The Hit List Grows: A Governor, His Wife, and a Justice Department for Hire
California Governor Gavin Newsom says federal agents are knocking on the doors of his family, friends, and former employees in search of a crime to attach to him. He is the latest name in a pattern that no honest observer can still pretend is coincidence — and the latest evidence that the Department of Justice now functions, in too many cases, as the personal legal arm of a wounded president.
On Monday, Gavin Newsom did something that, only a decade ago, would have been unthinkable for a sitting American governor: he turned to a camera and informed the public that the United States Department of Justice was actively investigating him, his wife, and the people around them — and that, in his view, the only crime under investigation was being a political threat to Donald Trump. Newsom said in his video statement that federal agents have contacted associates and issued subpoenas for years of personal and professional records, with the probe recently expanding to take in his family and professional network. As he put it directly to the president of the United States: leave my wife and family out of your personal vendetta.
The political class will spend the next several days arguing over whether Newsom’s accusation is dramatic. It is not. It is precise. And the only reason it sounds dramatic is that Americans have not yet caught up to how far this country has already drifted from the rule of law it tells itself it lives by.
1. The Latest Name on a Growing List
According to CalMatters, Newsom said the DOJ is interviewing his friends and associates because he is considering a run for president in 2028. According to reporting in the Los Angeles Times, federal prosecutors opened a probe last year into the tax filings of Newsom’s wife, the filmmaker and nonprofit founder Jennifer Siebel Newsom — a probe that has since expanded to take in years of personal and professional activity. There has been no indictment. There has been no public allegation of a specific crime. There is only a sustained search by federal investigators for one.
Former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani, speaking to Newsweek, observed that most of the Trump Justice Department’s investigations of the president’s named political adversaries have “gone nowhere” — with the notable exception of John Bolton, who pleaded guilty. That is not a track record of careful, evidence-driven prosecution. It is the track record of a fishing expedition that occasionally hooks a fish.
“One by one, anyone who has challenged Donald Trump has ended up on his hit list. And today, I proudly join that list.”
— Gov. Gavin Newsom, June 15, 2026
2. The Pattern Has Become the Policy
Newsom is not alone. He is not the first. And he will not be the last. The DOJ under Attorney General Pam Bondi and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — the latter being the man who personally represented Donald Trump as his criminal defense lawyer before joining the administration — has, in the first sixteen months of this presidency, taken investigative or prosecutorial action against nearly every prominent figure who has crossed Donald Trump in a courtroom, on a witness stand, or in a hearing room. Critics no longer have to argue this; the receipts are public.
The mechanism is repeatable, and by now it is depressingly familiar. Trump publicly demands a prosecution on Truth Social. A U.S. Attorney who refuses is replaced. A loyalist — frequently with no prosecutorial experience whatsoever — is installed in their place. A grand jury is convened. Career prosecutors warn that the evidence is thin. The indictment comes anyway. Then the case collapses on legal grounds, on factual grounds, or on the grounds that the prosecutor herself was never lawfully appointed. The point, increasingly, is not to win. The point is the process itself — the subpoenas, the agents at the door, the legal bills, the chilling effect on anyone watching.
Case I · Former FBI Director
Indicted in September 2025 on false-statement charges days after Trump publicly demanded the DOJ act “now.” A federal judge later dismissed the case after finding that interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan — a former Trump personal attorney with no prior prosecutorial experience — was unlawfully appointed.
A second indictment, over an Instagram post of seashells reading “86 47,” followed in April 2026. The lead prosecutor has since left the case.
Case II · New York Attorney General
Won the civil fraud judgment against Trump’s company. Indicted in October 2025 on mortgage-fraud charges. The indictment was dismissed after the same Halligan-appointment ruling. A grand jury then refused twice to re-indict her — an extraordinary repudiation of a federal prosecutor.
Case III · Former National Security Adviser
Indicted in October 2025 on 18 Espionage Act counts. In June 2026, Bolton agreed to a guilty plea on a single count of retaining classified material. The investigation, notably, began under the Biden administration — the one case where the underlying evidence appears to have been substantive rather than political.
Case IV · United States Senator
Led Trump’s first impeachment. Under criminal investigation for alleged mortgage-occupancy misrepresentation after a referral from FHFA Director Bill Pulte, a Trump appointee. Schiff’s attorney, former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, has said career prosecutors reviewed the allegations and found them unsupported.
Case V · Defamation Plaintiff
The columnist whose lawsuits resulted in jury verdicts totaling more than $88 million against Trump for sexual abuse and defamation. CNN reported in May 2026 that the DOJ has opened a criminal inquiry into Carroll over a deposition statement about her legal funding.
Case VI · Fulton County DA
Brought the 2023 Georgia indictment of Trump and 18 co-defendants over efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Federal investigators have subpoenaed records from her office, including those connected to a leadership-training trip. Her office maintains no government funds were used.
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Add to that list Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook (a mortgage probe accompanied by an effort to remove her from her seat), Rep. LaMonica McIver (charged after a confrontation with ICE), and Rep. Eugene Vindman and his brother Alexander — figures central to Trump’s first impeachment — who have been the subject of inquiry letters from former DOJ official Ed Martin. The roster is not a list of suspected criminals. It is a list of people who beat, embarrassed, prosecuted, or refused to assist Donald Trump.
3. A Timeline of Retribution
4. The Chilling Effect Is the Point
It is important to be honest about what this is for. Donald Trump knows, and his Department of Justice knows, that most of these cases will not result in convictions. Several have already collapsed. Grand juries — bodies famously willing to “indict a ham sandwich,” in the old prosecutor’s joke — have refused to indict Letitia James twice. Judges have thrown out cases. Career prosecutors have walked off them. The conviction rate of this retribution campaign, after sixteen months, is approximately one plea deal.
But the conviction rate is not the metric. The metric is the message. The message to a U.S. attorney is: refuse a politically motivated prosecution and you will be fired and replaced with a loyalist. The message to a prosecutor in a state attorney general’s office is: sue this president civilly and you will spend the next decade defending your mortgage paperwork. The message to a witness in a civil suit is: testify against this president and the federal government will examine every deposition you ever gave. The message to a 2028 contender is: declare your candidacy and federal agents will start visiting your wife’s friends.
Sen. Schiff said it most cleanly when his own investigation was announced. He called the conduct the kind of thing tinpot dictators do, designed to intimidate political opponents and silence them. He was not exaggerating. Targeted prosecution — or even targeted investigation, with no prosecution — has been one of the standard tools of consolidating autocracies for a century. The United States has, until very recently, generally avoided it. We are no longer avoiding it.
“This prosecution was brought at the direction of President Trump.”
— Patrick Fitzgerald, attorney for James Comey, in federal court
5. The Silence in the Marble Building
The most damning fact of the past sixteen months is not what Trump has done. Trump has been telling the country exactly what he intended to do since the 2024 campaign — he promised retribution and he is delivering it. The most damning fact is what the Republican majority in Congress has not done. Not one Senate Judiciary hearing on the firing of U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert. Not one floor speech of consequence on the unlawful appointment of Lindsey Halligan. Not one subpoena, from the chamber whose entire constitutional purpose is to check the executive, to ask why grand juries are being convened against the president’s named enemies.
There has been one exception worth naming. When Trump tried to attach a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund to compensate his allies, a handful of Senate Republicans balked at the price tag, and the fund was quietly shelved. They did not object to the underlying premise — that the federal government should pay Trump’s people for their grievances. They objected to the dollar figure. That is the floor of the current Republican opposition to the weaponization of justice: not principle, but accounting.
Rep. Dan Goldman of New York, on the prosecution of his House colleague Rep. McIver, said the GOP’s silence on this conduct would be a permanent stain on each and every one of them. He is right, and the stain has only deepened since. Members of Congress who built careers calling the previous administration’s prosecution of Trump a “weaponization” of justice have responded to the actual, demonstrable weaponization happening now with a silence so total it can only be described as complicity.
When the President is unable, or unfit, to discharge the powers of his office.
The 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967 in the shadow of the Kennedy assassination, provides a constitutional mechanism for the removal of a president who is unable to discharge the duties of the office. Section 4 grants that power to the Vice President together with a majority of either the Cabinet — or, critically, “such other body as Congress may by law provide.” The Founders, and the framers of the amendment, did not assume the Cabinet would always be willing. They wrote in a backstop.
That backstop is the basis of legislation introduced in April 2026 by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, with more than 50 co-sponsors. The Raskin bill would create a Commission on Presidential Capacity — a 17-member body — to assess whether the president remains capable of discharging the duties of the office. Raskin’s stated trigger was Trump’s threats to “wipe out” Iran’s civilization, his AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ, and a Wall Street Journal report indicating that the president’s own advisers had limited his role in a military operation because of his erratic behavior. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) echoed the call, stating bluntly that the president was “not well.” Raskin warned that the nation was at a dangerous precipice.
The case for invocation does not rest only on the Iran threats or the Pope feud or the messianic posting. It rests on this: a president whose primary domestic policy priority appears to be using the criminal justice system to settle personal scores with people who beat him in court is, by definition, failing to discharge the duties of the office. The constitutional duty of the president is to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. A president who instead uses the laws as a personal weapon against his enemies is not executing his office. He is hijacking it.
The practical barrier — and why it does not negate the case
The honest reckoning: the 25th Amendment requires the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet to act. JD Vance will not act. The Trump-appointed Cabinet will not act. A two-thirds vote of both chambers of Congress would be required to sustain any involuntary transfer over the president’s objection, and the Republican Congress described above will not provide it.
But the impossibility of the political path does not negate the constitutional reality. The 25th Amendment exists in the text of the Constitution to be invoked when a president cannot or will not faithfully execute the office. The framers’ design contemplated exactly this kind of failure — a president acting against the constitutional order, defended by a party that has chosen him over the country. That the mechanism cannot be moved today does not mean the conditions for its use are absent. It means the political class has failed in its constitutional duty. The record being built now — by Newsom, by James, by Comey, by Carroll, by the agents knocking on doors — will be the foundation of a different reckoning, in a different Congress, before historians who will be far less forgiving of this silence than the senators currently sitting in it.
6. The Stakes Named Plainly
The American justice system has always struggled with legitimacy. It has been used against the powerless more often than against the powerful; it has been racially compromised, economically compromised, geographically compromised. None of that is in dispute. But the basic premise on which the system has rested for two and a half centuries — that the federal prosecutor’s office is not the president’s personal litigation department — is now in active dispute. It is being disputed by the president himself, by his attorney general, by his acting attorney general, by his hand-picked U.S. attorneys, and by the silence of the Senate that should be calling them in to testify under oath.
Gavin Newsom does not project the image of a relatable, everyday citizen. He is a powerful Democratic governor with his own ethics questions, his own behested-payment disclosures, his own political ambitions. None of that is the point. The point is that an American citizen — any citizen, of any political persuasion, with or without ambition — should be able to consider running against the sitting president without federal agents knocking on the doors of his family. That is the line. It is not a partisan line. It is the line between a republic and a regime that wears the costume of one.
Editorial Conclusion
What is being built, indictment by indictment and investigation by investigation, is not a justice system. It is a punishment infrastructure. Its targets are selected by the president on social media. Its prosecutors are picked for loyalty, not competence. Its convictions are largely absent, because convictions were never the goal.
The goal is fear. The goal is silence. The goal is to make every governor, every prosecutor, every senator, every witness, every plaintiff calculate, before they act, whether their family can afford the legal bills that will follow. The goal, in short, is to make political opposition expensive enough that Americans stop attempting it.
A country that allows this is not a democracy in any sense its founders would recognize. A Congress that watches it happen is not performing the function the Constitution assigns it. And a president who governs this way is not discharging the office he swore to take care of. He is using it. There is a constitutional name for what is required. It is past time to say it out loud.
Sources & References
- CNN — Newsom says Trump Justice Department is investigating him and his wife (June 15, 2026)
- Office of the Governor of California — Statement on Donald Trump’s Weaponized DOJ Investigation
- CalMatters — Newsom says he’s on Trump’s “hit list” as DOJ opens investigations
- CBC News — Newsom says Trump directed Justice Department to investigate him
- Newsweek — Newsom Says Trump’s DOJ Investigation Is Retaliation
- Washington Times — Newsom fumes that DOJ is investigating him and his wife
- CNN Politics — E. Jean Carroll, and the unmistakable pattern of Trump’s retribution campaign
- CBS News — Judge dismisses Comey and James cases, finds prosecutor’s appointment invalid
- NPR — Grand jury rejects new mortgage fraud indictment against Letitia James
- CBS News — Lead prosecutor leaves DOJ’s Comey “86 47” seashell case
- ABC News — John Bolton expected to plead guilty over classified information
- CNBC — Trump foe Sen. Adam Schiff eyed by DOJ in mortgage fraud probe
- ABC News — List of individuals targeted by the Trump administration
- Protect Democracy — Tracking retaliatory arrests, prosecutions, and investigations
- Common Dreams — Raskin bill would create commission to examine president’s fitness
- The Hill — Rep. Dan Goldman calls for invoking 25th Amendment on Trump
- House Democrats — Rep. Dan Goldman on the prosecution of Rep. LaMonica McIver
- NBC News — Republicans cancel votes amid fight over Trump’s “anti-weaponization” fund
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