan, and others, as well as the assaults he has launched on major law firms and universities.

The idea that he should be given $1.8 billion to hand out to his supporters who ran afoul of the law was preposterous but so too is the assertion that Trump and his comrades have been the targets of pervasive government weaponization. Yet that’s a major component of Trump’s self-glorifying mythology: He’s the target of a Deep State cabal and a martyr for MAGA. The pot of money for his malfeasants may be gone for now—though Trump still says, “I love it. I think it’s so important.” Whatever ultimately happens, Trump and his cult will continue insisting that he and his loyalists have been victimized by law enforcement. That’s what many crooks do. In this case, it’s a MAGA fairy tale and a cover story for a criminal president that deserves as much resistance as the corrupt slush fund has drawn.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

It would be hard to come up with a director of national intelligence worse than Tulsi Gabard, the former congresswoman who had little intelligence experience and who cared mostly about politicizing and misrepresenting intelligence to set up criminal investigations of Trump’s perceived political enemies. (That’s weaponization of government!) But Trump managed to do so. With Gabbard leaving the job, Trump named housing official Bill Pulte the acting DNI. He has absolutely no intelligence experience and, as head of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has sought to orchestrate mortgage fraud cases against Trump’s foes, such as Schiff and Letitia James. He’s a partisan hack totally unqualified for the vital position of overseeing the intelligence establishment. His appointment is a threat to national security. As I noted:

Let’s get the Trump entries out of the way. After the Trump-connected Freedom 250 concert series imploded, with most of the musical artists—even Milli Vanilli!—bailing, Trump announced he would replace theses shows with the “Number One Attraction anywhere in the World”—that is, himself featured in an “America Is Back” rally. In his social media post announcing this, he said this event will be “wild”:

Anyone remember the last time Trump invited his supporters to Washington, DC, and promised a “wild” time? Here’s a reminder:

On Monday, CNBC’s Eamon Javers held a phone interview with Trump and asked him, “Do you think the [Iran] negotiations are over now?” Trump replied:

I don’t care if they’re over, honestly. I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less. If they’re over, they’re over. If they’re not, you know, I think they took too much time. Frankly, I think they started to get a little boring.

It seems Trump is no longer interested in nabbing a Nobel Peace Prize. The work is just too boring.

At the recent Minnesota Republican convention, the assembled held a moment of silence for Derek Chauvin, the former police officer who in 2020 killed George Floyd—a murder that sparked mass protests across the country. When a local reporter asked Minnesota GOP chair Alex Plechash about this bizarre action, he defended it this way:

It came from the body...There are a lot of people, I think, that believe Derek Chauvin was improperly convicted and not treated well and those people wanted to have a moment of silence in recognition because they felt that way.

After that explanation, he was asked if he agreed with the convention attendees who pushed for this. “I don’t think I’m going to comment on that…I’m not going to challenge the court,” he replied. The reporter pressed him: “Did you like the fact that a convicted murder had a moment of silence at the convention?” His response: “I don’t think I should comment on that.”

Trump’s appointment of housing official and Trump stooge Bill Pulte to be acting DNI (see above) ranks as one of his worst actions as president. It even rankled a handful of Republican senators. After all, if you have any concern regarding the national security of the United States, you wouldn’t want this guy overseeing the intelligence community. Still, most Republicans cannot call out this laughable (but not funny) choice. Look at how Sen. Tom Cotton, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, responded to Pulte’s selection when questioned about it by CNN’s Manu Raju:

Manu Raju: Do you think Bill Pulte has experience to be acting DNI?…Is he kind of person you want leading the intelligence community?

Sen. John Thune: I'll defer to the chairman on that…

Sen. Tom Cotton: We have four more weeks with Director [Tulsi] Gabbard as the DNI, and I look forward to implementing last year’s intelligence authorization act with her… 

Raju: And Pulte?  

Cotton: I have no observations on the matter.

No observations on the matter. That is quite a whopper. Of course, Cotton has “observations” on the appointment. He’s just too chickenshit to say.

On Tuesday, it looked as if Rep. Andy Ogles, the bigoted right-wing Republican from Tennessee, was going to run away with the week’s trophy with this social media post:

It would be hard to beat that message of hate. But then Ogles deleted the post and put up this one, claiming the original message had come from a member of his communications team who had since “been reprimanded.”

For argument’s sake, the judges are willing to accept the congressman’s explanation. What kept Ogles in the running was his assertion that he had “reprimanded” rather than dismissed the person who zapped out that post. Keeping this hater on his payroll is an awful message itself.

But our winner this week is Energy Secretary Chris Wright for this simple doozy: “Solar is irrelevant in the winter.”

That’s about as dumb a statement as a supposed energy expert can make. By the way, the top four countries for solar use (per capita) are the Netherlands, Australia, Germany, and Japan. They each have winter. For outright doofusness, Wright rings the bell this week. 

Many readers this week shared their appreciation for the issue that reviewed Trump’s past ties to organized crime. Debby Dobson wrote:

As I read “What Donald Trump learned from the Mob,” I thought: Finally, someone is telling it like it is—and has been for years with him. He acts just like a Mafia boss. Thanks for telling the truth; I hope a lot of people read this and get it.

Thanks, Debby. I must admit I’m far from the first to compare Trump to a Mafioso. For me, the puzzling question is why so many American voters don't see this. Or maybe they do and like the idea of a mob guy in charge.

Christopher Randall emailed:

Anyone who believes anyone could build a (very successful—ha-ha) casino in New Jersey without mob involvement is delusional. Trump’s (very successful) casino went bankrupt. Who believes the mob didn’t get their money out?

A reader who goes by JM shared this:

Although we didn’t know all the details of his mob connections that were mentioned in this article, we pretty well understood by the time he was running for president in 2016 that he had run his business in a corrupt fashion, that he associated with such people as mob bosses, and that he cheated many of his contractors. We knew, and still, he got elected. I have blamed the media for soft pedaling his major drawbacks, and the New York Times for putting on the frontpage stories about the possibility of Hillary Clinton’s emails proving she was involved in scurrilous activities.

Jim Chalfant wrote in about the issue that reported on the Trump administration move to eviscerate regulations that cracked down on anonymous shell companies used by money launderers, drug cartels, terrorists, and fraudsters:

Another great piece of reporting that should be above the fold in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Guardian.

I think this story—which caught my eye because Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) had raised the issue—is a good example of a troubling reality of the Trump era: There’s just too much sleaze for the media to track and cover. Trump and his crew are engaged in so much wrongdoing it cannot all be captured by the press.

Responding to that issue, Betsy Smith wrote:

Last night, a friend sent me the link below to the Trump administration’s proposed revision of the rules by which the government funds scientific research. In all of your upcoming communications, please make this threat to science public, and please urge people to submit a comment within the 44-day limit: OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule.

Here’s the link. And what Betsy was referring to is a proposed change in federal rules that would subject a vast array of government grants—for science, health, housing, transportation, and other projects—to political conditions dictated by the Trump White House. For instance, grants could not go to groups that “deny the biological reality of sex or the sex binary in humans” or to initiatives that assist in voter registration or are deemed to “promote anti-American values.” The New York Times did a good piece that explains this and shows Betsy is right to worry.

Before Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund was 86’ed, Alexander Howard made this interesting point:

It’s unconstitutional for federal agencies to pay insurrectionists. Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States specifically limit payments to any Americans who engaged in insurrection against the U.S. government: “neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.” 

“Cold and gray—not a great beach day, right, Moxie?”
“What are you talking about? There’s water, there’s waves crashing, there’s dead fish and crabs and smelly stuff everywhere.”
“So what you’re saying is—”
“Every beach day is a great beach day.”