Four days after voters gave Democrats the House and the Senate, President Donald Trump ordered the Justice Department to open an inquiry into them. The offense, in his words, is that they are “going around threatening a lot of people, including the Attorney General of the United States, and others, with Impeachment.”
He posted it Saturday on Truth Social, called it “extortion at the highest level,” and ended: “By copy of this statement, I am ordering the Department of Justice to look into this criminal act, immediately!” He offered no evidence. He did not say who sent what to whom, or what law was broken.
The people who will do the investigating are not abstractions to Black readers. Black voters gave Democrats about nine in 10 of their ballots on Tuesday, and Black members of Congress are in line to run committees with subpoena power. Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi is set to chair Homeland Security, the committee that oversees ICE. The Justice Department Trump is now pointing at them is the one that walked away from the police reform agreements reached after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
Trump also claimed Democrats are threatening his donors “with imprisonment, and many other levels of punishment, just because they happen to be Republicans.” He said, again without evidence, that Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan “is saying that she is going to go after all young people that believe in Republican Values.”
What Democrats have actually said in public is narrower. Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the incoming Oversight chair, answered the election result with two words for the White House: “Lawyer up.” He has promised investigations into the Trump family’s finances, immigration enforcement abuses and the Epstein files. Democrats also plan to look at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Todd Blanche. Impeachment is a power the Constitution gives Congress. Oversight and subpoenas are the job of a majority.
This is not the first time Trump has reached for the Justice Department against Democrats who crossed him. Slotkin was told earlier this year that the administration was investigating her over a video urging troops to refuse illegal orders, and she declined to cooperate.
A president telling prosecutors to examine his opponents the week after losing an election is a threat in itself, and it lands on the people who will question his officials about deportation raids and shootings by federal agents. Whether Blanche acts on the order is the first test of whether the department answers to the law or to the man who posted it.
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