The Justice Department Was Dangerous Before Trump. It's Out of Control Now

Part 2: Federal Prosecutors expand their War on Terror tactics in the Trump years, taking advantage of a historically unpopular target

Clockwise from top left: Andrew Giuliani after the raid on his father’s apartment, Steve Bannon en route to his contempt of Congress charge, beleaguered former Trump aide Rick Gates, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, former campaign manager Paul Manafort, former Trump adviser Peter Navarro

The reviled former president Donald Trump has become a giant media version of a Trojan Horse, inside which the Justice Department has assembled an army for a grand assault on civil liberties. The rout is already on.

In Trump-related cases, the DOJ has pushed the tactical envelope in all the same ways it has with other types of unpopular defendants over the years, only it’s done so with a disturbing (and perhaps correct) presumption that the public wants them to color outside the lines more than ever, and deal even more cruelly with targets. The DOJ has political winds at its back it lacked even in the early War on Terror days as it campaigns openly to replace an adversarial system with Judge Dredd s…