Donald Trump has endlessly complained about the Department of Justice abusing its wide-reaching powers to make improper political attacks on him. But it was the DOJ under Trump himself that did exactly that to the Democratic governors of New York and New Jersey in late October 2020, violating department policy. So says the DOJ’s own independent inspector general.

And next week the DOJ will be back under Trump again. This time, his appointees must stay out of politics, whether to help or hinder anyone for partisan reasons. We realize that might be a naïve hope.

In his report, IG Michael Horowitz concluded that in the final weeks of the 2020 campaign three senior unnamed Trump DOJ officials intentionally plotted to use official proceedings against how Andrew Cuomo in New York and Phil Murphy in New Jersey handled COVID in nursing homes in direct violation of the rules of the DOJ.

As the incriminating text message showed, one plotter wrote to another that this “will be our last play on them before election, but it’s a big one.” “Them” being Cuomo and Murphy. What the Trump officials did was to break clear DOJ rules about keeping secret info secret and tell the press in an effort to score points against the Democrats.

The New York Post and the Wall Street Journal were told about the probes, even before the two states were informed of the investigations. The Post and the Journal then reported the news of the DOJ inquiry, which was news indeed, but telling the press at that preliminary stage — and right before a national election — was against long-standing policy against politicization of the government.

Isn’t that what Trump gripes about?

In August of 2020, the department announced publicly it was looking at COVID nursing home deaths in those two states, along with Michigan and Pennsylvania (which also had Democratic governors) even though there were states with similar situations regarding COVID nursing home deaths in states with GOP governors that were not being reviewed.

The political focus was then amped up in October, as the IG uncovered in reviewing emails, telephone call logs, instant messages, text messages, and calendar entries.

The IG’s summary report says: “The OIG investigation found that three then Senior DOJ Officials violated DOJ’s Confidentiality and Media Contacts Policy by leaking to select reporters, days before an election, non-public DOJ investigative information regarding ongoing DOJ investigative matters, resulting in the publication of two news articles that included the non-public DOJ investigative information. The OIG investigation also found that one of these three then Senior DOJ Officials violated the Confidentiality and Media Contacts Policy and DOJ’s Social Media Policy by reposting through a DOJ social media account links to the news articles.”

Last Friday, during his sentencing in his Manhattan Stormy Daniels hush money felony conviction, Trump used his time before the judge to repeat his rant: “this has been a weaponization of government. They call it lawfare. Never happened to any extent like this, but never happened in our country before. And I’d just like to explain that I was treated very, very unfairly.”

Actually, he was treated correctly. But it was his own men at DOJ who engaged in “weaponization of government.”

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