Is Trump’s Justice Department trying to discredit itself?

On Wednesday, when FBI agents raided the office of one of the most powerful Democrats in Virginia, Fox News just happened to have one of its Washington-based foreign correspondents on the scene in the small city of Portsmouth. What an extraordinary coincidence! The raid targeted state Sen. Louise Lucas, the 82-year-old president pro tempore of the Virginia Senate, who is nationally prominent for two reasons. Lucas was the driving force behind the 10-1 Democratic congressional map that Virginia recently enacted to retaliate against similarly biased Republican maps drawn by red states. She’s also a pugnacious tweeter who gleefully mocks her political opponents online. After her congressional maps became law, Lucas posted an AI image of four incumbent Republican members of Congress working at McDonald’s. There are two possible explanations for why this raid happened. As MS NOW’s Carol Leonnig reports, the Justice Department has apparently been investigating “evidence that [Lucas] solicited or accepted bribes” for three years. Three years ago Democratic President Joe Biden was in office, which suggests that the probe into Lucas is legitimate. At the same time, Leonnig also reports that Lindsey Halligan, a former insurance lawyer who Trump illegally attempted to install as the top federal prosecutor in eastern Virginia, pressured prosecutors to bring charges against Lucas prior to the midterm elections, believing that “it would be good for the White House to be able, before the midterms, to accuse a prominent state Democrat in Virginia with bribery.” Halligan was also a central figure in the failed prosecutions of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James; last September, Trump appeared to order former Attorney General Pam Bondi to target Comey and James, both of whom Trump resents for investigating him in the past. Trump’s Justice Department has since indicted Comey a second time, claiming that a social media post where Comey arranged seashells to spell “86 47” was an explicit threat to kill Trump. Which brings us back to the fact that Donald Trump’s de facto state media outlet just happened to have a reporting team on the scene when the FBI raided Lucas’s office. It’s hard to imagine how Fox News could have known that it needed to have a reporter in Portsmouth unless the Justice Department tipped them off. The Justice Department did not behave this way in the past. As then-Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a 2022 press conference following an FBI raid at Trump’s Florida home, “we speak through our [court] filings and the cases we bring; that is the only way we speak.” Legal ethics rules governing prosecutors strictly limit their ability to make “extrajudicial comments that have a substantial likelihood of heightening public condemnation of the accused.” This rule is grounded in the Constitution. When the government levies accusations against an individual that won’t be tested in a public trial, it denies that individual due process. But there’s also a practical reason why prosecutors should avoid creating an unnecessary media spectacle around a criminal investigation. When prosecutors run a media campaign against a criminal defendant, that shifts the conversation about whether that defendant is guilty or innocent from a courtroom, where there are procedural rules and clear jury instructions, to a public forum where potential jurors may draw unpredictable conclusions. That’s doubly true when the defendant is someone like Lucas, who is more than capable of pushing her own opposing narrative to the press. And it is triply true when the defendant is a prominent political opponent of the prosecutor’s boss. By politicizing the Lucas investigation, in other words, the Justice Department tainted its jury pool. If Lucas is eventually arrested and brought to trial, prosecutors are going to have a tough time finding jurors who haven’t been exposed to media reports suggesting that the prosecution is a sham brought for an improper political purpose. Broadly speaking, there are three reasons why the Justice Department may have targeted Louise Lucas. The first is that she may actually be guilty of a serious crime. If that’s true, the questionable timing of this raid — shortly after Lucas successfully redrew Virginia’s congressional maps — the inclusion of Fox News, and the involvement of known bad actors such as Halligan are all easily avoidable errors by DOJ. Not long after the raid occurred, Lucas put out a statement accusing Trump’s DOJ of targeting her to “intimidate and silence the voices who stand up to” the Trump administration. She will no doubt spend the coming months pushing this narrative to everyone who could potentially serve on her jury. And the DOJ’s politicization of its investigation into her makes this narrative believable. A second possibility is that Lucas is innocent. Perhaps the Biden-era investigation into her uncovered no actionable evidence of criminal wrongdoing, and this raid happened solely because Trump’s DOJ thought that going after a prominent Democrat would help Republicans in the 2026 midterms. If that’s the case, the DOJ’s hamhandedness is likely to undermine that goal as well. The Lucas raid did not occur in isolation. It exists against the backdrop of the prosecutions of Comey, James, and other political opponents of Trump. Fox News’s presence at the raid only adds to the impression that Lucas’s only real crime is being a Democrat. Persuadable voters — or, at least, persuadable voters who follow the news closely enough to be aware that a Democratic state senator’s office was raided by the FBI — will largely be aware of this broader context. So they are unlikely to be convinced by the Lucas raid that Democrats are corrupt. There’s also a third possibility, which is that Lucas actually committed a crime, but it’s not the sort of crime that the Justice Department would ordinarily prosecute. Law enforcement agencies unavoidably exercise discretion when deciding whom to target. This is why, for example, you’ve probably never been pulled over for driving 57 mph in a 55 mph zone. Criminal legal codes tend to be very expansive, and they often capture activity that is neither particularly morally reprehensible nor particularly harmful to society. Law enforcement also has limited resources, and it has to be selective about which potential crimes it actually investigates and who it arrests, even if it does uncover evidence that someone broke the law. The Supreme Court recognized that law enforcement must have this authority to exercise “prosecutorial discretion” as recently as 2023. Because criminal codes often capture relatively innocuous conduct, prosecutors can potentially harass mostly law-abiding citizens by closely monitoring their behavior until they trip up and commit a crime. Historically, the Justice Department has had robust safeguards to specifically prevent harassment of elected officials. Until recently, for example, the DOJ required prosecutors to consult with the department’s Public Integrity Section before filing charges against a member of Congress — although Trump’s Justice Department suspended this policy shortly before it brought what appear to be politically motivated charges against US Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ). All of which is a long way of saying that it may turn out that Lucas did commit a crime, but it was the sort of offense that the DOJ would have ignored if not for the fact that this Justice Department is eager to target elected Democrats. One other factor looming over the Lucas raid is that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was formerly one of Trump’s personal lawyers, has not yet locked down his job. Blanche is the Senate-confirmed deputy attorney general, which means that he runs the DOJ unless and until the Senate confirms a permanent leader to replace Bondi, who Trump removed last month. Bondi was reportedly fired because Trump felt that she was ineffective…