The Trump vengeance tour coming to a politician near you

 According to The New York Times, Donald Trump has never been coy about his intentions. He ran in 2024 on a promise of payback, and declared in a speech at the Justice Department this year his intention to pursue vengeance against the “scum” he says weaponized the criminal justice system against him.

While Mr. Trump and his team acted quickly to purge the Justice Department and the F.B.I. of officials who had roles in prosecuting him and his allies, it has taken a while for the president to exert maximum pressure to bring charges against his highest-profile foes.

In July, William J. Pulte, an obscure but ambitious housing finance official, padded into the Oval Office and pressed doubts in Mr. Trump’s mind about Mr. Siebert’s role in the James investigation. It fueled his growing frustration over the pace of Justice Department inquiries into all of his enemies, including Mr. Comey.

Mr. Pulte argued that Mr. Siebert was slow-walking the James case in order to get confirmed by the Senate for a job in a state with two Democratic senators, according to people briefed on the conversation.

The president’s drive for vengeance was stoked by allies in and outside his government, most notably Mr. Pulte, whose accusations of wrongdoing against a Federal Reserve governor, Lisa Cook, helped instigate Mr. Trump’s move to oust her. Mr. Pulte has often teamed up with Ed Martin, who runs the Justice Department’s “weaponization” task force.

Mr. Pulte, who referred the James mortgage case to the department earlier this year, was not just veering out of his lane. He had jumped the median. Todd Blanche, the former Trump defense lawyer who now runs the day-to-day operations of the Justice Department as the deputy attorney general, made it clear he did not appreciate Mr. Pulte telling the boss what the department should do, according to officials briefed on their interactions and familiar with Mr. Blanche’s thinking.

Mr. Blanche told people in his orbit that Mr. Pulte was hyping up the president’s expectations, even though the legal threshold for bringing charges against Ms. James, proving criminal intent, had not been met.

Mr. Pulte declined to comment. Mr. Blanche did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Blanche is a Trump loyalist. He left a partnership at a top New York law firm when colleagues refused to let him take on Mr. Trump as a private client, and he has promoted the view that Mr. Trump has nearly unlimited authority under Article II of the Constitution. He strongly believes law enforcement was weaponized against the president.

Yet unlike Mr. Martin and Mr. Pulte, Mr. Blanche is also a seasoned former federal prosecutor with a firm grasp of evidentiary rules and an appreciation of work done by career department investigators that is not shared by the president, or many others in the West Wing.

He passed along their unwelcome findings in the James investigation to the White House, knowing it would not be happily received, according to officials.

He knew that Mr. Trump viewed him as his personal lawyer. He also knew his client wanted revenge, not a legal lecture, and understood that it was futile to protest too much.

By late summer, bigger political forces were at work, namely the backlash over his department’s failure to release the full tranche of investigative files into the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. In what was seen as an effort to divert public attention, many pro-Trump influencers — egged on by government officials like Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director — turned up the volume on their demands about prosecuting the president’s enemies.

The calls for vengeance reached such a frenzy that Mr. Trump himself eventually issued a chilling yet all but undeliverable threat: He claimed that former President Barack Obama had committed treason and should face “consequences.”

Enter Mr. Martin, a far-right activist from Missouri, who had been given an ill-defined but potentially powerful role at the department to pursue Trump enemies after Senate Republicans quashed his nomination to serve as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

He had a direct line to the White House, at times bypassing Mr. Blanche, and had a mandate to work directly with U.S. attorneys to bring cases.

By mid-August, he was focused on indicting Ms. James over questions Mr. Pulte had raised about a mortgage application for a house she had purchased in Virginia. One of the spurs driving him: His special agreement to work with Mr. Siebert’s office on the James case expires at the end of this month.

Prosecutors working under Mr. Siebert, however, determined that there was insufficient evidence to bring charges.

But Mr. Trump was growing increasingly fixated on the fact that the Justice Department had not yet indicted a single person he had targeted, according to multiple people in his orbit, and was receptive to the agitation of advisers. Mr. Pulte soon had frequent access to Mr. Trump by phone, and efforts by some Trump advisers to stall Mr. Siebert’s dismissal were failing.

Sergio Gor, the director of the presidential personnel office, moved to dismiss Mr. Siebert after Mr. Trump said multiple times that he wanted him fired, according to two people with knowledge of the events. And Boris Epshteyn, a longtime Trump legal adviser, spoke with Ms. Halligan, who was serving as a lawyer in the White House, about stepping in to lead the U.S. attorney’s office. The president quickly settled on her for the role, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Senior Justice Department officials, meanwhile, suggested that the Comey investigation was moving forward, and did not rule out the possibility of a prosecution.

Another deadline accelerated the pace of that investigation: the five-year statute of limitations on potential crimes emanating from Mr. Comey’s Senate testimony, which would have expired on Tuesday.

In early September, prosecutors from Mr. Siebert’s office subpoenaed Daniel C. Richman, a Columbia law professor and close adviser to Mr. Comey, in connection with an investigation into whether the former F.B.I. director lied about authorizing Mr. Richman to leak information.

Mr. Richman’s statements to prosecutors were not helpful in their efforts to build a case, according to people familiar with the matter. And Mr. Siebert began expressing serious doubts about the case, which quickly made their way up the chain of command.

By mid-September, Mr. Trump was determined to rid himself of Mr. Siebert, a 15-year veteran of the office. Ms. Bondi and Mr. Blanche, who had worked closely with Mr. Siebert on immigration, drug and gang cases, pushed back.

The president was unswayed. On Friday, Sept. 19, he told reporters he wanted Mr. Siebert to leave. The prosecutor, who had hoped to find another job in the department, knew that time was up and resigned, according to officials in his office who requested anonymity to avoid retribution.

The next morning, shellshocked staff members in the U.S. attorney’s office awakened to find an email in their inboxes from Maggie Cleary, a veteran state prosecutor, saying she was their new boss.

At 6:44 p.m. on Saturday, Mr. Trump dashed off a rambling but pointed social media message to Ms. Bondi demanding action. It landed with a boom.

It read: “Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, ‘same old story as last time, all talk, no action.’ Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.’”

His coda erased any questions about his intentions.

“JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” he wrote. Soon after, Comey was indicted by a grand jury.

To read more CLICK HERE