Trump Sics DOJ on Famed Victim of His Sexual Abuse

INSIDE: Sharyn Alfonsi ... Bari Weiss ... Stephen Miller

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - AUGUST 15: E. Jean Carroll attends the Variety and Rolling Stone Truth Seekers Summit presented by Paramount + at Second on August 15, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Ilya S. Savenok/Variety via Getty Images)

There Is No Bottom

I wish I could say we have reached the nadir of President Trump’s abuse of his office and debasement of the Justice Department. But the news, first reported by CNN, that the Trump DOJ has launched a criminal investigation of E. Jean Carroll, the high-profile victim of Trump’s sexual abuse, feels like a downward spiral with no end in sight.

The top-line outrage here is clear but it’s so astounding that it bears repeating: The president is using the powers of his office to settle not just political but private scores against someone adjudged by juries to be a victim of his sexual abuse and defamatory attacks. Carroll, 82, has been awarded nearly $90 million by juries in the two Trump cases, whose verdicts he is still appealing.

It is abuse heaped on top of abuse.

As with the other Trump II retributive investigations and prosecutions, the predicate to the Carroll investigation is bogus, but is it especially tenuous here. The DOJ is zeroing in on conduct that even if true (and it’s not) is rarely if ever prosecuted, federally or otherwise: perjury in a civil deposition.

Trump already tried and failed to make Carroll’s incorrect deposition answer an issue at trial, but the judge flicked it away as a nonstarter, and a unanimous appeals court agreed.

No other Justice Department would have even entertained a criminal investigation under these circumstances. But no other DOJ has taken orders directly from the White House on whom to investigate and for what.

In this case, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has recused himself because of his prior representation of Trump personally. But Main Justice is so thoroughly corrupted now that other top officials moved ahead on it, CNN reported: “Senior leaders at the Justice Department referred the investigation to federal prosecutors in Chicago, according to two sources familiar with the matter.”

The irony of referring the Carroll case to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago is almost too rich to bear. The office is currently embroiled in a furor over its misconduct in front of the grand jury in the Broadview Six case, with potential sanctions coming down the pike. The fallout is spreading to at least one other criminal prosecution and just yesterday “prompted U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros to order ‘sweeping’ internal reforms to the office’s grand jury practices, including ‘deep-dive’ training from outside national experts,” the Chicago Tribune reports.

In a departure from past practice that reinforces the abusive nature of the criminal investigation of Carroll, the Trump DOJ all but confirmed the existence of the probe in an unusually contorted statement to CNN: “We can confirm that no U.S. Attorney’s Office has declined to investigate any case relating to the subject matter of CNN’s inquiry. We will not comment beyond that.”

Enough said.

A $1.776 Billion Hail Mary Pass

Thirty-five former federal judges have joined together to seek to re-open President Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS as a backdoor way to try to scuttle the “settlement” that led to the creation of the corrupt $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

RIP 60 Minutes

CBS News had declined to renew the contract of “60 Minutes” correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, who spoke out after Bari Weiss spiked her segment on the Alien Enemies Act detainees consigned to CECOT in El Salvador.

Stephen Miller’s ‘Wins’ Meeting

Stephen Miller is leading a White House push to pressure Latin American countries into allowing the U.S. military to conduct joint counternarcotics operations inside their territories, the NYT reports. It’s part of the larger militarization of counternarcotics that includes the lawless campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats on the high seas:

Mr. Miller chairs a bimonthly meeting — called a “wins” meeting — at which various government agencies report on recent successes, with the Pentagon’s death toll from boat strikes regularly highlighted as one of the biggest, according to those two people and one other person familiar with the meeting.

So much winning.

Two Boat-Strike Survivors Left at Sea

The 58th strike in the Trump administration’s lawless high-seas campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats killed one person and left two survivors adrift in the eastern Pacific on Tuesday. The death toll from the campaign now stands at at least 194 souls.

Venezuela Iran Cuba Madness

The U.S. Navy has now assembled an armada in the vicinity of Cuba sufficient to launch a military attack against the island nation if President Trump gives the order to do so, Politico reports.

For Your Radar: Russia-NATO Edition

This story is unfolding too slowly to be captured by Morning Memo’s daily news filter, but by historic standards it’s an incredibly fast-paced realignment of international geopolitics, so I want to take a step back to bring your attention to President Trump’s steady erosion of the NATO alliance at a moment of heightened risk that Russian President Vladimir Putin will turn his attention from Ukraine to more substantial provocations elsewhere in Europe.

Across European capitals, long-standing fears have been rekindled that in the face of a stalemate with Ukraine that is costing Russian more troops per month than it can recruit, Putin will expand his aggression against NATO allies beyond hybrid attacks.

“Several European national-security officials have warned that Russia could try to test the cohesion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization by targeting one of the Baltic nations, Swedish and Danish islands in the Baltic Sea or alliance territory in the Arctic,” the WSJ reported on Tuesday

Russian hybrid attacks are already a persisent background noise in Europe:

Among the aggressions that European officials have blamed on Russia are a swarm of drones and explosives placed on a rail line in Poland; jamming aviation-navigation systems over Sweden; hacking a dam in Norway; and plotting to put incendiary devices on cargo planes. Lithuanian officials recently announced the arrests of nine people accused of plotting murders and sabotage across Europe at the behest of Russia’s military intelligence service, the G.R.U.

In a speech Wednesday at the famed Bletchley Park, the director of the British electronic surveillance agency warned that “Russia is scaling up its daily hybrid activity against the U.K. and Europe.”

The European response to the increased Russian threat has focused on strengthening military and diplomatic ties independent of the United States, where the Trump administration is mercurial and unreliable at best and outright hostile to NATO at worst.

Among the latest developments:

• Poland and the U.K. yesterday signed a new defense and security treaty.

• In a move away from the U.S., Norway ​is opening talks with France about joining its nuclear umbrella.

• NATO is racing to turn the vulnerable Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea into a military stronghold. A Russian attack “could happen anytime,” the chief of defense for Sweden, which joined NATO in 2024, told Politico during a major NATO training exercise on the island last week.

While Europe is rushing to re-arm, Trump is further destabilizing the alliance. The Pentagon notified NATO allies last week that it is substantially shrinking the pool of forces earmarked for deployment to Europe in the event of a crisis.

All of this comes after a significant inflection point in U.S.-NATO relations earlier this month that further unnerved Europe. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth abruptly canceled two planned troop deployments to Poland and Germany, respectively, only for Trump to seemingly reverse course on the Polish deployment.

Rather than backstopping NATO in its time of need, Trump is backing up his longstanding threats to withdraw from the alliance with reduced and fickle support, sending an unmistakeable message to Putin that Europe is his for the taking.

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