Fact check: Vance falsely claims Trump did not ‘go after his political opponents’ as president

Sen. JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, falsely claimed Sunday that former President Donald Trump “didn’t go after his political opponents” during his presidency – an assertion that is contradicted by a mountain of evidence.

Vance, who said Friday that the attorney general would be the most important government official other than the president in a second Trump administration, was asked by ABC News host Martha Raddatz in an interview on Sunday if Trump would go after his political opponents. Vance said no, then added, “Martha, he was president for four years and he didn’t go after his political opponents.”

Facts First: Vance’s claim is false. As president, Trump publicly and privately pressured the Justice Department, and others in his administration, to investigate or prosecute numerous political opponents.

Trump made extensive behind-the-scenes efforts to get his political opponents charged with crimes. But you don’t have to rely on investigative reporting or the memoirs of former administration officials to know that Trump went after political opponents as president.

He often went after them in public, too.

As CNN reporter Marshall Cohen has noted, there is a long list of political opponents whom Trump publicly called for the Justice Department and others to investigate or prosecute. The list includes not only 2016 election opponent Hillary Clinton and 2020 election opponent Joe Biden but also Biden’s son Hunter Biden, Democratic former Secretary of State John Kerry, Trump’s former national security advisor turned critic John Bolton, Democratic former President Barack Obama, unspecified Obama administration officials, the anonymous author of a New York Times op-ed by a Trump administration official critical of Trump, MSNBC host and Trump critic Joe Scarborough, former FBI director turned Trump critic James Comey, other former FBI officials, former British spy Christopher Steele (the author of a controversial dossier of allegations against Trump), and various congressional Democrats – including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, and Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia.

Asked for comment for this article on Monday, Vance spokesperson Taylor Van Kirk accused the media of having a biased “double standard” and said “it is indisputable that under Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s DOJ, the Republican nominee for president was targeted and indicted, while under President Trump, nothing like that ever transpired against either of the Democrats he faced off with in 2016 or 2020.”

But that wasn’t for a lack of Trump trying.

Trump repeatedly pressured the Justice Department as president to prosecute both Clinton and Biden, in addition to trying to get foreign countries to investigate Biden. That the Trump-era Justice Department declined to charge Clinton and Biden doesn’t mean it’s true that Trump didn’t “go after” them or others. (In fact, Trump literally said in 2017 that he wanted the department to be “going after” Clinton.)

John Kelly, whom Trump appointed as Secretary of Homeland Security and then White House chief of staff, told The New York Times in 2023 of Trump: “He was always telling me that we need to use the FBI and IRS to go after people – it was constant and obsessive and is just what he’s claiming is being done to him now.”

And contrary to Vance’s claim to Raddatz that Harris has herself tried to arrest political opponents, which Van Kirk echoed in her Monday statement to CNN, there is no public evidence that Harris pressured the Justice Department to prosecute Trump or her other opponents. The decision to bring two criminal cases against Trump – one over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and one over his post-presidency retention of classified documents – was made by a special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Trump made many public calls for investigations and prosecutions of political opponents

On some occasions, Trump’s calls for investigations, arrests or prosecutions of his political opponents sounded more like vague gripes than sincere attempts to prompt official action. On numerous occasions, though, Trump applied explicit, sustained public pressure on the Justice Department in general or his attorney general to pursue his opponents.

For example, in 2017 and 2018, Trump frequently harangued then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions in tweets and public remarks to investigate various allegations against Clinton.

“Attorney General Jeff Sessions has taken a VERY weak position on Hillary Clinton crimes,” he wrote in one tweet. “So where is the investigation A.G.,” he wrote in another tweet. “So many people are asking why isn’t the A.G. or Special Council (sic) looking at the many Hillary Clinton or Comey crimes,” he wrote in another tweet. In yet another tweet, he noted allegations about Clinton, then wrote that “at some point the Justice Department, and the FBI, must do what is right and proper.”

Trump made a direct public request in 2019 for Ukraine and China to launch investigations into Joe Biden and Hunter Biden – after he was already facing criticism for privately pressuring Ukraine to investigate them. And in 2020, Trump publicly demanded that then-Attorney General William Barr indict Joe Biden, Obama and unspecified others over their supposed roles in the investigation into his 2016 campaign’s links to Russia.

“Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes, the greatest political crime in the history of our country, then we’re going to get little satisfaction unless I win and we’ll just have to go – because I won’t forget it. But these people should be indicted. This was the greatest political crime in the history of our country. And that includes Obama and it includes Biden,” Trump said.

Trump privately pressured the Justice Department

Trump suggested in that Fox News interview that he might have raised the subject of Biden and Obama indictments with Barr, saying, “I’ll be honest with you, he’s got all the information he needs. They want to get more, more, more, they keep getting more. I said, ‘You don’t need any more. You’ve got more stuff than anybody’s ever had.’”

Trump privately pressured the Justice Department and Trump administration officials to go after other political opponents, according to former officials and news reports. And it appears he was sometimes successful, though it’s impossible to definitively prove a direct relationship between his demands and the department’s actions.

Sessions told special counsel Robert Mueller that Trump pressured him in 2017 to abandon his recusal from investigations related to the 2016 election in order to prosecute Clinton, according to the Mueller report. Sessions did not do that, but he announced in March 2018 that he had (in November 2017) appointed a federal prosecutor to look into a variety of allegations against Clinton. She was never charged.

The New York Times reported this year that in April 2018, Trump told aides that if Sessions didn’t prosecute Clinton and Comey, Trump would prosecute them himself – prompting his White House counsel to write him a memo outlining the limits of the president’s powers.

Bolton wrote in a 2020 book that Trump was “obsessed” with having Kerry prosecuted for supposedly breaking a rarely enforced old law by remaining in contact with Iranian officials after leaving office to try to preserve the nuclear agreement Kerry helped to negotiate. Bolton wrote that “in meeting after meeting in the Oval (Office), Trump would ask Attorney General William Barr or anybody listening to launch a prosecution.”

The same week in 2018 that Trump tweeted that Kerry might have broken the law, the Justice Department assigned federal prosecutors to investigate Kerry, according to a book by former federal prosecutor Geoffrey Berman, who was ousted by Trump in 2020. Then, the same day Trump tweeted about Kerry in 2019, a Justice Department official called one of the prosecutors to apply more pressure over the case, Berman wrote. Kerry was never charged.

In 2019, Barr satisfied Trump’s investigate-the-investigators demand by tasking a federal prosecutor to help investigate the origins of the FBI’s probe related to Russia and the 2016 election. In late 2020, with about three months left in Trump’s presidency, Barr gave that prosecutor, John Durham, the status of special counsel.

And in early 2020, Barr tasked a different federal prosecutor with taking in information from members of the public, notably including then-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, related to allegations about the Bidens and Ukraine, which had been a subject of Trump’s public and private focus.