On Jan. 8, the White House announced the creation of a new division in the Department of Justice for “national fraud enforcement,” to be headed by an assistant attorney general. What makes this move notable is that it will be run out of the White House, under the direct supervision of President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Never before has the politicization of justice been so blatant or so dangerous.
Having a prosecutor directly answerable to the president and vice president crosses a line that no other administration has dared to cross. It is the kind of thing one might expect in an autocratic or totalitarian regime, but not in the United States.
Who does the vice president have in mind when he talks about the “bad guys”?
The New York Times rightly calls Trump and Vance’s intention to directly oversee a senior DOJ official “one of the administration’s most brazen efforts to date to toss out the traditional boundaries that have long existed between the White House and investigations conducted by federal law enforcement.”
And how did Republicans in the Senate, which will be responsible for confirming the nominee to head the new division, react? Majority Leader John Thune said that the person “would be confirmed swiftly.”
Thune’s response is a clear dereliction of duty. It will now be up to his colleagues in the Senate to resist this dangerous power play.
Explaining why the administration is creating the new position, Vance said, “This is the person who is going to make sure we stop defrauding the American people. When we get the bad guys, we want to make sure we get them permanently and they don’t have some legal technicality they can get out of.”
But who does the vice president have in mind when he talks about the “bad guys”? Recall the president’s unfounded charges against people who, in his view, “persecuted my family, staff and supporters, raided my home, Mar-a-Lago, and did everything within their power to prevent me from becoming the president of the United States.” In a speech at the Justice Department soon after he retook office in 2025, Trump called those who had been involved in bringing criminal cases against him “bad people, really bad people.”
And, in a moment of supreme irony, Trump said, “There could be no more heinous betrayal of American values than to use the law to terrorize the innocent and reward the wicked, and that’s what they were doing at a level that’s never been seen before.”
Since then, the administration has used allegations of fraud to actually “terrorize the innocent” and target its political opponents.
Last fall, New York State Attorney General Letitia James was indicted by a grand jury in Virginia for bank fraud and making false statements on a mortgage application; the indictment was later dismissed. The administration has also threatened to bring fraud charges against Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who led the first effort to impeach Trump while Schiff was a member of the House of Representatives. The New York Times notes that “Trump has said that Mr. Schiff … misled his lenders in a series of home loan transactions between 2009 and 2012.” And let’s not forget that the president has used allegations of mortgage fraud in his campaign to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board.
The Justice Department also has opened an investigation of Fed Chair Jerome Powell for supposed financial irregularities in conjunction with the renovation of the Fed’s headquarters.
James, Schiff and Cook were all targeted by William Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, who referred their cases to the Justice Department. It seems clear that the administration has found a powerful weapon to use in the president’s campaign of retribution and reprisal.
What matters is that going forward, decisions regarding fraud prosecutions will be made in the White House and directed by the president and vice president.
Because mortgages are complex, paperwork errors are common. Stanley Brand, a criminal defense attorney and fellow in law and government at Penn State Dickinson Law, is quoted by the Times as saying, “If the government pursued all of these — and I’ll call them application peccadilloes — there wouldn’t be any room in all the prisons for people who do this.”
But the Trump administration’s weaponization of fraud investigations doesn’t stop there. On Jan. 6, it told five blue states that it was freezing billions of dollars in funding for child care and social services programs to review them for fraud.
The Washington Post describes that action as itself “unprecedented” and as “an act of cruel retribution that could do long-term harm to some of the nation’s poorest families.” Besides pursuing these allegations, the jurisdiction of the new assistant attorney general will extend to efforts against what Vance called “domestic terrorism networks” trying to thwart the administration’s immigration agenda. In his view, these supposed networks are “defrauding the United States by inciting violence against our law enforcement officers.” That’s an unusually expansive definition of fraud, but the administration is eager to let its newly created division loose to curb protest without letting niceties of the law — what Vance labeled “some legal technicality” — get in the way. Moreover, it seems not to matter to Trump and Vance that the Justice Department already has a Fraud Section housed within its Criminal Division. What does matter is that going forward, decisions regarding some fraud prosecutions will be made in the White House and directed by the president and vice president. As Vance said at a press briefing, the new assistant attorney general “is going to kick [them] into high gear.” That effort is also central to the administration’s ongoing effort to purge the Justice Department of any vestige of professionalism, an effort at war with the very reason the department was created by an act of Congress in 1870. As Boston University law professor Jed Shugerman argued in 2014, “The founding of the DOJ had less to do with Reconstruction (and the legal cases it inspired), and more to do with ‘retrenchment’ (budget-cutting and fiscal conservatism) and anti-patronage reform.” “The DOJ’s creation,” Shugerman observes, “was contemporaneous with major professionalization efforts (especially the founding of modern bar associations) to make the practice of law more exclusive and more independent from partisan politics.” Throughout American history, the effort to achieve this goal has been more or less successful, depending on the president in office. Some attorneys general were comfortable in the political arena and being closely aligned with the White House. Others insisted on their independence and that of the department they led. But even at their most political moments, none took the leap the Trump administration intends to take with the new division of national fraud enforcement. If Sen. Thune and his colleagues let this plan succeed, they will be taking a monumental step toward turning the American constitutional system upside down.
Austin Sarat
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. The views expressed here do not represent Amherst College. 
