Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) is sounding the alarm about evident ambitions of Donald Trump and his allies in the event that the former president successfully returns to power via this year’s elections.
Goldman was responding specifically to news coverage outlining interest within Trump circles in pursuing criminal charges against Biden family members — which would go above and beyond the allegations already faced by the current president’s son Hunter Biden, a favorite GOP target. House Republicans have been conducting an impeachment inquiry targeting the current president on the basis in part of theories tying him to claimed corruption ensnaring others in his family, though they’ve yet to conclusively establish such a link. So the factual record means that a Trump administration pursuing Biden family charges of the sort clearly of interest would constitute political retaliation.
“Trump and his allies are planning to weaponize the DOJ and abuse the tools of justice to target political enemies without evidence,” Goldman wrote on X (Twitter). “Trump’s Project 2025 will decimate our institutions and end democracy as we know it. We must stop him in November. Our democracy depends on it.”
The whole concept is something Trump’s talked about and given airtime before (“Lock her up!”), but if Trump becomes president again, the threat returns.
And on the flip side, alongside the ambitions of reshaping the government inherent to the “Project 2025” plan that Goldman referenced, it’s also a major, leading item on Trump’s agenda to pardon and/or release detainees/defendants with criminal allegations originating in the Capitol riot of early 2021. He refers to such detainees as “hostages,” essentially claiming that the same hostile, political forces supposedly now running the justice system and going after him are going after these individuals as well — large numbers of whom pleaded guilty or were convicted. Most Capitol riot detainees in Washington, D.C.’s often discussed prison housing such individuals were specifically charged with assault, violence that would have been perpetrated against police.
