WASHINGTON – Ohio’s Jim Jordan chaired a House of Representatives subcommittee that examined alleged weaponization of the government by Democrats during Joe Biden’s presidential administration.
A 17,000 page report it issued found that a broad range of federal agencies collaborated with big tech to suppress content on COVID, elections, and political topics—especially targeting conservative viewpoints. It concluded criminal prosecutions of Donald Trump were part of a pattern of “lawfare” against political opponents and found that FBI agents who questioned Jan. 6 narratives or overbroad investigations were punished.
Now that Trump is back in the White House and controls the government, Democrats claim he’s weaponized everything from the Department of Justice to the Small Business Administration to clamp down on political enemies.
Jordan counters that he doesn’t view Trump’s activities as weaponization.
“President Trump is doing what he said he was going to do,” Jordan said when asked about Democratic claims.
Jordan cited Trump’s promises to cut taxes, secure the border, impose work requirements on public benefits, and change energy and school choice policies.
“It’s no secret that President Trump said he was going to round up bad people who came here illegally and repatriate them,” said Jordan. “I’ve got complete confidence in President Trump and his people at the Justice Department.”
Jordan, a Champaign County Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, said Trump’s activities were different from those examined by his Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
Jordan said that within days of Trump’s 2022 presidential campaign announcement, then-Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to examine Trump’s efforts to overturn results of the 2020 presidential election and his handling of classified documents after leaving the White House. Along with Special Counsel Jack Smith, he said Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis and Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg all “went after” Trump.
“That’s the weaponization of government,” said Jordan. “Going after your political opponent just days after he announces he’s running against you. That’s weaponization, not to mention what we saw from the Biden administration on censorship.”
But the breadth of Democratic allegations — spanning from the Justice Department to the Small Business Administration — illustrates the deep partisan divide over what constitutes legitimate government action vs. political weaponization.
While Jordan and Republicans see the Biden-era prosecutions as unprecedented political targeting, Democrats argue that Trump’s current actions represent the very weaponization that Republicans once condemned.
Democrats counter with Trump weaponization claims
Democrats in Congress deny that the Biden administration was “weaponized” against Trump and his supporters, and accuse the Trump administration of turning federal agencies into tools of political retribution. They cite a long list of examples.
Agencies including the Justice Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Communications Commission, the Internal Revenue Service, the Small Business Administration and the Social Security administration now are being used for those ends, they say.
Early in his campaign to regain the presidency, Trump told a crowd at a Conservative Political Action Conference event that he would seek redress.
“I am your justice,” he said then. “And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”
Earlier this week, Trump urged the Justice Department to prosecute former President Barack Obama for treason, accusing him of plotting to steal the 2016 presidential election, which Trump won.
“After what they did to me, and whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people,” Trump said.
An Obama spokesman called Trump’s claims “bizarre” and “a weak attempt at distraction” from his administration’s failure to release Justice Department files on financier and convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.
The call to prosecute Obama reflects a broader pattern that Democrats say shows systematic weaponization across the Justice Department.
Congressional Democrats, including top Senate Judiciary Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois, have condemned Attorney General Pam Bondi’s creation of a “Weaponization Working Group,” a DOJ task force launched on her first day in office. It followed up on an executive order Trump signed during his first day on the job that called for correcting “past misconduct by the Federal Government related to the weaponization of law enforcement and the weaponization of the Intelligence Community.”
“Bondi said that she would ‘investigate the investigators,’ and ‘prosecute the prosecutors,’ and now she’s doing exactly that to seek ‘retribution’ against his [Trump’s] political enemies—real and perceived,” Durbin said on the Senate floor.
Durbin cites mass dismissals of career DOJ and Federal Bureau of Investigation staffers involved in the investigation of rioting Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol, or other Trump-related probes as another example of weaponization.
“We’re witnessing an unprecedented weaponization of the Justice Department right now, at the direction of President Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI Director Kash Patel,” Durbin said in February.
The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Maryland’s Jamie Raskin, says Republicans are spending their time relitigating stale conspiracies about the Biden Administration instead of pursuing real oversight of federal agencies under Trump.
“We’re not going to stand idly by while this administration tries to turn the FBI into an arm of a pay-to-play gangster state,” said Raskin.
Contrasting justice departments
Democratic U.S. Senators Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Adam Schiff of California, Judiciary Committee members who are both former federal prosecutors, drew a sharp contrast between Trump-era DOJ actions and those of Biden in a May podcast.
They argued the Trump administration is actively weaponizing the Department of Justice against its political enemies while Republicans falsely accuse Biden of doing the same to them.
“They’ve kind of inoculated themselves with all this talk about weaponization,” said Schiff, saying that such claims are often projection. “They will talk, talk, talk about how DOJ has been weaponized against them as the preview to their own weaponization.”
Schiff cited the targeting of Christopher Krebs, who had served as the Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) under Trump and led efforts to secure the 2020 election.
After Krebs publicly affirmed that the election was secure and free of fraud, Trump’s DOJ announced it was investigating him at Trump’s request. Schiff said the probe, though likely to fail, had real consequences, forcing Krebs to leave private-sector work out of concern for clients and to spend time and resources defending himself.
The pair also pointed to the Justice Department’s attempt to block the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a clean energy initiative Congress had already funded and distributed.
Whitehouse charged that political appointees at DOJ invented a criminal investigation in order to convince a bank to freeze the money — despite having no evidence of wrongdoing. When career prosecutors refused to participate, they were fired or driven out.
All of this, Whitehouse and Schiff argued, is happening while Republicans continue to accuse Biden’s DOJ of weaponization — without challenging the facts behind any of the major prosecutions.
“They never say Trump didn’t have the classified documents,” Schiff noted. “They just go straight to the slogan: weaponization.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling granting presidential immunity has only emboldened the abuse, allowing Trump’s circle to act with impunity, Whitehouse said. “The loaded weapon,” he warned, “is already going off.”
This month, after Trump accused Schiff of mortgage fraud and suggested he’d be prosecuted for claiming his homes in California and Maryland were both primary residences, Schiff described Trump’s actions as a “terrible abuse of power.” He said Trump was trying to distract from the fallout of his own failure to release the Epstein files. in the case of disgraced financier and convicted sex offender and Jeffrey Epstein.
“This is the kind of stuff you see tinpot dictators do,” said Schiff. “It is designed to intimidate his political opponents and somehow try to silence them.” … I’m going to continue to hold Donald Trump accountable for his corruption, for his malfeasance, for the terrible harms he’s doing to this country. You can count on it.”
Trump has also sought a mortgage fraud prosecution against New York Attorney Letitia James, who won a $450 million judgement against Trump and his companies for inflating his net worth to get better loan terms. Her attorney described it as “improper political retribution” in a letter to Bondi.
“The stunning hypocrisy of President Trump’s complaint that the Justice Department had been ‘politicized’ and ‘weaponized’ against him is laid bare as he and others in his Administration are now asking you to undertake the very same practice,” said the letter from attorney Abbe Lowell.
Schiff, a frequent target of Trump’s attacks, defends the prosecutions that Republicans have labeled as weaponization. In remarks before the Senate Judiciary Committee this year, he said Trump was indicted more than any other president in history because he “committed more crimes than any other president in history.”
“Let’s not propagandize about some weaponization, some double standard when grand juries found probable cause to believe he committed these crimes,” said Schiff. “And the only case that was actually allowed to go to trial, the jury found him guilty on every single charge.”
Broad government reach
Democrats point to the use of military force as another form of weaponization. They cite Trump’s deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles in response to protests sparked by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) workplace raids.
“Our warfighters are not political tools meant to patrol the streets of our own cities or to suppress the political views of their fellow Americans,” U.S. Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware said in a statement.
The forcible removal of U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla of California from a June press conference by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and federal charges against U.S. Rep. LaMonica McIver of New Jersey for intervening in the May arrest of Newark’s mayor during a visit to an immigration detention center, drew similar criticism.
“This is how banana republics and authoritarian dictatorships work, not the oldest democracy in the world.” Democratic U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman of New York said of the charges against McIver.
Democrats also say the Federal Communications Commission is being used to intimidate the press and punish disfavored media.
Members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee claim that since Trump’s FCC appointee took charge, it has “harassed CBS for routine editing practices, reinstated lawfully denied complaints against ABC and NBC, launched a bogus investigation into KCBS-AM in San Jose simply for reporting publicly available information, and directed the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau to launch investigations into NPR and PBS based on false allegations.”
The top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, Richard Neal of Massachusetts, says that under Trump, the IRS had been “blatantly weaponized to target critics of the President,” citing Trump’s threat to revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt status as an example.
A statement from Neal recalled how Republicans including Jordan spoke out against weaponization over the years quoting Jordan saying: “For an administration to use an agency as a weapon against their political opponents is as wrong as things can be in this country.”
Neal has also criticized the Trump administration for using the Social Security Administration to target immigrants. In an April joint statement, Neal and Connecticut Democrat John Larson condemned reported plans to erase Social Security numbers from legally present immigrants, calling it “digital murder” and “outrageous.”
Even the Small Business Administration is being weaponized under the Trump administration, Democrats say. They claim that a March 6 decision to relocate regional SBA offices in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, New York City, and Seattle, in reaction to those cities’ immigration stances was politically motivated to hurt cities controlled by Democrats.
“Your decision to relocate regional offices in six major cities with high concentrations of Democratic residents is a blatant weaponization of the SBA for political gain,” a group of Democrats on the House Small Business Committee wrote to SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler. “The targeting of these cities is clearly punitive, unjust, and counterproductive.”
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