DOJ Launches Criminal Investigation Into E. Jean Carroll

Listen: We have all heard about rapists using intimidation tactics and retaliation to re-victimize their victims. We know that rapists who are in positions of power are especially adept at performing such abuse. Regardless, it should be far more shocking than it is when the president of the United States is weaponizing the federal government against his rape victim in order to intimidate her or exact revenge — but that abuse is what President Donald Trump and his MAGA-fied DOJ are committing against Trump’s rape victim, E. Jean Carroll, and, unfortunately, it’s just not very shocking at all.

According to CNN, the Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into Carroll and whether or not she committed perjury in testimony tied to her two civil lawsuits against Trump, who was found to have raped and defamed the magazine columnist by two separate federal juries.

It’s worth noting, of course, that the DOJ doesn’t seem to be accusing Trump of lying about being raped or defamed in the denial of that rape. Instead, the department seems to be investigating whether or not she lied about who was paying her legal fees, because, apparently, that’s an important detail when an adjudicated rapist is grasping at straws.

During a 2022 deposition, Carroll stated that she received no outside funding for her lawsuit, but it was later revealed that billionaire Reid Hoffman had paid some legal fees. Who cares, right? Well, apparently, the man found liable for rape cares, and so do his legally-challenged sycophants in the Justice Department.

From CNN:

Senior leaders at the Justice Department referred the investigation to federal prosecutors in Chicago, according to two sources familiar with the matter. While Carroll’s deposition took place in New York, one of the individuals who helped cover some of Carroll’s legal fees, Hoffman, has a nonprofit based in Chicago.

Hoffman’s support of the case caught Trump’s attorneys off guard when it came to light on the eve of trial.

In a 2022 videotaped deposition, Carroll told then-Trump attorney Alina Habba that no one else was paying for her legal fees. But two weeks before the trial Carroll’s attorneys informed the judge and Trump’s lawyers that they secured funding from Hoffman’s nonprofit.

Carroll’s lawyers said she never met nor had conversations with anyone associated with the nonprofit. Habba said in court at the time that Carroll’s team “conspired to conceal the truth for nearly six months.”

The judge permitted Trump’s attorneys to question Carroll again in a deposition, which has not been made public.

When the trial began two weeks later Judge Lewis Kaplan said he saw no issue with Carroll’s credibility and blocked the lawyers from asking about Hoffman’s funding.

Earlier this month, we reported that the DOJ requested that the U.S. Supreme Court allow the government to use the Westfall Act to swap Trump for the U.S. as the defendant in Carroll’s defamation suit — which it has tried to appeal unsuccessfully multiple times — which would require that the case be dismissed because it’s illegal to sue the federal government for defamation. In other words, Trump wasn’t trying to get the defamation suit tossed on the grounds that he didn’t defame anyone. Instead, he’s asking SCOTUS to change the rules so the suit gets tossed on a technicality. And as I noted in that report, “the DOJ’s request to implement the Westfall Act represents Trump’s fifth attempt to have either the judgment reviewed or tossed out entirely.”

According to CNN, “the Supreme Court has deferred its decision on whether to take up Trump’s appeal twelve times,” with the most recent deferral being made Wednesday morning.

Then there are Trump’s numerous attempts to get the sexual assault verdict against him overturned. Last November, he asked SCOTUS to review the verdict, questioning why Carroll had waited so long to accuse him of raping her in a New York department store in the mid-1990s. That request went nowhere.

In December 2024, a federal appeals court affirmed the jury’s verdict and the $5 million judgment that came with it, and in June of last year, Trump lost a bid to have that failed appeal reviewed by the full bench of judges.

Carroll received a whopping $83 million judgment as a result of her defamation case, and last September, a federal appeals court panel affirmed those damages, finding it “reasonable in light of the extraordinary and egregious facts,” after Trump attempted to have that verdict overturned.

The point is, Trump has tried and failed to weasel his way out of the verdicts two separate juries of his peers reached against him, so now he and his Justice Department of spineless stooges appear to be going a different route by launching a desperate criminal investigation against her, where the only “crime” she’s even accused of committing is being untruthful about who paid some of her expenses. And because the president and his loyalists are seemingly lacking in any semblance of self-awareness, they just don’t seem to get that these tactics only make the president look all the more guilty.

It also reeks of weaponization of lawfare, which the Trump administration is supposed to be so vehemently against that the DOJ created a nearly $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” which has been promoted as a fund to pay restitution to people who allegedly “suffered weaponization and lawfare” under former President Joe Biden. It’s assumed that the only people who can apply for the fund are Jan. 6 rioters, Trump allies and other prominent conservatives who found themselves on the wrong side of federal prosecutions under Biden — because, again, that’s how Trump and his people have advertised it — but, according to BBC News, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote in a memo to skeptical Republican U.S. senators that  “there is no partisan restriction; Democrats can submit claims, too.”

One can only wonder if Carroll would be eligible for the fund if the DOJ actually does charge her with a crime but fails to secure a guilty verdict, as it has in virtually all of the president’s other retaliatory lawfare cases — and those are just the cases where the DOJ didn’t fail to even secure an indictment.

Perhaps the president is so obsessed with what he perceives to be lawfare committed against him because he’s proven to be so damn bad at committing lawfare against others.

Again, we should all be shocked that the so-called “Justice” Department is helping a sitting president criminalize his rape victim, but the real story here is that it’s not shocking at all. This is where we are.

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DOJ Launches Criminal Investigation Into E. Jean Carroll, Who Trump Was Found Liable For Sexually Assaulting was originally published on newsone.com