Weeks after President Donald Trump took to social media to instruct the nation’s chief law enforcement officer to take legal action against his political enemies, New York Attorney General Letitia James was indicted by a grand jury in Virginia on Thursday.
The move comes one day after former FBI Director James Comey pleaded not guilty to an indictment brought by the same office. Comey and James, a Black woman, are two of the most high-profile targets, but Trump’s playbook in seeking retribution against political enemies has been used on many others in the past — including other Black women in positions of power.
As the New York attorney general, James’ office opened an investigation in 2022 into whether Trump inflated the value of his real estate holdings. The case went to trial in 2023 and resulted in a $500 million civil fraud penalty. In May, the FBI opened a criminal investigation into James for alleged mortgage fraud. A divided appeals court also threw out the half-billion dollar civil fraud judgment against the president this August.
“This is nothing more than a continuation of the president’s desperate weaponization of our justice system,” James said on Thursday in response to charges of bank fraud and making false statements to a financial institution. “These charges are baseless, and the president’s own public statements make clear that his only goal is political retribution at any cost.”
Zoe Walker, an assistant professor in political science and racial and ethnic politics at the University of Rochester, said that Comey’s indictment is significant but not surprising given Trump’s previous actions.
“In some ways, the targeting of Black women was sort of like the warm-up to getting ready to target Comey,” said Walker, who researches public opinion and attitudes about race inequality in politics. “It was easier to target people like Letitia James, Fani Willis and Lisa Cook than it was to target James Comey.”
As the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, Willis led an investigation in 2021 into whether Trump and others sought to overturn the 2020 election. The case remains active, but an appeals court disqualified Willis from prosecuting because of a romantic relationship. In September, a federal grand jury subpoenaed Willis for international travel records from around the 2024 election.
In August, Trump alleged that Cook, a Federal Reserve governor, had committed mortgage fraud. The president, who has disagreed with the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy, has repeatedly tried to fire Cook since he returned to office, but the U.S. Supreme Court has held that she will keep her job for now. The high court said it would hear oral arguments in January on whether the president can fire Cook.
James, Willis and Cook are all Black women who rose to the top of their field. Trump and his allies have regularly tried to undermine the authority of women of color by attributing their positions to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts.
“The attacks that Trump has made on Letitia James, Lisa Cook and Fani Willis in particular fit into the larger goals of the Trump administration — as far as DEI and basically questioning the legitimacy of women of color and people of color in power,” Walker said.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, which brought charges against James and Comey, is being led on an interim basis by Lindsay Halligan, a White House aide with no prosecutorial experience and the most junior lawyer on Trump’s personal legal team. Trump appointed Halligan last month after her predecessor refused to bring charges against Comey.
Walker said one of the first things Trump did in his political career was undermine the legitimacy of one of the most prominent people of color in politics, then-President Barack Obama. Trump for years fueled conspiracy theories that falsely claimed Obama was not a natural-born U.S. citizen and therefore ineligible to be president. Then there were the “Lock her up” chants directed toward former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president in 2016. Walker said Trump’s base seemed to rally behind this type of messaging.
“Trump is someone who really responds to his base,” Walker said. “That’s part of what’s made him such an effective politician; he pays attention to what they want and how they’re feeling. And women of color are sort of easy targets because there’s a long-standing belief among that base and among the political right in general that Black people, women and people of color in general are getting unfair advantages in society. So it’s politically advantageous for him to appeal to racism when he has the goal of attacking his enemies.”
Walker said to combat this, people need to use their voices to decry racism or wrongdoing when they see it. She pointed to the recent controversy with Jimmy Kimmel. ABC pulled Kimmel’s show off the air in September after the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission hinted that he would take regulatory action over the talk show host’s comments about the late activist Charlie Kirk. Politicians, union leaders and protesters rallied to defend Kimmel’s right to free speech — and within a week, the show was back on air.
“We saw attempts to really silence Jimmy Kimmel were walked back quickly by the administration because of the public outcry,” Walker said. “I think there is a way for the public to demand accountability from Trump. We just have to value public servants the same way that we might value people in the media or celebrities, particularly White men.”
Walker said Comey’s indictment sets a concerning precedent, particularly for marginalized communities, immigrants and women — who are so often viewed by Trump as enemies. The president, for example, has deployed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and thousands of National Guard troops to several Democratic-led cities helmed by Black women mayors. If Comey, a powerful White man who is seen as more of a moderate centrist, can be discredited, “it’ll be that much easier to come for people on the margins of society,” Walker added.
“What’s happening is a lot scarier than folks may realize,” Walker said. “And we’re rapidly descending into a political state where the government is going to go after so-called enemies. And we might think we’re immune from those attacks. We may say we’re not particularly political or particularly vocal, but the reality is we’re all vulnerable. Anybody who is not exceedingly loyal to Donald Trump in every way, in every political opinion, is at risk.”
Ryan Dawkins, a political science professor at Carleton College, said that Trump is transparent about what he plans on doing and what is motivating him.
“The great thing about Donald Trump is he is an open book,” Dawkins said. “And if you read his Truth Social, he makes it very, very clear that he sincerely believes that the DOJ has been weaponized against him, and that he was treated unfairly and that this is just retribution.”
Dawkins said Trump is creating what’s called competitive authoritarianism — a political space that sits in between pure authoritarianism and liberal democracy.
“You still have competitive elections and all the trappings of a liberal democracy,” Dawkins said. “But at the same time, you have those in political power tilting the political landscape in their favor.”
But what does this actually look like? Dawkins pointed to how Trump is using the Justice Department as a personal bludgeon against his political opponents. But he also emphasized Trump’s defamation lawsuits against media outlets, threats against the tax-emempt status of higher-learning institutions and the Republican effort to redistrict ahead of the midterms.
“Citizens often don’t realize what’s going on,” Dawkins said. “In the world of partisan politics, where things get put into the spin cycle, these things look — at least on the surface — nominally legal. I look at the whole James Comey situation as part of a larger pattern of behavior.”
Dawkins said it was telling when Trump put loyalists in the Justice Department, the FBI and the Defense Department because he learned from his first administration where resistance was and removed “those sticking points.” In his first term, for example, Trump made repeated attempts to use the DOJ to investigate his political opponents, but was thwarted by career officials, including former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and his successor former Attorney General William Barr.
“My biggest fear is that the damage being done now is not going to be stopped soon,” Dawkins said, adding that people don’t seem to think we are quite at a “constitutional crisis” yet because Trump has yet to openly defy the Supreme Court. Dawkins said that might not happen because “the court’s giving him everything he wants. Congress is giving him everything he wants. There’s already a consolidation of power that is some manifestation of authoritarian rule.”
Phil Chen, an associate professor of political science at the University of Denver, said that Comey is not the first FBI director to face indictment. Louis Patrick Gray III, who was acting director of the FBI during President Richard Nixon’s administration, was the first and only other FBI director to be indicted over the agency’s surveillance of the radical group the Weather Underground. Moreover, Trump is not the first president to be accused of being too close to the Justice Department: President John F. Kennedy had his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, serve as Attorney General; Nixon’s campaign manager became the attorney general; and President Ronald Reagan’s first attorney general was his personal lawyer.
But much changed after the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Chen said norms and regulations were put in place to keep the DOJ more neutral and objective and establish the department’s independence from the White House. Post-Watergate norms established that personal and partisan influences should not impact DOJ legal decisions; that the DOJ’s purpose was to enforce the law, not serve the president; and that all DOJ lawyers be committed to integrity and good judgment.
“We’re seeing an erosion of those kinds of principles that used to guide what the DOJ did and how it functioned,” Chen said. “If those norms are not reinstated, you’re likely to see continued prosecutions of people perceived to be the enemy of the administration in power. That is a dangerous place to be in terms of the health of American democracy.”
And Chen said the stakes are high. If the Justice Department is effectively used to shut down organizations, fundraising platforms and any people who voice dissent, Chen argued, there might soon be elections that are not free and fair.
Yet, even with the news coverage of the Comey indictment, Chen said a large segment of the population doesn’t know who Comey is, let alone James, Willis or Cook. People aren’t aware that these people are under investigation or facing criminal indictments. And as a growing number of people continue to avoid the news, Chen said ignorance is a real danger to democracy.
“There’s a real risk that this becomes the new norm, not because people think it’s the right thing to do — but because they’re just not paying a lot of attention,” Chen said. “And they don’t understand that this is not normal.”
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