Trump Adds 3 More Names to the List of Enemies He Wants the Justice Department To Prosecute
"There was tremendous criminal activity," the president averred, urging unspecified charges against former Special Counsel Jack Smith, former FBI lawyer Andrew Weissmann, and former Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco.
"Deranged Jack Smith, in my opinion, is a criminal," President Donald Trump said during a press conference in the Oval Office on Wednesday. The sentiment was not new: Everyone knows that Trump has a grudge against Smith, the former special counsel who obtained two federal indictments against him, which Trump described as "the worst weaponization" of the justice system "in the history of the world." But the fact that the president offered his assessment of Smith alongside three top federal law enforcement officials—Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel—made it seem more like marching orders than his usual airing of grievances.
Bondi, Blanche, and Patel are all Trump loyalists who previously worked for him personally. Bondi served on Trump's defense team during his first impeachment. Blanche represented him during his 2024 criminal trial in New York. Patel—the author of children's books detailing the travails of the wise and just "King Donald," who is able to triumph over his evil enemies with the help of "a wizard called Kash the Distinguished Discoverer"—served as a campaign surrogate and a go-between during the dispute over the presidential records that Trump took when he left the White House in January 2021. But in their current positions, Bondi, Blanche, and Patel are supposed to be working for the American people, and before their Senate confirmations all three promised to pursue justice rather than revenge.
How is that going? The dubious perjury indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, who earned a prominent spot on Trump's enemies list by overseeing the investigation of alleged ties between his 2016 campaign and the Russian government, came just five days before the statutory deadline and five days after the president publicly told Bondi that "we can't delay any longer." That Truth Social missive also mentioned the need to prosecute another Trump nemesis, New York Attorney General Letitia James, who last week was charged with mortgage fraud in an indictment obtained by the same neophyte prosecutor: Lindsey Halligan, a former Trump lawyer whom he appointed as the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia after her predecessor proved insufficiently enthusiastic about pursuing cases against Comey and James.
Bondi and Blanche reportedly were also privately skeptical about the viability of those cases. The president nevertheless got what he wanted, which suggests the same thing could happen with Smith, regardless of Trump's inability to explain exactly what crime the former special counsel supposedly committed.
Trump alluded to an October 8 interview at University College London in which Smith defended his work on criminal cases that charged Trump with mishandling classified material after he left office and with illegally trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Smith's interviewer at that event was former FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann, which reminded Trump that Weissmann also is "a bad guy" who probably should be prosecuted for something. "I hope they're gonna look into Weissmann too," he said.
Weissmann earned Trump's ire by participating in the Russia probe as part of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team. And while Trump was on the subject of people who had wronged him in one way or another, he added that Lisa Monaco, deputy attorney general during the Biden administration, likewise "should be looked at very strongly." Monaco, Trump explained, was Weissmann's "puppet," so she also should be punished.
"There was tremendous criminal activity," Trump averred. "You're talking about political crime….I hope they're looking at political crime because there's never been so much political crime against a political opponent as what I had to go through."
New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush notes that Bondi, Blanche, and Patel "smiled, nodded and shuffled in place" as their boss suggested that the Justice Department should find charges to pin on Smith, Weissmann, and Monaco. But not to worry: Patel, during his confirmation hearing, promised there would be "no politicization at the FBI" and "no retributive actions" against the president's enemies.
Patel felt a need to offer those assurances because in 2023 he had published a book, Government Gangsters, that included an appendix listing 60 "Members of the Executive Branch Deep State," whom he described as "corrupt actors of the first order." Weissmann and Monaco were both on that list. Smith did not make the cut, possibly because he did not obtain the first indictment of Trump until June 2023, after Patel had finished his manuscript.
In any case, Patel assured the senators who confirmed him that, notwithstanding his promise to "come after" the anti-Trump "conspirators," he would not use his powers in service of the president's personal vendettas. Patel nevertheless portrayed the Comey indictment as a response to the "Russiagate Hoax," even though the charges against him were legally unrelated to that investigation.
Like Patel, Bondi was confirmed after promising to be guided by the facts and the law rather than the president's grudges. "The partisanship, the weaponization, will be gone," she declared. "America will have one tier of justice for all….There will never be an enemies list within the Department of Justice."
Blanche sang the same tune during his confirmation hearing. "Politics should never play a role in the Department of Justice," he said. "We will work to restore the American people's faith in our justice system."
Whether or not Bondi and Blanche meant those words when they said them, the president plainly does not share the vision they described. "They're all guilty as hell," Trump said in the Truth Social rant addressed to Bondi, which mentioned Adam Schiff, the not-yet-indicted Democratic senator from California (whom Trump also mentioned on Wednesday), along with Comey and James—a list to which he has now added three more names. Guilty of what? The Justice Department's job, as Trump sees it, is to figure that out.
