What did Donald Trump do today?

He lied about using the power of the state to criminally punish a woman he raped.

In 2023, a jury found that Trump had raped E. Jean Carroll and then defamed her by calling her a liar when she accused him. Trump repeated the defamatory statements after the verdict was returned, earning him a second and much larger defeat in court. Trump continues to drag the case through the appeals process, but he has lost every round in court so far.

Yesterday, news broke that the Department of Justice was investigating Carroll for the crime of perjury. Several news agencies independently confirmed the story with DOJ sources.

The substance of the investigation was a claim that Carroll, 82, made during a deposition in which she said that she was not receiving external funding for her lawsuit. That deposition took place two years after her attorneys accepted some financial support on her behalf from a Chicago nonprofit organization, and which Carroll had evidently forgotten about or was unaware of.

At Trump's attorneys' request, the trial judge held a hearing, and accepted that Carroll's statement was an innocent mistake with no bearing on the case. The jury never heard any false statement regarding the matter. 

Today, facing outrage at still yet another obvious attempt by Trump to use the power of the presidency to get revenge against his enemies, he sent a US Attorney to make a misleading statement of his own. Andrew Boutros "categorically" rejected the reporting and insisted that no such investigation into Carroll existed. His statement read:

In light of wide-spread reporting and intense media and public interest into the E. Jean Carroll matter in New York, the Chicago U.S. Attorney’s Office can confirm that it has not opened — and has never opened — a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll. Any claim to the contrary is categorically false. 

(Boutros has been in the news for other reasons this week, trying to do damage control after his office was found to have grossly abused the grand jury process to obtain false indictments of people protesting against Trump's immigration terror campaign.) 

But given the certainty that the investigation does exist, it appears that Boutros's statement was carefully worded to conceal that reality. Further reporting today revealed that the organization that helped fund Carroll's suit is itself under investigation—and since that would amount to a criminal conspiracy if Carroll actually had knowingly lied during her deposition, an investigation into the donor is an investigation into Carroll regardless. 

In other words: Trump's DOJ, which is led by Trump's former personal defense attorney, is targeting for criminal prosecution the woman that a jury found he raped and twice defamed for alleged false statements that her lawyers voluntarily corrected, and a judge held harmless—and then lying about it when called out. 

Trump has spent much of the last month trying to pay himself and supporters who committed crimes on his behalf billions of taxpayer dollars for the supposed "weaponization" of government against them.

Why does this matter?

• Accusing your victims of doing what you did to them, in an attempt to create doubt about a clear-cut situation, is a common tactic among men who abuse women.

• This is pretty much what you'd expect an unrepentant sexual abuser to do with the powers of the presidency. 

• The Department of Justice is not supposed to be Donald Trump's private goon squad.