Trump Targets Newsom's Inner Circle as Critics Warn Democracy's Guardrails Are Collapsing

As federal investigators knock on doors tied to California's governor, critics warn America is sliding toward the politics of Nixon, Richelieu, and Stalin…

I was a guest on C-SPAN on Sunday. You can watch the program and all the fireworks with conservative callers here.

Trump and his legal lickspittles appear — if what Governor Newsom is saying publicly right now turns out to be true — to be playing a very dangerous game with our democracy.

Federal agents have been knocking on the doors of Gavin Newsom’s family, friends, and former employees. Not, according to the Governor yesterday, because they’d found a crime, but because they’re trying to find one.

That’s not my paraphrase; it’s how the Governor of the largest state in the union described what the Trump administration is now doing to him and his wife, and if it’s true it should shock every American who remembers why we built the guardrails we’re now watching get torn down.

“Donald Trump isn’t just coming after me because of my mean tweets,” Governor Newsom said. “He’s coming after me because I am considering running for president.” He then added, “To get me, he’s coming after my wife.”

As my father taught me when I was around 10 years old, the power of a government is awesome. It can legally take everything you own from you, imprison you, and even execute you. No corporation or individual can do any of those things under cover of law, but government — even state and local governments — can.

It can also break you simply by criminally investigating you. The costs of dealing with such investigations can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, as multiple victims of Trump’s witch hunts have now discovered.

This is why it’s so vital — as our nation’s Founders knew when they wrote the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment — that government be constrained by the law and answerable to the largest portion of the people.

After Richard Nixon’s “Enemies List” was made public with his resignation, the Justice Department in 1976 created, within its Criminal Division, a Public Integrity Section; two years later Congress wrote oversight of it into the Ethics in Government Act.

The theory of its creation was that public officials have been chosen by We the People to represent us and going after them for political purposes is a gross violation of our democracy, essentially a denial of our vote.

The Public Integrity Section’s job, thus, was to first examine every investigation, potential investigation, or potential prosecution of any elected official to make sure there’s no taint of politics corrupting the process as Nixon tried to do.

Trump first gutted the Section, reportedly reducing it from roughly 40 full time prosecutors to a mere two attorneys who were functionally no longer able to oversee anything.

He has apparently, since then, built it back up into a powerful weapon: this is reportedly the group spearheading the investigation into Newsome and/or his wife.

If this reporting is right, it no longer bears any resemblance to its origin or purpose. That said, there is also reporting that this inquiry began last year with a California whistleblower and is confined to his wife and her charity.

Time will tell what the real story is here, but the context and the charge are still alarming because of the long history of this sort of thing.

Bыл бы человек, а статья найдётся — “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” — is usually attributed to Stalin’s state prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky, who ran notorious show trials in the 1930s against anybody who pissed off his boss. (Some sources also attribute it to NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria or even Stalin himself.)

It’s simply a more modern version of 17^th century French Cardinal Richelieu’s famous dictum when he was Louis XIII’s secret service minister:

“Show me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough therein to hang him.”

It’s the cornerstone of every corrupt government throughout history, and now Trump has brought it here. So far, it’s claimed as its victims, through direct investigation, indictment, or loss of clearances or other privileges:

James Comey, Letitia James, Mark Kelly, Elissa Slotkin, Maggie Goodlander, Jason Crow, Chrissy Houlahan, Chris DeLuzio, John Bolton, Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook, Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, Chris Christie, Jack Smith, Miles Taylor, Christopher Krebs, Hunter Biden, Ashley Biden, Alejandro Mayorkas, Mike Pompeo, Brian Hook, Mark Milley, Anthony Fauci, Antony Blinken, Jacob Sullivan, Lisa Monaco, Mark Zaid, Norman Eisen, Alvin Bragg, Andrew Weissmann, Hillary Clinton, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Fiona Hill, Alexander Vindman, Kimberly Cheatle, John Brennan, James Clapper Jr., Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, Thomas Fingar, Richard Ledgett, Michael Morell, Michael Vickers, Douglas Wise, Nicholas Rasmussen, Russell Travers, Andrew Liepman, John Moseman, Larry Pfeiffer, Jeremy Bash, Rodney Snyder, Glenn S. Gerstell, David B. Buckley, and the law firms Covington & Burling, Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, Milbank, WilmerHale, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and Willkie Farr & Gallagher.

And now, apparently, Governor Gavin Newsom and/or his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom.

Ironically, Trump — who has actually been repeatedly convicted of real crimes — started his second administration falsely claiming that the Biden Justice Department was doing to him and his friends exactly what he’s now doing to those he thinks of as his enemies.

A 2025 executive order claims that Biden’s administration “engaged in a systematic campaign against its perceived political opponents, weaponizing the legal force of numerous Federal law enforcement agencies and the Intelligence Community” and describes those actions as “a third‑world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.”

The problem we face with Nixon’s and now Trump’s “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” is that it doesn’t stop with the famous names: Vyshinsky didn’t run out of defendants, and neither did Richelieu.

And neither will Trump, now that he has already started.

A government that can manufacture a case against a sitting Governor or his wife can manufacture one against a county clerk, a school board member, a journalist, or you and me. And that’s the real danger here.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Show Me the Man”

Comments on Monday’s Hartmann Report:

What Desperate Regimes Do Before They Fall

Our biggest enemy now are not the crazies or the belligerent or the wealthy. It’s apathy. The A-hole won because of apathy.

If people stay home in Election Day because the candidates running don’t meet their criteria of gender, race, sexual orientation, or religious background, we are looking at 4 more years of possibly JD.
~ G.P. Baltimore

A great read.

I also got a good laugh seeing the chubby little tiny hand in the picture. Thanks, I needed that this morning.
~ no_fascism

Read the Article | See all Comments

Your Daily Meme, suitable to copy and paste into social media or email:

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.