WASHINGTON — Every time Donald Trump calls a Georgia prosecutor colleague her “lover,” he invokes a strikingly familiar phrase.
After all, as president, Trump repeatedly used the same word to mock two FBI officials, including an agent who helped lead Russia’s election interference investigation, after revelations that the couple had an extramarital relationship and pejorative text messages about him had exchanged.
During years of investigations by prosecutors, culminating in 91 felony counts, Trump has repeatedly tried to divert attention from himself by making investigators’ personal lives ripe for ridicule and ridicule. He has jumped on allegations of cases and made claims of bias against officers, prosecutors and judges. He was also quick to exploit the sometimes questionable decision-making, or occasional outright violations of protocol, by officials investigating him as a means to discredit entire investigations.
The strategy underlines the extent to which Trump views his four criminal cases as a battle to be won not only in the courtroom, but also in the court of public opinion, where attacks on public officials – both for baseless reasons and because of actual errors of judgment and unforced errors – are able to shape the perception of investigations and divert attention from the underlying allegations of the investigations.
“Prosecutors in law enforcement are generally not built to respond to these types of attacks. The policy of the Ministry of Justice is: we do not handle cases in the public domain. We don’t respond to everything a defendant says,” said Reid Schar, a former federal prosecutor who led the corruption case against ex-Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.
He added: “The whole conceptual framework that Trump has moved to is not one that the DOJ or, frankly, prosecutors for the most part are used to playing off of.”
Trump has recently seized on revelations about a romantic relationship between Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and an outside attorney, Nathan Wade, whom she hired to help manage the case.
Willis acknowledged the relationship in a court filing Friday but said there was no basis to dismiss the case or remove her from prosecution and charge Trump and 18 others with conspiring to undermine Georgia’s 2020 election. In response to the filing, Trump posted on Truth Social on Sunday about Willis and her “lover,” claiming they “conspired” to enrich themselves and cheat and interfere in the 2024 race.
“This case is a hoax, just like Russia, Russia, Russia (and the rest!), and everyone in America knows it,” he wrote.
Claims of an inappropriate relationship were first raised last month by a lawyer for a Trump co-defendant, who said it created a conflict of interest. Even before Friday’s filing, Trump sensed an opportunity to attack. “The Lovers knew I did nothing wrong,” he wrote in a Jan. 19 post, adding that “the Lovebirds should face appropriate consequences.”
As president, Trump similarly exploited the news that Peter Strzok, a lead agent in the investigation into whether the 2016 Trump campaign coordinated with Russia, and FBI lawyer Lisa Page sent negative text messages to each other during the Russia investigation. had sent messages about Trump and had had an extramarital affair. relation.
One such text, referring to the prospect of a Trump victory, read: “We will stop it.” (Strzok, who was fired over the text messages, later said he was referring to the will of American voters and not to any step the FBI might take to interfere in the election).
The Justice Department’s inspector general called the texts troubling, but also found no evidence that investigative decisions were motivated by partisan bias. That didn’t stop Trump from accusing Strzok and Page of “treason,” and many of his supporters disagreed with Trump that the entire investigation had been a “witch hunt.”
“Trump has shown that he is able to sway public opinion in a way that may not get him out of the legal trouble he faces – it will still be up to the judges and juries – but it certainly appears to be his political viability, which is incredible. as it is,” said Greg Brower, a former assistant FBI director at the Congressional Affairs Office.
Strzok has said he was the subject of more than 100 Trump tweets, telling The Associated Press in 2020 that “being subjected to outrageous attacks up to and including the President himself, which are full of lies and mischaracterizations and is just plain rude and cruel are. horrible.”
Other figures in the Russia investigation drew Trump’s ire, including Christopher Steele, the ex-British spy who compiled a dossier of salacious and unsubstantiated rumors about Trump. He was also angry with the FBI, which was accused, among other things, of submitting flawed applications to monitor an ex-Trump aide.
In 2017, days after being fired by Trump as FBI director, James Comey sent a friend a memo documenting a private Oval Office conversation he had with the president that unnerved him. The purpose, Comey later admitted, was to get the content shared with the media so that Trump’s actions could be exposed and because he believed it could prompt the appointment of a special counsel.
Comey’s memo showed that Trump had asked him to end the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn. The act exposed Trump’s determination to exert his will on the FBI and became part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s broader investigation into whether he had obstructed justice.
But for Trump and his supporters, the revelation became an opening to attack Comey as a leaker. A report by the Justice Department’s inspector general concluded that Comey had violated FBI policy but said that, contrary to Trump’s claims, he had not illegally disclosed classified material. .
Mueller himself had been under scrutiny of his personal life, with Trump seeking his resignation over alleged conflicts — Mueller had sought membership reimbursement at a Trump golf club in Virginia years earlier — which aides told the president were frivolous.
Former Justice Department prosecutor Christopher Mattei, who prosecuted former Connecticut Governor John Rowland and more recently represented the families of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in a lawsuit against Infowars host Alex Jones, said he worried that Trump had “poisoned a significant portion of the population. “to believe that government officials routinely act out of personal bias.
“To the extent that he has been successful in suggesting to people that our public servants and leaders who have taken an oath to do their duty are really not doing so – yes, that is concerning,” he said.