Trump’s Phony “Karma Defense”
The claims that he was a victim of inappropriate “lawfare” are wildly inflated, and don’t justify his government’s lawsuits against his critics.
DONALD TRUMP’S REVENGE TOUR is now in full swing. His Justice Department has already indicted three of his political adversaries, James Comey, Letitia James, and John Bolton. Comey and James were indicted on the most ephemeral charges imaginable. The Bolton indictment, perhaps not quite as loony as the first two, charges the former national security advisor with mishandling national defense “information.”
This appears to be just the beginning of Trump’s campaign of retribution. He has openly directed Bondi to target other political opponents—Senator Adam Schiff, Jack Smith, Lisa Monaco, and Fani Willis, to name a few—whom he has characterized as guilty, criminals, and worse.
Faced with the impossible task of defending the indefensible conduct of their Dear Leader, the GOP has adopted a so-called “karma defense”: What goes around comes around. They did it to Trump, the argument goes, now he’s just doing it back to them.
Jonathan Chait perfectly captured the letter and spirit of Trump’s morally bankrupt karma defense in a recent Atlantic piece: “When Republicans find themselves unable to defend something Donald Trump has done, they tend to look for a way to turn the blame onto his opponents. So it is with the president’s prosecutorial rampage against his enemies. The anti-anti-Trump right has declared that, although [the] series of vindictive charges . . . may be regrettable, Democrats brought it on themselves.”
Chait quotes right-wing radio host Erick Erickson (“Two wrongs do not make a right, but Democrats did start this”), National Review writer Dan McLaughlin (Trump’s lawsuits are the “predictable” “consequences” of “the Biden-era lawfare campaign against Donald Trump”), and a truly terrible Washington Post editorial (“Many Democrats still cannot see how their legal aggression against Trump . . . set the stage for [his] dangerous revenge tour”).
The problem with the GOP’s retributive karma defense is not only that it is morally repugnant, but also that it is premised on lies.
The first lie is that Trump himself was a victim of weaponized lawfare. Chait debunks this by pointing out that, with the possible exception of the New York state case in which Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts—which Chait and others believe may have been legally sound, but was nevertheless “too marginal to merit prosecution”—Trump was no victim of the legal system. To the contrary, in the cases brought against him by Special Counsel Jack Smith, Chait observes correctly that Trump benefited from “notably lenient treatment by prosecutors, the courts, or both.” Both the Florida classified documents indictment and the D.C. election-subversion indictment are replete with detailed allegations of corrupt, lawless behavior, much of which was never disputed. (And by the way, although hypocrisy is now so rampant that it normally passes without comment, how do Attorney General Pam Bondi and Vice President JD Vance square their argument that since Comey was indicted by a grand jury, there could not have been weaponization with their argument that the proof that Trump was the victim of weaponization is precisely that he was indicted by grand juries on far more serious charges than those leveled against Comey and James?)
THE SECOND BIT OF DISHONESTY at the core of the karma defense is that the Biden administration corruptly targeted not only Trump, but also other people and organizations whose political views they disfavored.
Senator Josh Hawley made the most comprehensive case that the Biden administration weaponized the DOJ against its political foes in an October 7 Senate Judiciary hearing. Hawley urged Bondi to investigate what he called “a litany of abuses that Biden’s DOJ committed against everyday Americans, including pro-lifers, parents at school board meetings, and ninety-two conservative advocacy organizations, like Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA.”
But none of the so-called abuses alleged by Hawley are real. They are tortured, misleading mischaracterizations of routine investigative conduct at best, outright lies at worst.
Hawley’s supposed big reveal was that the Biden FBI “tapped my phone . . . tapped Lindsey Graham’s phone, tapped Marsha Blackburn’s phone, tapped five other phones of United States senators.”
This one, quite simply, is a lie—not a mistake or an exaggeration, a flat-out lie.
The alleged wiretapping of GOP senators never happened. No senators were wiretapped, and Hawley knows it. What Hawley was referring to is a document released by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) that indicated that Smith had obtained subpoenas to acquire a narrowly tailored range of cellphone tolling data of more than a half-dozen G.O.P senators to determine whom they had spoken to just before and after the January 6th riot at the Capitol. Hawley, a Yale Law School graduate, certainly knows the difference between obtaining such phone logs, which show whom the GOP lawmakers called, who called them, and when and where the calls were made, and “tapping” a phone, which records the content of the calls. This is not a minor distinction: One is a common investigative tactic that doesn’t reveal the contents of conversations, and the other is a highly intrusive invasion of privacy requiring a court order.
Hawley’s other accusations of Biden-era weaponization are no better.
His claim that the Biden administration was “targeting Catholics who went to a certain kind of Mass” and terrorizing “everyday” pro-lifers is equally dishonest. This is a reference to an eleven-page memo issued in early 2023 warning that “increasingly observed interest of racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) in radical-traditionalist Catholic (RTC) ideology” (emphasis added) might be mitigated by new avenues of intelligence gathering. The memo, which targeted violent extremists, not Catholics in general or “everyday” pro-lifers, was quickly withdrawn after it was leaked, and although DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz later concluded that errors in tradecraft and professional judgment had been made, he found that there was “no evidence of malicious intent or an improper purpose.” The FBI agreed with Horowitz’s findings and stated that “there was no intent or actions to investigate Catholics or anyone based on religion.”
Then there’s the accusation that “Merrick Garland, at the direction of the White House, issued a memo activating the FBI’s counterterrorism division against parents who attended school board meetings and had the temerity to ask what their kids were being taught.” Another lie. Garland’s memo said nothing of the sort. It did not target parents who asked what their kids were being taught. Instead, it announced DOJ efforts to address “the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel” in light of “an increase in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence against school board members, teachers and workers in our nation’s public schools.”
Hawley, in other words, is “accusing” the Biden DOJ of investigating criminal conduct and threats of violence. That’s not improper “weaponization”; it’s exactly what the American justice system is supposed to do.
Hawley then claimed that an individual named Mark Houck was prosecuted “for going to an abortion clinic and praying on a sidewalk.” False. Houck was charged with assaulting a 72-year-old volunteer outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Philadelphia. He was ultimately acquitted of the charge, but he never denied that he twice shoved an elderly volunteer to the ground. To the contrary, he admitted it, but claimed that he did so to protect his 12-year-old son. Houck went through a trial and is thus entitled to his acquittal, but Hawley is not entitled to lie that Houck was arrested “for going to an abortion clinic and praying on the sidewalk.”
Hawley’s accusation that ninety-two conservative organizations were “put under surveillance, targeted for potential prosecution” is equally misleading. It refers generally to the FBI’s “Arctic Frost” investigation into efforts by Trump and his supporters to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The accusation sweeps in not only the eight senators whose phone-tolling data was obtained—but who were never tapped, targeted, surveilled, or accused of anything—but also dozens of subpoenas that were issued to investigate what individuals or organizations might have been complicit in Trump’s effort to overturn the election. That investigation resulted in grand jury indictments of Trump on criminal charges that were later dropped, but only because Trump won the 2024 election and could no longer be prosecuted under DOJ guidelines. Nobody else was indicted, and the vast majority of the people and organizations that received routine investigative subpoenas were neither “put under surveillance” nor “targeted for potential prosecution.”
There is really no other way to put it: The GOP’s tit-for-tat karma defense is not only morally appalling but also an artifice built on lies. And even if some of it were true—which it isn’t—it would not justify, excuse, or mitigate the orgy of real weaponization currently taking place at Trump’s explicit direction.
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