Former President Donald Trump is enraged over his federal indictment for hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort, with he and his GOP allies — and even his rivals for president, like former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy — baselessly claiming that he is the victim of political targeting by the state.
But one of the less-discussed reasons he is so angry, argued former federal prosecutor Shan Wu for The Daily Beast on Friday, is "Deep State envy": he really wants to use the FBI to target his political enemies, exactly the way he is wrongly claiming is being done to him.
"Of course, what Trump and these Republicans really want is to control the DOJ and FBI themselves so that they can deploy law enforcement against their political enemies," wrote Wu. "We know that is their real goal because they propose making the DOJ and FBI less independent as a solution for what they claim is politically weaponized federal law enforcement — aimed at Republicans. Their illogic — not to mention hypocrisy — is perfectly illustrated by Gov. DeSantis’ argument that 'Republican presidents have accepted the canard that the DOJ and the FBI are ‘independent.’ They are not independent agencies. They are part of the executive branch. They answer to the President of the United States.' Accordingly, DeSantis promised to fire people at these agencies upon his becoming president."
The DOJ and FBI's rules and traditions guarding its independence, Wu admitted, show "that efforts to insulate the DOJ and FBI from political interference often fail" — and Attorney General Merrick Garland's painstaking efforts to preserve DOJ's independence have actually come at the cost of hindering investigations.
"Trump and Republicans’ daily attacks on the DOJ make plain the failure and futility of Garland’s efforts to protect the department against criticisms of being partisan. Moreover, Garland seems painfully blind to the fact that being overly concerned about being criticized for being political is, in itself, a politicization of the DOJ," wrote Wu. "So Trump and his Republican supporters may be right about the DOJ and FBI needing to be revamped, but not for the reasons they think. We just might need an attorney general who isn’t afraid to be taunted by GOP insults, and an FBI that is less independent and less able to dictate the pace of criminal investigations and prosecutions."
Trump faces 37 charges, including Espionage Act violations, for hoarding highly classified military secrets in boxes in unsecured rooms in his country club, and allegedly lying to federal officials and his own lawyers about how many he had. The trial was tentatively set for August, but special counsel Jack Smith filed a motion to move it to December.
