Trump 'targeting civilians' as his 'desperation' explodes: ex-DOJ lawyer

U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during a press conference at a NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands June 25, 2025. REUTERS/Yves Herman/File Photo

On Friday, a former lawyer with the Department of Justice warned that President Donald Trump is propping up “flimsy,” “politically motivated prosecutions” to bolster his claims of election fraud. This is according to former DOJ pardon attorney Liz Oyer, who writes in the New York Times that Trump’s legal attacks on a “tired mailman” and other “civilian” targets not only make a mockery of his voter fraud claims, but prove his “weakness” is growing.

“When the deputy attorney general personally announces an indictment from Justice Department headquarters, it signals a matter of national importance,” writes Oyer. “So when Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter announced that he would hold his first news conference, observers rightly expected a major case. Instead, Mr. McCotter announced an indictment of a rogue postal worker for improperly disposing of mail.”

As Oyer explains, the case involved a Utah mail carrier who was covering a colleague’s route and said he began feeling “overwhelmed,” and sought to “lighten his workload” by discarding a batch of undelivered mail in a church dumpster. He told federal law enforcement that this was a “poor decision” made out of “frustration” and “laziness.” While he claimed he thought the mail was junk ads, prosecutors say it included 300 primary mail-in ballots. As a result, he was charged with a single felony for the destruction of mail. But while his intention clearly had nothing to do with election interference, “that did not stop the Justice Department from offering him up to the public as an election saboteur,” writes Oyer. The deputy attorney general called him — a 34-year-old with no prior criminal history — “a danger to the public and to the integrity of the electoral system.”

Attorney General Todd Blanche and McCotter went all over Fox touting the prosecution of the “tired mailman”, but according to Oyer, “Their chest-thumping highlights how desperate Justice Department leaders are to substantiate the president’s claims of election interference, and how miserably they are failing. At the news conference, Mr. McCotter admonished reporters: ‘Remember, folks. Voting fraud is real.’ In other words: We may not have much proof, but trust us.”

While polls show that few have been convinced by the claims of election fraud Trump has been pushing for over half a decade, “what’s different and scarier now,” writes Oyer, “is that the Justice Department’s leadership is working together to validate the president’s election lies from the top down. Turning fiction into fact is now part of the job description. A refusal to concede that Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election has become a litmus test for all his political appointees. Initially, Mr. Trump’s justice system targeted specific individuals who had angered him — such as Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) or the former F.B.I. director, James Comey. Now, it has adopted a dragnet approach, trawling to find perpetrators on whom to pin conspiracies cooked up by the president. Ordinary citizens are being ensnared.” Oyer points to examples like David Hearn, who merely put his hand in the water of the Reflecting Pool while taking a bike ride, only to find himself arrested and tried for a felony in an incident that blew up humiliatingly in the faces of Trump and his allies.

Cases like this prove that Trump has moved on from targeting high-profile figures like Comey and Kelly. “They were people the president viewed as enemies,” writes Oyer. “Now, he’s getting desperate and targeting civilians.” As she concludes, “So far, the courts have consistently rejected Mr. Trump’s politically motivated prosecutions. Most Americans can see these cases for what they are: flimsy and pathetic — a sign of Mr. Trump’s weakness.”

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