Continuing President Donald Trump’s abuse of government power against his perceived enemies, his hatchet men in the Justice Department have reportedly launched a criminal investigation into the nonprofit American Future Republic, run by LinkedIn co-founder billionaire Reid Hoffman.

The supposed offense revolves around supporting the legal team of E. Jean Carroll, the longtime columnist whose civil lawsuits against Trump found him liable for sexually assaulting and subsequently defaming her and won her millions in court judgments from him. Early news reports on the investigation said it was aimed directly at Carroll.

Should Trump get his way in actually setting up his patently corrupt $1.776 billion weaponization of government slush fund, Hoffman and Carroll should be prime candidates to receive some of that cash. They are victims of being put through the DOJ ringer and of Trump’s unquenchable desire to punish those he believes have crossed him.

It is getting tedious to watch trained and supposedly serious government attorneys dutifully filing motions and appearing in court to pretend that these politically-motivated crusades are about anything other than pleasing the king. Exacting vengeance is a hallmark of autocrats and Trump rarely fails to disappoint.

The phony baloney case is supposedly focused on the question of whether Carroll committed perjury in a 2022 deposition when answering a question about the funding for her lawsuit. She answered truthfully based on what she knew about her legal team’s financing, although her team later corrected the record.

But under Trump even an alleged four-year-old immaterial misrepresentation in a personal civil case that the president lost merits the resources of the DOJ. They know that they don’t have to actually win to disrupt the lives of Hoffman and Carroll and chill other critics.

We can hardly think of a better example of the weaponization of government, though of course the actual recipients of the slush fund are instead intended to be the insurrectionists and rioters that Trump wants to reward.

As to the Hoffman probe, the actual facts are secondary to what’s important here.

This is one more notch in Trump’s efforts to turn the machinery of the nation’s federal justice system into a personal grievance-settling apparatus to go after personal and political foes. These were hard enough contortions from the get-go, when the DOJ targeted Jim Comey and Tish James, but every subsequent investigation or indictment just makes the charade all that more embarrassing.

It would be comical if it weren’t so disgusting and dangerous to our system of government, a spit in the face to the founders’ vision of a democracy with due process in contrast to the whims of a spiteful monarch.

This is who Trump is, but the attorneys and government functionaries who are actually carrying out this agenda are under no obligation to go along. In fact, quite the opposite: each has a responsibility to uphold the Constitution and the laws of the United States, and every move they make towards fulfilling Trump’s wishes to use the DOJ as his attack dog are an abdication of that grave duty.

They should know that this conduct won’t just be washed away once Trump is no longer in the White House; the stain of participating in his authoritarianism won’t soon wash out, and it will have consequences.

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