The Trump Justice Department’s indictment of former FBI Director James Comey has been received with widespread incredulity, both because of the shady circumstances around its filing and the extraordinary weakness of the case.
Yet Lindsey Halligan, the US attorney who brought that indictment, seems unbothered. Indeed, she very quickly moved on to the next task at hand: getting New York Attorney General Letitia James indicted for similarly dubious charges, which she accomplished Thursday.
Meanwhile, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is heading a sweeping effort that he hopes will get leading Democratic groups and donors indicted for supporting purported “left-wing terrorism.” This seems similarly unlikely to stick in court.
Watching all this unfold — the weaponization of thex Justice Department, in efforts that mostly seem groundless or doomed — I’ve recalled a phrase Steve Bannon coined during President Donald Trump’s first term. Describing how the right could push back against the mainstream media, Bannon said they had to “flood the zone with shit.”
Trump and Miller, it seems, are trying to target the opposition by flooding the zone with shit. They are going to bring one bogus investigation and prosecution after another. If one flops, they’ll swiftly move on to the next — often, perhaps, against the same people already indicted. (There is already talk in MAGA-land of what else Comey could be charged with, and a separate US Attorney’s Office is looking into James on other topics.)
The main point is not really to win convictions. Trump’s team would of course love that, but if they wanted to build cases that would actually hold up in court, they’d be going about things very differently.
Instead, the goal is to put Trump’s enemies, and the Democratic opposition more broadly, through the wringer — again, and again, and again until January 2029. Or perhaps even after that.
Trump is targeting his personal enemies. Stephen Miller wants a broader crackdown on the opposition.
There’s a notable contrast between who the president and his most powerful adviser seem most focused on targeting.
For Trump, everything is personal, and he’s been keenly interested in bringing vindictive prosecutions against particular individuals he’s feuded with.
Often, these targets have been people who were involved in investigations of Trump, like Comey and James — the first two indicted. Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) has been targeted with a mortgage investigation. Former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director Chris Wray are also targets, as is Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.
To go after these targets, Trump’s allies have rummaged through their mortgage records or past congressional testimony in hopes of finding something that prosecutors can argue was a false statement or crime.
Trump’s justification would be: “They did it to me first.” He’d say this is simply what he and his allies have gone through for the past decade: repeated investigations during his first term, and eventually, four prosecutions during the Biden years, a legal saga that only came to an end when he won in 2024.
Some of Trump’s complaints are specious — he was prosecuted for trying to steal the 2020 election, something he really did do — but others have at least a grain of truth to them. Elected Democratic prosecutors in New York state did indeed spend years digging through his business history in search of any charges that could stick to him or his family.
Miller, on the other hand, apparently wants to target the political opposition more broadly and strategically — by going after key Democratic and progressive organizations and donors.
Miller has been furious for months about protests of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who are carrying out the mass deportation campaign that is his brainchild. But after Charlie Kirk’s killing last month, he began putting together a multiagency effort to go after the funding and organization of the left.
According to a report from Reuters, Miller’s effort is looking at protests where violence or vandalism occurred in hopes of accusing groups that supported or encouraged these protests of fomenting left-wing terrorism in some illegal way or another.
“We need to use our anti-terrorism laws, our RICO [racketeering] statutes, our conspiracy statutes — we need to use every tool in our law enforcement arsenal to crush these left-wing terrorists legally, financially, and politically, and to cut off their funding sources, and throw them in prison,” Mike Davis, a legal activist close to the Trump administration, told Rolling Stone.
One major target of this push so far is the Open Society Foundations, the grantmaking network funded by billionaire George Soros. A high-level Department of Justice official reportedly instructed US Attorney’s Offices to investigate the network late last month. One White House official was quite frank about the political aim, telling Reuters: “The goal is to destabilize Soros’s network.”
Other potential targets that came up in Reuters’s reporting included ActBlue — the major online fundraising platform for Democratic candidates that Trump ordered the DOJ to investigate in April — and Indivisible — the progressive organizing group.
“Trump is going after boilerplate liberal nonprofits,” the leftist commentator Adam Johnson posted on X. “This isn’t even a war on the left, it’s a war on the left AND mainline democrats because republicans want to run without meaningful opposition in 2026 and 2028.”
Flooding the zone with shit might not lead to convictions. But it could mean a four-year legal nightmare.
The problem for both Trump and Miller, and the silver lining for their targets, is that, so far, these cases seem extremely weak.
The Comey and James indictments appear deeply flawed, and it will be quite a reach to link progressive groups or donors to actual violence, particularly without running afoul of the First Amendment.
Most of these prosecutions appear likely to collapse, either at trial or before. (Though it’s not necessarily clear that all of them will. Perhaps some could be brought in red jurisdictions and draw MAGA-aligned judges like Aileen Cannon.)
And yet, if one prosecution flops, the Trump administration can simply bring another — perhaps even against the same person.
Over the past decade, MAGA enforcers and foot soldiers have gotten quite good at concocting creative logical chains and legal theories to argue that their enemies are guilty of crimes.
That is to say: A quick defeat of the charges in court might not — probably won’t, in fact — be the end of the story for Comey, James, or other Trump targets. Trump’s appointees can simply bring bogus charges against them on other topics, ensuring their legal nightmare won’t end, at least until he leaves office.
And many top Democratic, and progressive groups, and donors may be headed for the same fate.
