Trump's list of targeted opponents grows longer with action against Powell and the Federal Reserve

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ATLANTA (AP) — Donald Trump promised in his second inaugural address to fairly apply the law, unlike how he said he'd been treated by federal authorities.

“The vicious, violent and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end,” he declared on Jan. 20, 2025.

Since then, Trump’s administration has gone after multiple elected and appointed government officials who have either directly opposed the Republican president or not granted his wishes.

The most recent is Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who has defended the independence of the central bank against Trump’s pressure to cut interest rates more sharply. Trump told NBC News over the weekend that he knew nothing about a Justice Department inquiry into the fed’s ongoing construction project in Washington.

But influential White House chief of staff Susie Wiles has also affirmed that Trump sees his White House return as a sort of vengeance tour.

“There may be an element of that from time to time,” she told Vanity Fair. “Who would blame him? Not me.”

Here’s a look at how Trump's government has pursued his opponents, real and perceived.

Powell said in an unusual video statement Sunday that the Justice Department has subpoenaed the central bank and threatened criminal indictments after his testimony to the Senate Banking Committee this summer. In that appearance, Powell pushed back at Trump’s criticism of the Fed’s $2.5 billion office renovation project in Washington — criticism that Trump had elevated as he also expressed frustration that Powell and his fellow governors were not lowering interest rates sharply enough for Trump’s taste.

Powell, whom Trump appointed as chairman in 2017, asserted plainly that the Justice Department action is a “pretext” to weaken the Fed’s historic independence to set monetary policy without political influence from the president. The chairman had previously ignored Trump’s pressure and personal insults, other than to emphasize the central bank’s historical independent status.

The inquiry and Powell’s statement mark a significant escalation in Trump’s battle with the Federal Reserve and his ongoing straining of the U.S. system of checks and balances.

Before the latest subpoena, Trump tried to fire another Federal Reserve board member, Lisa Cook, over allegations of mortgage fraud pushed by the president’s director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Bill Pulte. It was the first time in 112 years that a president had sought to remove a Fed governor.

Cook, a 2022 appointee of a Democratic president, Joe Biden, and the first Black woman to serve on the seven-member board, sued to keep her job. The Supreme Court ruled last fall that Cook could remain on the board as her case advances. The justices are expected to hear arguments in January. The court already has heard a separate case on Trump’s power to remove officials at independent agencies.

Former FBI Director James Comey has survived, for now, a federal indictment that charged him with lying to Congress.

Comey, whom Trump fired during his first administration, was the first former senior government official to face prosecution after being involved in one of the president’s chief grievances, the long-concluded investigation into Russian electoral interference.

The September indictment came days after Trump appeared to encourage Attorney General Pam Bondi to punish Comey. “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” he said in a social media post that named Bondi and referenced his own impeachments and prosecutions.

A federal judge in Virginia dismissed the criminal case against Comey in November, finding that prosecutor Lindsey Halligan, who brought the charges at Trump’s urging, was illegally appointed by the Justice Department. That, of course, means that Comey has not been cleared on the charges, which could be leveled against him again.

New York Attorney General Letitia James has long been a Trump target after she won a massive civil fraud case against him in 2024. The fine was later tossed out by a higher court, but both sides are appealing — and Trump’s Justice Department has gone after James since.

She was indicted on federal mortgage fraud charges two weeks after Comey’s indictment last year. Her case was thrown out by the same Virginia-based judge and for the same reason that spared Comey: The prosecutor who brought the charges was found to be illegally appointed.

The Trump administration has continued to go after James but was twice rebuked in December by grand juries that have declined to issue indictments after hearing evidence from federal prosecutors.

Even more recently, another federal judge, this time in James’ home state, disqualified another prosecutor from overseeing investigations into James. The judge found that John Sarcone also was not lawfully serving as an acting U.S. attorney in the Northern District of New York.

John Brennan’s lawyers say they’ve been informed the former CIA director is a target of a grand jury investigation in Florida.

That inquiry is related to the U.S. government assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election — the inquiry that fed Trump's ire at Comey.

Brennan’s lawyers said in a letter last month that they wanted the Justice Department to be prevented from steering an investigation of him and other former government officials to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon. She is the Florida jurist who was appointed by Trump and later dismissed a classified documents case against him.

An ostensibly independent federal agency that investigates partisan political activity of federal employees opened an investigation last summer into Jack Smith, the former federal prosecutor who led multiple Trump investigations, including into the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection by Trump supporters.

The Office of Special Counsel in Trump’s Justice Department confirmed in August that it was investigating Smith on allegations he engaged in political activity through his inquiries into Trump. Smith was named a special prosecutor in November 2022 by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland.

In congressional testimony in December, Smith did not back down, saying his team “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that the president criminally conspired to overturn his 2020 election defeat to Biden.

“I made my decisions in the investigation without regard to President Trump’s political association, activities, beliefs, or candidacy in the 2024 presidential election,” Smith said. “We took actions based on what the facts and the law required — the very lesson I learned early in my career as a prosecutor.”

California Sen. Adam Schiff has long been among the loudest Trump critics on Capitol Hill, starting when he was a House member during the first Trump presidency. Now he is another official whose mortgages and personal finances are under scrutiny. The investigation into Schiff was being conducted by prosecutors in Maryland as of late last year.

And now the investigation itself is the subject of an investigation. Federal authorities in November began inquiring about the roles of Ed Martin, a Justice Department official, and Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director whose name has surfaced in several of the high-profile mortgage fraud cases leveled by Trump’s administration.

Schiff, who pushed impeachment in Trump's first term, has consistently said the investigation against him is political retribution.

___ Associated Press reporter Eric Tucker contributed from Washington.