The Justice Department has trained its prosecutorial machinery on an 82-year-old woman who twice beat Donald Trump in court. Strip away the legal jargon and what remains is a vendetta — and a profound failure of leadership that the framers anticipated when they wrote the 25th Amendment.
E. Jean Carroll is 82 years old. She is a former magazine columnist who, after decades of silence, accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. She sued him. She testified. Two separate juries believed her. In 2023, the first jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation and awarded her $5 million. In 2024, a second jury awarded her another $83.3 million. Both verdicts were upheld on appeal. The legal questions, in the eyes of the American judicial system, are settled.
On May 27, 2026, CNN broke the news that the Justice Department of the United States — the same federal government Donald Trump now controls as President — had launched a criminal investigation into Carroll. The reported theory: that in a 2022 deposition, Carroll perjured herself when she said no outside party was paying her legal fees, though it later emerged that a nonprofit connected to billionaire Reid Hoffman had covered some of her expenses. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois — led by Trump appointee Andrew Boutros — was reportedly running the probe.
Within 24 hours, that same office issued a statement claiming it had “not opened — and has never opened — a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll. Any claim to the contrary is categorically false.” The denial was technically correct and substantively misleading. Subsequent reporting from CBS News and NBC News confirmed that the same office is investigating American Future Republic, the Hoffman-affiliated nonprofit that helped fund Carroll’s case, on possible charges of money laundering, conspiracy, and obstruction — and that Carroll’s testimony about that funding remains squarely under examination. The distinction between “investigating Carroll” and “investigating the people who paid Carroll’s lawyers about what Carroll said about them paying her lawyers” is the kind of distinction that exists in press statements, not in reality.
1. The Pretext, and Why It Is Thin
The legal foundation of this investigation has already been examined and rejected by a federal appeals court. When Trump’s lawyers tried to invoke the Hoffman funding to overturn Carroll’s verdicts on appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found, in the appellate court’s own words, that Carroll had “plausibly represented” she had forgotten about the limited outside funding — and that there was “no evidence to suggest that Ms. Carroll was personally involved in securing funding, interacted with the funder, received an invoice showing the arrangement before or after her counsel received the outside funding, or had discussed the arrangement with anyone between learning of it in September 2020 and being deposed in October 2022.”
In other words: a federal appeals court has already looked at this evidence and concluded that there is no there there. That ruling has not stopped the Justice Department from looking again. Deborah Tuerkheimer, a Northwestern University law professor and former prosecutor, told Democracy Now exactly what the rest of us are thinking out loud:
“The use of the Justice Department to go after E. Jean Carroll in this way is completely unprecedented. It is an obvious indication that Donald Trump continues to go after E. Jean Carroll in this vendetta. And in this case, he’s using the taxpayer-funded Justice Department to do that. These cases are brought in our name, in the name of the people of the United States. And it’s frankly galling.”
— Prof. Deborah Tuerkheimer, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder whose donations triggered the probe, did not mince words either. In a statement on X, he wrote that the President “is investigating me because I supported E Jean’s lawsuit — where a jury found Trump liable for sexually assaulting her, and a court of appeals upheld the decision.” He described the goal as plainly as anyone has: to silence those who stand up to the President.
2. The Pattern Is the Point
If this were an isolated event, one could plausibly imagine it as the product of an overzealous U.S. attorney’s office. It is not isolated. The Carroll-Hoffman investigation is the latest entry in a sustained, documented pattern of federal prosecutorial power being aimed at people who have crossed Donald Trump personally. The targets are not random. They are, with eerie precision, the people who beat him, prosecuted him, investigated him, or testified against him.
This is what a vendetta looks like at federal scale. The unifying thread is not legal — there is no body of evidence linking these cases beyond the man at the top. The thread is biographical. Each of these people did something specific to Donald Trump. Each is now answering for it under the law as the President has chosen to deploy it.
3. A Timeline of Targeted Justice
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4. What This Says About Priorities
Set aside, for a moment, the question of whether E. Jean Carroll committed perjury in a deposition four years ago. Even granting the most generous possible reading of the Justice Department’s interest, ask the harder question: of every conceivable use of federal prosecutorial resources in June 2026 — every drug trafficking case, every public-corruption probe, every counterterrorism investigation, every Medicare fraud scheme bleeding billions from the Treasury — is investigating an 82-year-old woman who already won her case really where this country’s law enforcement priorities should be?
The same Northern District of Illinois U.S. Attorney’s Office now running the Carroll-Hoffman probe just suffered a federal judge’s public rebuke for “incredibly shocking” prosecutorial misconduct in the case of the so-called Broadview Six — ICE-facility protesters whose charges were dismissed in May after DOJ officials apologized in court. The pattern is not subtle: the office is being used to pursue Trump’s perceived enemies, and is doing such a poor job that judges keep throwing the cases out.
Meanwhile, more than 100 career prosecutors and lawyers have resigned from the Justice Department since Trump returned to office — an exodus the International Bar Association calls “far exceeding normal turnover.” Career officials with decades of nonpartisan service have left rather than carry out what they understand to be politicized prosecutions. The institution that is supposed to be the firewall between political power and the criminal law is being hollowed out.
A president focused on the country would be confronting inflation, housing costs, the opioid crisis, climate disasters, and the genuine national-security challenges of a multipolar world. This president is focused, instead, on settling personal scores from civil litigation he lost. The contrast is not a matter of partisan interpretation. It is observable in the public record, week by week, indictment by indictment.
“Public trust in Donald Trump’s ability to meet the duties of his office has dropped to unprecedented lows. We are at a dangerous precipice, and it is now a matter of national security for Congress to fulfill its responsibilities under the 25th Amendment to protect the American people from an increasingly volatile and unstable situation.”
— Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Ranking Member, House Judiciary Committee
The 25th Amendment Was Written for a Moment Like This
What it is. Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967 in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, gives the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet — or, alternatively, “such other body as Congress may by law provide” — the authority to declare a sitting president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Upon such a declaration, the Vice President immediately assumes presidential authority. The president can contest the determination; if he does, Congress votes, and a two-thirds supermajority in both chambers is required to make the removal permanent.
Who has called for its invocation. The list is long and growing. Rep. Jamie Raskin introduced legislation on April 14, 2026 — with 50 House Democratic co-sponsors — to create the standing commission Section 4 explicitly contemplates. Sen. Chris Murphy publicly suggested cabinet members should “spend Easter calling constitutional lawyers about the 25th Amendment.” Sen. Bernie Sanders described the President’s recent rhetoric as “the ravings of a dangerous and mentally unbalanced individual.” Rep. Maxine Dexter, Rep. Yassamin Ansari, Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove, and Sen. Ed Markey have all publicly demanded invocation.
The constitutional case. The 25th Amendment does not require a stroke or a diagnosed illness. It speaks of inability “to discharge the powers and duties” of the office. A president who directs federal prosecutorial resources toward people who have personally aggrieved him — and away from the executive duties he swore an oath to discharge — is not exercising the office. He is, quite literally, using the office for something else. The Carroll investigation is not a policy disagreement. It is a category error: the executive branch deployed as a personal weapon against a civil-court adversary. That is precisely the kind of confusion of person and office that constitutional capacity requires the holder to be able to maintain.
The Practical Barriers
Let us be honest about what stands in the way. Vice President JD Vance has shown no willingness to break with the President. A Republican-controlled Cabinet appointed for personal loyalty is structurally unlikely to act. Raskin’s commission bill faces near-certain failure in the Republican-held House and Senate, and even if passed, would be vetoed. The political pathway is, in the short term, blocked.
But the barriers do not negate the case. The framers of the 25th Amendment did not write it to be invoked easily. They wrote it to exist — to be a present constitutional remedy against the precise scenario in which a president becomes unfit to distinguish his person from his office. The political barrier to invocation is not evidence that the moral and constitutional case is unsound. It is evidence that the Republican Party has chosen, knowingly, to abandon its role in the constitutional architecture. The duty to name what is happening — and to name what the Constitution provides as a remedy — does not require the remedy to be achievable today. It requires the citizenry to understand what it would mean if it were.
5. What Is Actually at Stake
Ms. Magazine’s Jennifer Weiss-Wolf put it as plainly as anyone: the Carroll investigation sends a signal far beyond Carroll. “Go public, risk retaliation,” she wrote. Every woman who has ever considered coming forward against a powerful man — every whistleblower, every journalist, every witness — is being told what happens to those who win in court against the wrong defendant. The message is unmistakable, and it is meant to be.
This is not, in the end, a story about one 82-year-old woman in upstate New York with a pit bull and a $88 million judgment she has yet to collect. It is a story about whether the United States is still a country where the law applies to the powerful and protects the vulnerable, or whether it has become a country where federal law enforcement is a tool the powerful use to punish the people who held them accountable. The civil courts found Donald Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. The appellate courts upheld those findings. The system worked. The President’s response has been to weaponize a different part of the system against the woman who made it work.
A leader fit for the office would understand the difference between losing a lawsuit and being persecuted. A leader fit for the office would respect the judgment of a jury and the affirmation of an appellate court. A leader fit for the office would not direct, suggest, or tolerate the use of federal prosecutors against a private citizen who beat him at trial. The President of the United States has done none of these things. He has done the opposite of all of them. The Constitution names this kind of unfitness, and it provides a remedy. That the remedy is politically difficult does not mean it is not what the moment requires.
Editorial Conclusion
The President of the United States is using the Department of Justice as a personal grievance machine, and Congress is letting him. The investigation involving E. Jean Carroll is not a legal proceeding; it is a confession — that the man in the Oval Office cannot tell the difference between his civil-court enemies and the enemies of the country he was elected to serve. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment exists for precisely this confusion. The question is no longer whether Donald Trump is fit to be president. The question is whether the institutions of American democracy still have the courage to say so.
Sources & References
- CNN — Exclusive: Justice Department launches a criminal investigation into Trump accuser E. Jean Carroll
- CBS News — Justice Department investigating whether Trump accuser E. Jean Carroll committed perjury
- NBC News — DOJ opens criminal probe involving E. Jean Carroll testimony in Trump sexual abuse lawsuit
- ABC News — DOJ launches criminal probe into E. Jean Carroll: Sources
- TIME — DOJ Launches Investigation Into Trump Accuser E. Jean Carroll
- CBS News — Justice Dept. investigating outside funding E. Jean Carroll received for civil lawsuits against Trump
- CNN — Reid Hoffman says E. Jean Carroll probe involving his nonprofit is meant to ‘silence’ Trump critics
- CNN — E. Jean Carroll, and the unmistakable pattern of Trump’s retribution campaign
- Democracy Now — Trump’s Enemies List: DOJ Launches “Egregious” Criminal Probe into E. Jean Carroll
- MS NOW (Opinion) — The DOJ investigation of Reid Hoffman’s nonprofit has an unmistakable backdrop
- Slate — Did the DOJ Just Admit to Going Too Far With Its E. Jean Carroll Investigation?
- Ms. Magazine — Of Course Trump Is Going After E. Jean Carroll
- Protect Democracy — Tracking retaliatory use of arrests, prosecutions, and investigations by the Trump administration
- International Bar Association — US presidency: weaponised DOJ investigations prompt concerns over independence
- Global News — James Comey, Letitia James indictments dismissed by U.S. judge
- The Hill — DOJ probes mortgage fraud investigation into Adam Schiff
- The Hill — Rep. Jamie Raskin introduces bill to assess president’s fitness under 25th Amendment
- Common Dreams — “We Are at a Dangerous Precipice”: Raskin Bill Would Create Commission to Examine President’s Fitness
- Slate — The DOJ Just Admitted to Weaponizing a Prosecution Against Trump’s Foes
- The Contrarian — Of Course They’re Going After E. Jean Carroll
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