National Review
Trump’s Self-Defeating, Self-Destructive Lawfare
By Jim Geraghty
January 13, 2026 10:49 AM
On the menu today: The Trump administration is far too combative with the Federal Reserve and the Danish, while being far too open to negotiations with the Iranian mullahs. Read on.
Trump Wants Revenge
From the Wall Street Journal, late Monday, in a story about how President Trump is frustrated with and complaining about the performance of Attorney General Pam Bondi:
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This month, Trump has talked with allies about how he could appoint special counsels at the Justice Department because he is so frustrated with what he sees as the slow progress of its work, people familiar with the matter said.
Chief among his grievances is what he sees as [attorney general Pam] Bondi’s failure to quickly and effectively prosecute the investigators who had pursued him for years, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Democratic Attorney General Letitia James, the officials and others familiar with his complaints said. Both criminal cases were dismissed in November by a judge who said the Trump aide who secured the indictment had been improperly appointed to her post. Trump has wanted to see the cases continue quickly.
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You can only indict somebody when there’s sufficient evidence to convince a grand jury that the accused has committed a crime. Traditionally, this is the easy part; Sol Wachtler, then the chief judge of the Court of Appeals for the State of New York, famously opined that a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich if asked to do so.
Federal grand juries are made up of 16 to 23 members, and at least twelve jurors must concur to issue an indictment.
At the federal level, federal prosecutors usually bring their A-game for this task, and up until recently, almost always got an indictment. “In 2016, the Justice Department brought charges against 130,000 suspects. Grand juries rejected indictments only six times, according to agency statistics compiled by Niki Kuckes, a professor at Roger Williams University with expertise in the grand jury process.” That is a success rate higher than 99.9 percent.
And yet, since Donald Trump started his second term, those criminal ham sandwiches have never had it so easy. The U.S. Department of Justice keeps trying to indict the president’s foes, and grand juries keep concluding that there isn’t sufficient evidence for an indictment, even though during grand jury proceedings, no one speaks on behalf of the accused. No grand juror hears a counterargument to the prosecutor’s argument. Under Trump, federal prosecutors keep standing before a grand jury, making their best argument, and losing to an opponent who isn’t even in the room.
The indictment against former FBI Director Jim Comey got thrown out, after a judge ruled that interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan was not lawfully appointed. As our Andy McCarthy lays out, Halligan is still publicly insisting she’s a U.S. attorney, and a federal judge has demanded Halligan explain how doing this does not “constitute a false or misleading statement.”
Back in December, a federal grand jury rejected a bid by the Trump Justice Department to reindict New York Attorney General Letitia James. Twice.
Hey, remember Lisa Cook, that member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors who had allegedly lied on her mortgage documents? Remember how William J. Pulte, director of the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency, wrote his “criminal referral letter” to the U.S. Department of Justice back on August 15?
The Department of Justice still hasn’t indicted her; maybe someone is looking at Pulte’s letter with newfound wariness.
It’s not just the cases involving high-profile Trump foes. Remember that figure above, about how federal prosecutors failed to get an indictment just six times out of 130,000 in 2016? Federal prosecutors in Washington, under the direction of U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia and former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, failed to get an indictment eight times in a month.
In November, a D.C. grand jury refused to indict the “sandwich guy” who threw a Subway footlong at a U.S. border patrol officer. Note this detail:
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Border Patrol Officer Greg Lairmore received two “gag gifts” related to the incident — a plush sandwich and a patch featuring a cartoon of Dunn throwing the sandwich with the words “Felony Footlong” — which the defense team argued showed this was not a serious event in his life.
Lairmore had testified that the sandwich “exploded all over” his chest and claimed he could smell mustard and onions. But a photo showed that the sandwich was still in its wrapper on the ground after it hit Lairmore in his bulletproof vest.
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“Testified,” huh? As in put his hand on a Bible or holy book of his choice, and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help him God? Just checking,
Back in October: “A federal grand jury has refused to indict a Chicago couple arrested during a violent protest outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview last month, a rare move that prompted prosecutors to abruptly drop the case and signals government overreach in bringing the charges in the first place.”
I’m sure this will spur complaints about the kinds of people who serve on federal grand juries in places like the District of Columbia. But again, a prosecutor just has to convince twelve out of 16 to 23 grand jurors. On the high end, that’s barely more than half!
You don’t have to be the world’s greatest detective to figure out what’s going on here. Trump wants revenge. He has at times explicitly instructed Bondi to go after his political enemies. She tells federal prosecutors to find something to justify an indictment, and then federal prosecutors must scramble to find something that could qualify as a crime.
(Recall that Comey wasn’t indicted over his actions in Russiagate, or efforts to investigate and prosecute Trump; it was a claim he lied to Congress when he denied telling FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to leak information. This meant that Trump’s Department of Justice argued in its indictment that McCabe was a reliable and truthful witness and wasn’t lying to protect himself.)
Alas, the evidence that Trump’s enemies have broken the law remains scant in these particular cases, and so prosecutors march into court with an exceptionally weak case, and the grand juries remain unconvinced.
Then there’s the Department of Justice’s serving the Federal Reserve with grand jury subpoenas on Friday, and the suggestion that Chairman Jerome Powell will soon be indicted over his testimony given to the Senate Banking Committee concerning an over-budget renovation project.
No one likes this.
Start with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, according to Axios: “A perturbed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told President Trump late Sunday that the federal investigation into the Federal Reserve chair ‘made a mess’ and could be bad for financial markets, two sources familiar with the call told Axios.”
Moving on to GOP senators, according to the Wall Street Journal:
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Several other Senate Republicans on Monday expressed concern with the Justice Department probe, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.), who said he hoped the dispute was resolved quickly.
Others worried that the fight would rattle markets and raise borrowing costs. The litigation will “cause interest rates to go up, not down. We need this like we need a hole in the head,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R., La.), a member of the banking panel.
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North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis: “If there were any remaining doubt whether advisers within the Trump Administration are actively pushing to end the independence of the Federal Reserve, there should now be none. It is now the independence and credibility of the Department of Justice that are in question. I will oppose the confirmation of any nominee for the Fed — including the upcoming Fed Chair vacancy — until this legal matter is fully resolved.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board: “In the annals of political lawfare there’s dumb, and then there’s the criminal subpoena federal prosecutors delivered Friday to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. President Trump would do himself and the country a big favor by firing those responsible for this fiasco.”
The Editors of NR: “The Fed’s immunity remains an important principle. To challenge it as crudely as the administration now appears to be doing — tactics more reminiscent of some nations to our south than of the country now celebrating its semiquincentennial — is profoundly misguided and may well prove to be profoundly destructive. . . . Undoing what has been done will not be easy, but, when it comes to confirming Trump’s choice of Powell’s successor and any other new Fed governor, the Senate must take as hard a line as it realistically can in support of maintaining the central bank’s ability to exercise independent judgment.”
There are a lot of reasons this is bad. But an underdiscussed one is the “boy who cried wolf” phenomenon. Just because Trump is thirsting for revenge doesn’t mean that his political opponents have never broken the law in a manner worthy of federal prosecution. At some point, one of them may well get caught with their hand in the cookie jar. (A hypothetical but plausible example: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz discouraging a state law enforcement fraud investigation because it involved his political allies. Whistleblowers in state offices have complained about retaliation from their bosses.)
The day this administration’s Department of Justice catches one of Trump’s enemies in a genuine crime, the indictment will be widely dismissed as just another political vendetta.
I can hear the argument, “Lawfare against Democrats is the only way Democrats will learn that lawfare against Republicans is wrong!” Okay, when do we conclude they’ve learned that lesson? When do we go back to not using the U.S. Department of Justice as a tool for partisan vengeance?
Negotiate with Iran . . . over What?
Also in today’s Wall Street Journal:
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Some senior administration aides, led by Vice President JD Vance, are urging Trump to try diplomacy before retaliating against Iran for killing protesters during a two-week uprising over a flailing economy and regime repression, the officials said.
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I am glad that President Trump hears all sides of an argument before making a decision, particularly a decision as consequential as military strikes on Iran. As discussed in yesterday’s edition of this newsletter, there are legitimate concerns that a U.S. strike against Iranian regime targets could spur a rally-around-the-flag effect in the Iranian populace, or that the regime could use the attacks to discredit the protesters.
But I hope someone in that discussion raised the question: “Negotiate with the Iranians over what?”
Iran has broken just about every treaty it has ever signed. The only thing that really halted their nuclear weapons development were bunker-buster bombs dropped on the Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan sites. They claim they gave up their chemical weapons program years ago; every year the U.S. State Department recertifies that they are not in compliance with the Chemical Weapons Convention and that they are continuing chemical weapons research at their military facilities, and it’s the same story with biological weapons.
Officially, their top export is ethaline polymers, but we all know what they produce and send overseas the most is trouble. They’ve reigned as the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism for 39 years, a record that Cal Ripken would envy.
The FBI characterizes them as one of our top foreign threats, including cyberattacks, terrorism, and espionage. The regime of the mullahs has targeted U.S. citizens and servicemen for four decades.
They’ll sell weapons to just about any regime that’s willing to pay. Their human rights record is abominable; Amnesty International summarizes it as “systemic impunity prevailed for past and ongoing crimes against humanity.”
Finally, in November 2024, the Department of Justice “charged an asset of the Iranian regime who was tasked by the regime to direct a network of criminal associates to further Iran’s assassination plots against its targets, including President-elect Donald Trump.”
What’s left to talk about with these guys? What promise could they possibly make that we would trust, and what could they offer us that we would want?
It’s not like we can discuss these issues at our embassy in Tehran, ya know?
The main problem with the Iranian regime . . . is the Iranian regime. If the mullahs fall from power and the ayatollah flees to Moscow, every problem listed above gets at least a little bit better, overnight.
ADDENDUM: Over in that other Washington publication, I’m writing about the Danish, and I don’t mean breakfast. One of the oddities of President Trump’s public saber-rattling over Greenland is that the government of Denmark is comparably tough on immigration and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s role model on childhood vaccines. “So, not only is Trump threatening a NATO ally when he says, ‘We’re going to be doing something with Greenland, either the nice way or the more difficult way.’ He’s also threatening a NATO ally that is like-minded with him on immigration, childhood vaccines, tax cuts, defense spending and economic policies.”
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