Sen. Elissa Slotkin laid out Democrats’ plans for another round of lawfare against President Donald Trump’s administration in a public interview last week, saying the prosecutions would be a “deterrence message” to scare young conservatives away from politics.
Speaking to students at the University of Chicago, Slotkin said, “The people around Donald Trump … have no immunity the way the president does. … So you go after the people who do his bidding.”
“I want to look at these signature cases and not just focus on the president, but on the people who enabled him,” Slotkin continued. “I want young people coming out of school to say, ‘Should I go work for the Trump administration? Like that sounds fun. I might get an opportunity.’ I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that.’ I want that deterrence message.”
Slotkin then doubled down in a post on X days later: “America must be a place where the rule of law still matters. Those laws should apply to everyone equally. If you have aided in the corrupt use of U.S. taxpayer dollars to benefit the President or his family, or you have violated the law in order to carry out guidance from the President, you should be held accountable.”
“And given how rampant that corruption appears to the average American, people looking to work for his Administration should realize that while the Supreme Court has granted the President immunity, it has not done the same for those who do illegal things at his behest,” her post continued.
The warning followed a September speech Slotkin gave in which she had already identified targets for her lawfare, saying “the goal here is to have a list of ‘signature cases’ that go after some of the most obvious and harmful abuses of taxpayer dollars.” The list of targets includes former DHS secretary Kristi Noem, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, and U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro. Slotkin herself describes these efforts as “retribution.”
She’s not the only Democrat calling for jailing their opposition.
Democrat Senate candidate Angie Nixon said last week that her Republican opponent, former attorney general of Florida Ashley Moody, should be “locked up and punished in jail.”
When asked whether those comments sounded “like a desire to weaponize the justice system,” Nixon told the CBS Face the Nation audience that “it’s not a desire to weaponize the justice system. It’s designed to actually hold corrupt politicians accountable for what they’re doing.”
These recent Democrat promises to continue lawfare are merely the latest in a long series. Last year House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said: “The one thing that should be clear — to all of these Republican extremists and sycophants and the people who are either actively involved in corruption, violating the law, engaged in extrajudicial activity — is that the statute of limitations for any crimes being committed now is five years. It will extend well beyond the end of the Trump administration.”
But the Democrat Party has gone far beyond threatening lawfare. Democrats spent the lead-up to the 2024 election trying to throw President Donald Trump in jail and successfully jailing some of his allies.
New York Attorney General Letitia James — who campaigned on using lawfare to target Trump and called him an “illegitimate president” — accused Trump of inflating his personal wealth to get more favorable loan terms in a case in which there were no victims. A court ultimately found the judgment against Trump to be unconstitutional. The case was so political that even anti-Trump CNN political commentator Jonah Goldberg called the “prosecution … a mistake” and “very political.”
At the same time, Trump was also facing 34 felony counts in Manhattan in a lawfare case led by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Bragg claimed payments Trump made to his then-lawyer Michael Cohen to transfer to pornographer Stormy Daniels (purportedly to keep quiet about an alleged affair) were illegal, though Bragg failed to clarify exactly how such alleged actions were illegal.
(Notably, the Federal Elections Commission, the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Southern District of New York’s U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to bring the case because it lacked any legal basis.)
A Manhattan jury convicted Trump on all 34 counts in May of 2024, but scheduling for his sentence was delayed after his 2024 victory.
Running concurrently to those lawfare challenges was Democrat lawfare at the federal level. President Joe Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith to prosecute the former president. Trump was indicted in June of 2023 for allegedly mishandling classified documents. Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the case one year later, ruling Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional.
Smith brought a second indictment against Trump in August 2023, targeting the then-former president for questioning the administration of the 2020 election. The Supreme Court later addressed the case, ruling 6-3 that a president has “absolute immunity” for “actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority” and “at least presumptive immunity” for all “official acts.” The court sent several questions pertaining to the charges against Trump back to the lower court to determine whether his actions constituted an official act. Smith filed a superseding indictment against Trump but then dropped the case after Trump won the 2024 presidential contest.
Democrat politicians, attorneys, and other power figures extended their lawfare far beyond Trump himself, targeting the people who worked for the president — the same group of people Slotkin now says she hopes to prosecute, in part to intimidate young people who might work in a Republican administration. Trump’s personal aide, Walt Nauta, was a co-defendant in the classified documents case and charged for allegedly moving boxes. Nauta pleaded not guilty, and charges were later dropped.
Other Trump allies were not so “fortunate.” Both Steven Bannon and Peter Navarro were convicted and spent several months in jail for defying a subpoena issued by the sham Jan. 6 Committee.
As Slotkin herself said, Democrats’ plans for “victory” are focused on dealing out “retribution” to Republicans regardless of status, from the president to low-level staffers. Americans should take her warning very seriously.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2