This heinous Trump abuse won't topple its targets — but the real point is much scarier

Earlier this week, President Donald Trump’s corrupt and lawless Justice Department served grand jury subpoenas on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, State Attorney Gen. Keith Ellison, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her and two county administrators, as part of an investigation into whether they “obstructed or impeded law enforcement during a sweeping immigration operation” in the Twin Cities area.

The subpoenas came a day after Trump’s DOJ urged a judge to rejecta state lawsuit to stop the immigrant enforcement surge that has agitated and frightened local citizens, inspiring massive protests.

As James Zirin, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote in Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3500 Lawsuits (2019), nobody familiar with Trump’s legal history could have been surprised that in this case, “he would seek to weaponize the justice system, use his power to bend the law, attack his enemies and critics, and claim victory when there was none.”

Not unlike his embarrassing midweek performance at Davos, where his attempt to make a case for seizing Greenland was a total bust to say the least, in Minnesota, Trump declared victory immediately.

In response, Walz toldFox News: “A mother is dead, and the people responsible have yet to be held accountable.”

Most telling was the fact that there is not going to be a federal investigation of how Jonathan Ross, an ICE agent, killed Renee Good, because the Trump administration instantaneously “determined” that the officer acted in self-defense.

Even if this had been true, which videos clearly showed was not the case, to not investigate any law enforcement killing is in total opposition to common practices, locally or nationally.

Furthermore, federal officials didopen an investigation into Good’s wife, Becca Good, to determine whether she “impeded a federal officer moments before he shot and killed Good” or had “ties to activist groups.”

In such an atmosphere, Walz stressed, “kids are afraid to go to school [and] small businesses are hurting,” employees laying low, customers lacking.

“That’s where the energy of the federal government should be directed: toward restoring trust, accountability, and real law and order, not political retaliation,” Walz said.

He also accused federal officials of pursuing “political theatre,” adding: “Minnesota will not be intimidated and neither will I.”

Similarly, AG Ellison said: “Donald Trump is coming after the people of Minnesota, and I’m standing in the way. I will not be intimidated, and I will not stop working to protect Minnesotans from Trump’s campaign of retaliation and revenge.”

The subpoenas against Ellison, Walz and others were searching for “any records tending to show a refusal to come to the aid of immigration officials,” according to a subpoena released by Mayor Frey’s office that included a long list of documents to be presented before a grand jury on Feb. 3.

In response to this inquiry, focusing on whether officials were in violation of a “conspiracy” statute, Frey stated that the subpoenas were simply about stoking fear.

“We shouldn’t have to live in a country where people fear that federal law enforcement will be used to play politics or crack down on local voices they disagree with,” he said.

Her, the St. Paul mayor, is an immigrant herself. She said she was “unfazed by these tactics.”

All the targeted officials regarded the federal investigation as spurious and involving “bullying tactics” meant to discourage political opposition and the right to first amendment protest against overly forceful federal immigration and deportation policy. Not to mention how that approach tramples on the fourth amendment.

These criminal investigations, like Trump’s lifelong history of counter-lawsuits, have always been about weaponizing the law. They also represent the Trumpian way of negotiating and/or playing with the vulnerable relationships of law, power, and justice.

For Trump, the fundamental difference is that he is no longer a private litigant. His roles are no longer confined to that of plaintiff or defendant in mostly civil lawsuits. Instead, he has become the de facto U.S. chief prosecutor and defense attorney, as well as chief FBI investigator.

According to Protect Democracy, which tracks retaliatory arrests, prosecutions, and investigations, by the end of 2025 the Trump Department of Justice had weaponized its power “to punish political opponents, chill dissent, or pretextually achieve political objectives” in at least 18 high-profile cases, against the following targets:

• Jerome Powell, Chair of the Federal Reserve
• Lisa Cook, Federal Reserve Governor
• Mark Kelly, Democratic Arizona Senator
• Adam Schiff, Democratic California Senator, Former Chair of House Intelligence Committee
• Alex Padilla, Democratic California Senator
• LaMonica McIver, Democratic U.S. Representative from New Jersey
• Ras Baraka, Mayor of Newark, NJ, Democratic Candidate for Governor
• Kat Abughazaleh, Democratic Congressional Candidate
• Brad Lander, NYC Comptroller
• Honorable Hannah Dugan, Milwaukee Circuit Court Judge
• Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Maryland man deported in violation of Immigration Court order
• Letitia James, New York Attorney General
• David Huerta, SEIU California President
• John Bolton, Former National Security Advisor
• James Comey, Former FBI Director
• John O. Brennan, Former CIA Director
• Chris Krebs, Former Director Cybersecurity, DHS
• Miles Taylor, Former Chief of Staff, DHS

Like the forming cases in Minneapolis and St. Paul these cases all involved “selective” and "vindictive" investigations and/or prosecutions. Most if not all will come to nothing — other than to help reproduce the president’s lying narratives about his tactics and popular resistance to those lawless practices.

• Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several award-winning books on the crimes of the powerful, includingCriminology on Trump (2022) and its sequel,Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy (2024). The third book in this Trump trilogy, Regime Change, Authoritarian Treason, and the Outlaw-in-Chief: President Donald Trump’s Struggle to Kill U.S. Democracy & Realign American Global Power, will be published after the 2026 midterm election.