Donald Trump’s ongoing use of the Justice Department to settle scores became highly personal this week, with the federal government’s vast investigative resources turned on an old grievance stemming from the sexual assault and defamation cases he lost to E. Jean Carroll.
Following CNN’s bombshell report on Wednesday that the feds were targeting Carroll, Chicago U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros denied that his office was weighing charges against the 82-year-old writer. The Associated Press reported on Friday that Boutros was actually focused on a nonprofit that contributed to Carroll’s legal defense.
During the years-long, extensive litigation between Carroll and Trump in Manhattan federal court — which the president has lost every step of the way — Trump allies have promoted conspiracies about financial backing from Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn and a major donor to Democrat causes.
When Carroll’s claims first made it to trial during Trump’s second run for the presidency, Eric Trump tweeted that Hoffman was funding the case to stop his father from being reelected. Trump’s team worked to craft a “witch hunt” legal defense around the donations before his first trial in the spring of 2023 after Carroll’s lawyers acknowledged securing funding from Reid’s nonprofit, despite her saying nobody was footing the bill for her legal fees during a deposition.
Following the disclosure, Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over Carroll’s two lawsuits against Trump, let his lawyers depose her again, but ultimately concluded it was a nonissue and had no bearing on the credibility of the sexual assault allegations. The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Kaplan in a December 2024 ruling, similarly finding the matter was much ado about nothing, and no evidence that Carroll was personally involved in securing the funding.
Now, with Trump in the White House, the issue is apparently back in play.
Hoffman took to social media Friday to condemn the investigation. In a Substack post, he wrote, “If a President found liable for sexual assault can unleash federal prosecutors on his accuser and her backers, then any powerful abuser — anyone convicted of rape, anyone found liable for assault — becomes more encouraged to do the same. We cannot allow that to happen.”
Carroll has not weighed in publicly on the week’s developments. Her attorney, Roberta Kaplan, declined to comment when reached by the Daily News.
Since his return to the White House, Trump has made no secret of his desire to use the power of the presidency to seek retribution against his enemies — pressing for criminal charges against, among others, former FBI Director James Comey and New York AG Letitia James via his Truth Social platform, which quickly transpired.
The new probe regards an issue that is highly personal for the president, involving a private citizen in her eighties who has never held office — and who a civil jury concluded Trump had victimized. Jurors who found Trump liable heard graphic testimony from Carroll accusing him of attacking the former talk show host and Elle columnist inside of a dressing room on a vacant floor at Bergdorf Goodman in 1996, violently shoving her up against a wall and putting his fingers inside of her.
“The U.S. Department of Justice’s criminal probe into E. Jean Carroll sends a dangerous message to survivors: Speak out against powerful men, and you could be targeted next. This is bigger than one woman or one case. Our justice system should protect survivors — not intimidate them,” the National Organization for Women said in a statement.
The probe has even provoked criticism from some influential voices on the right. Conservative commentator Ed Whelan, a former clerk to the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, on Wednesday called it “an outrageous abuse of power.”
“Ordinarily I would hesitate to prejudge any DOJ criminal investigation, but this is now after a well-established pattern of the Justice Department launching specious criminal investigations and indictments against the president’s critics,” Gregg Nunziata, a former Republican staffer for the Senate Judiciary Committee, told The Hill.
Twelve Manhattan jurors on 2023 found Trump liable for sexually abusing her and for later defaming her as a liar who made it up, with the verdicts later upheld on appeal. The jury took less than three hours to weigh the claims and award Carroll $5 million in damages. They heard extensive testimony from Carroll about living alone upstate in paranoia amid a crush of death threats.
The following January, a second jury considering additional instances of defamation determined Trump owed Carroll another $83 million for damaging her reputation, starting in 2019 from the White House podium after she first went public with her allegations and he infamously called her a liar and “not my type.”
Trump has been vigorous in his efforts to discredit Carroll. Hours after the first verdict, he disparaged Carroll as a “wack job” before an audience of millions during a nationally televised town hall on CNN. The Republican front-runner’s courtroom antics at the second trial in January 2024 included criticizing Carroll in real time while she testified before jurors.
His brazen courtroom conduct reached the point where Judge Kaplan threatened to expel him from the trial.