Donald Trump was elected to a second term on a promise to exact his “retribution.” So it’s no wonder that federal investigators and others who worked with Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office are taking the president-elect at his word.
According to two sources with knowledge of the matter and a former Justice Department official, several attorneys and staffers who were on the special counsel’s Justice Department team, or had done work for its criminal investigations into Trump, have already sought legal counsel or retained personal lawyers — in case the former and now future president and his incoming administration follow through on his desire to probe or even prosecute his enemies.
In less than a month, Trump will be inaugurated in Washington, D.C., for his second term in the Oval Office. He plans to mold much of the Department of Justice and FBI into a subsidiary of his own interests, and has suggested using these instruments to retaliate against those investigating him.
“The precedent on doing what they did, with the weaponization, using the DOJ and the FBI to go after their political opponents, that is so bad,” Trump said earlier this year. “That means I can do it too,” he added. “Pandora’s Box is open and that means that I can do it too.” Trump repeatedly pledged to be voters’ “retribution.” When President Joe Biden said during a debate that Trump would go after his political opponents, he did not deny that, instead offering: “I said my retribution is going to be success.”
One of the sources with knowledge of the situation tells Rolling Stone that multiple people who worked with Smith and his core team have preemptively reviewed their private and professional communications, to make sure they hadn’t written anything that could be subpoenaed, publicly revealed, and used against them to paint a narrative of alleged misconduct or supposed anti-Trump bias.
Some federal investigators, including more junior staff, have talked to attorneys and legal groups about possible ways a rejuvenated Trump Justice Department could try to make their lives hell, what precautionary measures they should take, and even how to avoid going bankrupt if the revenge probes come in full force, the sources add.
At least one such investigator has privately inquired if there are steps, even extreme ones, they can take to protect their spouse’s assets, in the event of harmful criminal charges, the former DOJ official says.
“They want to make sure they are protected, if worse comes to worst,” one of the sources notes.
The three sources refused to publicly reveal who on Team Smith was seeking legal counsel or exploring preemptive measures. However, Trumpland is determined to work up a list of potential targets. Indeed, Trump and his circle have been working on that, to some degree or another, for years.
In May 2023, Rolling Stone reported on how for months Trump had personally grilled close advisers, including at least one of his personal lawyers, whether “we know” the name of every member of the DOJ staff and senior FBI personnel who had been detailed to the federal criminal investigations into Trump and his associates.
At the time, Trump had privately discussed with his confidants that if he returned to the White House in 2025, he’d want his new attorney general to purge his second Justice Department and FBI of the agents and staff involved in investigating him — and that at least some of them may, in his mind, deserve some retaliatory probes themselves.
On the campaign trail, Trump vowed that if he won the 2024 presidential contest, he and his government would move swiftly to shut down the criminal cases regarding his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results as well as his hoarding of classified documents in his post-presidency. Following Trump’s defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris last month, Smith and the Justice Department have been shuttering the cases preemptively, citing the longstanding DOJ policy of not prosecuting sitting American presidents.
Since at least last year, as Rolling Stone previously reported, some of Trump’s closest political allies had met with him, including at his private club and Florida estate of Mar-a-Lago, to brief him on their work compiling lists of DOJ and FBI personnel involved with the Trump-focused investigations, so that he and his inner circle would have a ready-made roster of targets if he won.
Two years ago, the right-wing nonprofit Judicial Watch, which is fronted by Trump ally and informal adviser Tom Fitton, filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking information on “all employees hired by or detailed to the office of Special Counsel Jack Smith.” Fitton later told Rolling Stone that the Justice Department was “stonewalling” Judicial Watch on the names and related details, adding: “I don’t understand why it is that the names of prosecutors involved in a criminal investigation are secret… We don’t want Social Security numbers or personal phone numbers, but certainly senior leaders and others who are pursuing this need to be disclosed.”
Fitton and other Trump boosters didn’t get what they wanted out of the Biden-era Department of Justice. But in a few short weeks, it’ll once again be the Trump DOJ.
Among the upper crust of MAGAworld and the Republican Party, it is no mystery what the second Trump administration’s priorities on the matter should be.
“First and foremost, the people involved with this should be fired immediately,” Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) told NBC News late last month. “And anybody part of this, this effort to keep President Trump off the ballot and to throw him in jail for the rest of his life because they didn’t like his politics, and who continue to cast him as a quote-unquote threat to democracy, was wrong, and so we’ll see where that goes.”
