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TRUMP AND ALLIES PLOT REVENGE, JUSTICE DEPARTMENT CONTROL IN A SECOND TERM


ADVISERS HAVE ALSO DISCUSSED DEPLOYING THE MILITARY TO QUELL POTENTIAL UNREST ON
INAUGURATION DAY. CRITICS HAVE CALLED THE IDEAS UNDER CONSIDERATION DANGEROUS
AND UNCONSTITUTIONAL.

By Isaac Arnsdorf
, 
Josh Dawsey
and 
Devlin Barrett
Updated November 6, 2023 at 1:27 p.m. EST|Published November 5, 2023 at 6:00
a.m. EST

Former president Donald Trump at the courthouse in Manhattan on Oct. 17. (John
Taggart for The Washington Post)

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Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the
federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term,
with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or
prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the
Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military
against civil demonstrations.



Keeping up with politics is easy with The 5-Minute Fix Newsletter, in your inbox
weekdays.ArrowRight


In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants
the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have
become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John
F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his
ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A.
Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on
the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Trump has also
talked of prosecuting officials at the FBI and Justice Department, a person
familiar with the matter said.

In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after”
President Biden and his family. The former president has frequently made
corruption accusations against them that are not supported by available
evidence.

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To facilitate Trump’s ability to direct Justice Department actions, his
associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and
practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations.
Critics have called such ideas dangerous and unconstitutional.

“It would resemble a banana republic if people came into office and started
going after their opponents willy-nilly,” said Saikrishna Prakash, a
constitutional law professor at the University of Virginia who studies executive
power. “It’s hardly something we should aspire to.”

Trump testifies in New York civil fraud trial: Live updates

Much of the planning for a second term has been unofficially outsourced to a
partnership of right-wing think tanks in Washington. Dubbed “Project 2025,” the
group is developing a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy
the military domestically under the Insurrection Act, according to a person
involved in those conversations and internal communications reviewed by The
Washington Post. The law, last updated in 1871, authorizes the president to
deploy the military for domestic law enforcement.

The proposal was identified in internal discussions as an immediate priority,
the communications showed. In the final year of his presidency, some of Trump’s
supporters urged him to invoke the Insurrection Act to put down unrest after the
murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, but he never did it. Trump has
publicly expressed regret about not deploying more federal force and said he
would not hesitate to do so in the future.



Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung did not answer questions about specific
actions under discussion. “President Trump is focused on crushing his opponents
in the primary election and then going on to beat Crooked Joe Biden,” Cheung
said. “President Trump has always stood for law and order, and protecting the
Constitution.”

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The discussions underway reflect Trump’s determination to harness the power of
the presidency to exact revenge on those who have challenged or criticized him
if he returns to the White House. The former president has frequently threatened
to take punitive steps against his perceived enemies, arguing that doing so
would be justified by the current prosecutions against him. Trump has claimed
without evidence that the criminal charges he is facing — a total of 91 across
four state and federal indictments — were made up to damage him politically.

“This is third-world-country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent,’” Trump said at a
campaign stop in New Hampshire in October. “And that means I can do that, too.”

Sign up for The Trump Trials, a weekly newsletter tracking the former
president's criminal cases

Special counsel Jack Smith, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Biden have all
said that Smith’s prosecution decisions were made independently of the White
House, in accordance with department rules on special counsels.

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Trump, the clear polling leader in the GOP race, has made “retribution” a
central theme of his campaign, seeking to intertwine his own legal defense with
a call for payback against perceived slights and offenses to right-wing
Americans. He repeatedly tells his supporters that he is being persecuted on
their behalf and holds out a 2024 victory as a shared redemption at their
enemies’ expense.

‘HE IS GOING TO GO AFTER PEOPLE THAT HAVE TURNED ON HIM’

It is unclear what alleged crimes or evidence Trump would claim to justify
investigating his named targets.

Kelly said he would expect Trump to investigate him because since his term as
chief of staff ended, he has publicly criticized Trump, including by alleging
that he called dead service members “suckers.” Kelly added, “There is no
question in my mind he is going to go after people that have turned on him.”

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Barr, another Trump appointee turned critic, has contradicted the former
president’s false claims about the 2020 election and called him “a very petty
individual who will always put his interests ahead of the country’s.” Asked
about Trump’s interest in prosecuting him, Barr deadpanned, “I’m quivering in my
boots.”

“Trump himself is more likely to rot in jail than anyone on his alleged list,”
said Cobb, who accused Trump of “stifling truth, making threats and bullying
weaklings into doing his bidding.”

Milley did not comment.



Other modern presidents since the Watergate scandal — when Richard M. Nixon
tried to suppress the FBI’s investigation into his campaign’s spying and
sabotage against Democrats — have sought to separate politics from law
enforcement. Presidents of both parties have imposed a White House policy
restricting communications with prosecutors. An effort under the George W. Bush
administration to remove U.S. attorneys for political reasons led to high-level
resignations and a criminal investigation.

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Rod J. Rosenstein, the Trump-appointed deputy attorney general who oversaw the
investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian interference
in the 2016 election, said a politically ordered prosecution would violate the
14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under law and could cause judges
to dismiss the charges. That constitutional defense has rarely been raised in
U.S. history, Rosenstein said.

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“Making prosecutorial decisions in a nonpartisan manner is essential to
democracy,” Rosenstein said. “The White House should not be meddling in
individual cases for political reasons.”

But Trump allies such as Russ Vought, his former budget director who now leads
the Center for Renewing America, are actively repudiating the modern tradition
of a measure of independence for the Department of Justice, arguing that such
independence is not based in law or the Constitution. Vought is in regular
contact with Trump and would be expected to hold a major position in a second
term.

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“You don’t need a statutory change at all, you need a mind-set change,” Vought
said in an interview. “You need an attorney general and a White House Counsel’s
Office that don’t view themselves as trying to protect the department from the
president.”

A FIXATION ON PROSECUTING ENEMIES

As president, Kelly said, Trump would often suggest prosecuting his political
enemies, or at least having the FBI investigate them. Kelly said he would not
pass along the requests to the Justice Department but would alert the White
House Counsel’s Office. Usually, they would ignore the orders, he said, and wait
for Trump to move on. In a second term, Trump’s aides could respond to such
requests differently, he said.

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“The lesson the former president learned from his first term is don’t put guys
like me … in those jobs,” Kelly said. “The lesson he learned was to find
sycophants.”

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Although aides have worked on plans for some other agencies, Trump has taken a
particular interest in the Justice Department. In conversations about a
potential second term, Trump has made picking an attorney general his number one
priority, according a Trump adviser.

“Given his recent trials and tribulations, one would think he’s going to pick up
the plan for the Department of Justice before doing some light reading of a
500-page white paper on reforming the EPA,” said Matt Mowers, a former Trump
White House adviser.

Jeffrey Clark, a fellow at Vought’s think tank, is leading the work on the
Insurrection Act under Project 2025. The Post has reported that Clark is one of
six unnamed co-conspirators whose actions are described in Trump’s indictment in
the federal election interference case.



Clark was also charged in Fulton County, Georgia, with violating the state
anti-racketeering law and attempting to create a false statement, as part of the
district attorney’s case accusing Trump and co-conspirators of interfering in
the 2020 election. Clark has pleaded not guilty. As a Justice Department
official after the 2020 election, Clark pressured superiors to investigate
nonexistent election crimes and to encourage state officials to submit phony
certificates to the electoral college, according to the indictment.

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In one conversation described in the federal indictment, a deputy White House
counsel warned Clark that Trump’s refusing to leave office would lead to “riots
in every major city.” Clark responded, according to the indictment, “That’s why
there’s an Insurrection Act.”

Clark had dinner with Trump during a visit to his Bedminster, N.J., golf club
this summer. He also went to Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday for a screening of a new
Dinesh D’Souza movie that uses falsehoods, misleading interviews and
dramatizations to allege federal persecution of Jan. 6 rioters and Christians.
Also attending were fringe allies such as Stephen K. Bannon, Roger Stone, Laura
Loomer and Michael Flynn.

“I think that the supposedly independent DOJ is an illusion,” Clark said in an
interview. Through a spokeswoman he did not respond to follow-up questions about
his work on the Insurrection Act.

Clark’s involvement with Project 2025 has alarmed some other conservative
lawyers who view him as an unqualified choice to take a senior leadership role
at the department, according to a conservative lawyer who spoke on the condition
of anonymity to describe private talks. Project 2025 comprises 75 groups in a
collaboration organized by the Heritage Foundation.

Project 2025 director Paul Dans stood by Clark in a statement. “We are grateful
for Jeff Clark’s willingness to share his insights from having worked at high
levels in government during trying times,” he said.

After online publication of this story, Rob Bluey, a Heritage spokesman, said:
“There are no plans within Project 2025 related to the Insurrection Act or
targeting political enemies.”

HOW A SECOND TRUMP TERM WOULD DIFFER FROM THE FIRST

There is a heated debate in conservative legal circles about how to interact
with Trump as the likely nominee. Many in Trump’s circle have disparaged what
they view as institutionalist Republican lawyers, particularly those associated
with the Federalist Society. Some Trump advisers consider these individuals too
soft and accommodating to make the kind of changes within agencies that they
want to see happen in a second Trump administration.

Trump has told advisers that he is looking for lawyers who are loyal to him to
serve in a second term — complaining about his White House Counsel’s Office
unwillingness to go along with some of his ideas in his first term or help him
in his bid to overturn his 2020 election defeat.

In repeated comments to advisers and lawyers around him, Trump has said his
biggest regrets were naming Jeff Sessions and Barr as his attorneys general and
listening to others — he often cites the “Federalist Society” — who wanted him
to name lawyers with impressive pedigrees and Ivy League credentials to senior
Justice Department positions. He has mentioned to several lawyers who have
defended him on TV or attacked Biden that they would be a good candidate for
attorney general, according to people familiar with his comments.

The overall vision that Trump, his campaign and outside allies are now
discussing for a second term would differ from his first in terms of how quickly
and forcefully officials would move to execute his orders. Alumni involved in
the current planning generally fault a slow start, bureaucratic resistance and
litigation for hindering the president’s agenda in his first term, and they are
determined to avoid those hurdles, if given a second chance, by concentrating
more power in the West Wing and selecting appointees who will carry out Trump’s
demands.



Those groups are in discussions with Trump’s campaign advisers and occasionally
the candidate himself, sometimes circulating policy papers or draft executive
orders, according to people familiar with the situation.

“No one is opposed to them putting together ideas, but it’s not us,” a campaign
adviser said. “These groups say they’ll have the whole transition planned. Some
of those people I’m sure are good and Trump will appoint, but it’s not what is
on his mind right now. I’m sure he’d be fine with some of their orders.”

Trump’s core group of West Wing advisers for a second term is widely expected to
include Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s hard-line immigration policies
including family separation, who has gone on to challenge Biden administration
policies in court through a conservative organization called America First
Legal. Miller did not respond to requests for comment.

Alumni have also saved lists of previous appointees who would not be welcome in
a second Trump administration, as well as career officers they viewed as
uncooperative and would seek to fire based on an executive order to weaken civil
service protections.

For other appointments, Trump would be able to draw on lineups of personnel
prepared by Project 2025. Dans, a former Office of Personnel Management chief of
staff, likened the database to a “conservative LinkedIn,” allowing applicants to
present their resumes on public profiles, while also providing a shared
workspace for Heritage and partner organizations to vet the candidates and make
recommendations.

“We don’t want careerists, we don’t want people here who are opportunists,” he
said. “We want conservative warriors.”

Marianne LeVine and Karen DeYoung contributed to this report.


2024 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES

Catch up on the winners and losers and takeaways from the third Republican
primary debate. Compare where the 2024 presidential candidates stand on key
issues like abortion, climate and the economy.

Republicans: Top contenders for the GOP 2024 nomination include former president
Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former Trump U.N. ambassador Nikki
Haley. Here is The Post’s ranking of the top 10 Republican presidential
candidates for 2024.

Democrats: President Biden is running for reelection in 2024. Here is The Post’s
ranking of the top 10 Democratic presidential candidates for 2024.


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18063 Comments
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