Breaking News from Pod Save America - Trump’s DOJ Launches SHOCKING Investigation Into E. Jean Carroll

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

Trump's Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the writer who beat Trump in court twice and won more than $88 million in judgments against him. Alex Wagner is joined by Leah Litman of Strict Scrutiny to break it all down. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGEMGEMP operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. Hi, everybody. Welcome to this rapidly responsive YouTube video for Runaway Country. We're going to tackle some news today, fresh off losing millions to E.G. and Carol in court, Donald Trump has a new legal strategy, which seems to be, if you can't beat the verdict, investigate the woman who won it. Today, CNN reports that DOJ has opened a criminal investigation into, you guessed it, E. Jean Carroll. You, I'm sure, remember E. Jean Carroll as the 82-year-old writer who won nearly $90 million in damages in two separate but related civil cases against President Donald Trump.

A jury found Trump guilty as a refresher and civilly liable for sexually abusing G. E. Jean Carroll decades ago, they also found him guilty of defamation. Now, Trump is denied wrongdoing, and now he is asking the Supreme Court to weigh in on all of this and to make sense of this, I need a legal expert, I need the best in the biz. I got strict scrutiny's Leah Litman. Leah, thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me. Although, I don't really think you even need a lawyer to explain to you, like, why this is utterly fucking bonkers.

It's probably true. I probably could have gathered someone up at the, like, macha shop across the street. My dog is available, right? Okay. The E. Jean story is a never-ending saga. Yes. But there's a part of her case that Trump has seized on, as he does in so many of these vindictive prosecutions, that otherwise would not have made a difference to anybody. But it's the piece that the DOJ is hanging this on.

Can you elaborate on where the Trump DOJ and its crackerjack attorneys have found fault in E. Jean Carroll's case? So according to CNN and the reports, DOJ is apparently investigating E. Jean Carroll for allegedly, line. about whether her litigation received outside funding support. Now, as you are suggesting, this is completely tangential to the underlying verdicts, i.e. whether Donald Trump sexually assaulted her, whether he defamed her when he said he didn't do so. But this issue, whether the litigation was funded by someone, was still discussed in the judicial opinions that upheld the verdicts against Donald Trump. So, a unanimous panel of appellate judges, three judges, said, look, Carol quite plausibly said

she forgot about the limited outside funding and that it was very realistic, given that there was no evidence she ever personally interacted with anyone who was allegedly funding the litigation. So that's the aspect that they are supposedly investigating her about. But just to describe what is happening, the president apparently is ordering his Department of Justice to investigate a woman who accused him of raping her and who was, you know, convinced a jury that he sexually abused her. And Todd Blanche, his acting attorney general at DOJ, was his lawyer in the E. Jane Carroll case. It's just so... Just to be clear, Todd Blanche is recused from this, right?

Recused. I'm going to put that in quotation marks. I don't know what recusal means to these people, frankly. They seem to be rather ethically challenged. Yes, yes. Okay, just to be clear, as far as the funding goes, this has already been settled.

It's not an issue. Some of the funding in question was from Reed Hoffman. Is that right? Yes. The billionaire. I mean, why... Okay. It sounds to me,

and I'm not illegal legal, but it doesn't sound like the DOJ has a very strong case here, which begs the question, is the case itself even the point? Is this not just to terrify anybody who dare stand up, raise their hand and say, Donald Trump did something wrong and needs to be held accountable for it? They absolutely do not have a strong case. I mean, I guess the way I would put it is, look, in cases, courts and juries have to resolve competing accounts. That is, they are always going to find,

one side said something and the other side said something else, and one of these people, right, like wasn't telling the truth and wasn't credible. That does not mean the Department of Justice prosecutes every single litigant whose story was found not to be credible, much less they don't prosecute people who were found to be credible by the courts, right? Like this just doesn't happen. And so you're completely right that the point of this is obviously not to secure a a conviction. Maybe, right, they hoped to get an indictment through some ham-handed process, but it's absolutely a process of intimidation where even the threat of being investigated or even the threat of being indicted and then have to defend yourself against all of this might be enough

to terrify people and deter them from standing up to Donald Trump or speaking out against the administration. I mean, it is worth note. I mean, this is, but, okay, so any normal group of people would say this is a fucking joke. But we are talking about the Supreme Court here. Now, give me a little assessment. I mean, they, correct me if I'm wrong, each and Carroll's other lawsuits against Donald Trump are still not settled. He's appealed the sexual abuse case. He has promised to do the same with defamation case. But CNN's reporting that the Supreme Court has deferred whether to take up the case 12 times so far. And the latest was this Wednesday. So, I mean, what do you think actually practically happens here with the Roberts Court?

Yeah, so you're right. The case is technically, you know, on potential review in the Supreme Court. I think part of the delay might be because it's also been reported that the Department of Justice was weighing whether it would substitute the United States as a defendant in the case for Donald Trump on the theory that Donald Trump was acting in his official capacity when he defamed. E. Jean Carroll, right, that this was somehow part of his official responsibilities as president. And so it's possible... Oh, oh, yeah. Right. It's possible that this, you know, twist in the case might be causing some delay. It's also possible. One of these loons is writing something. I mean, we don't know. I wouldn't put anything past them. But, you know, if there is any case, anything that underscores, I mean, how, in my view, like, the Trump administration is basically like the politics of, like, rape culture embodied, right? It is this case and everything the Department of Justice is doing. If this is... I mean, just to get back to the utter insanity of the Roberts Court for a second. So if the defamation of E. Jean Carroll is contextualized as an official president as part of Donald Trump's official presidential... it's an official presidential act, then it's protected by the immunity decision.

Is that right? It is potentially. So if it is an exclusive presidential function, then it is definitely protected. If it is, however, not exclusive to the president, but still within the president's official duties, then it's presumptively immune. Right? You're absolutely right. And it's even before you get to the constitutional immunity, if the department substitutes itself for Donald Trump, it's also possible they would be able to obtain a dismissal of the case because the federal law that they would be relying on basically limits plaintiff's

ability to sue the United States to recover for intentional torts, of which defamation is one. So it's possible, you know, he could leverage the immunity opinion or leverage his Department of Justice to try to evade this verdict, which is just appalling. Yeah. Can I just say Kilmar Abrigo Garcia had a success. civil lawsuit, securing his return from El Salvador, where he was, of course, sent it legally. And the DOJ came back with new criminal charges. This week, a Tennessee judge dismissed Trump's lawsuit on actually, on vindictive grounds of vindictive and selective prosecution. Can you talk about whether, I mean, if E. Jean Carroll is charged, could she bring a similar motion?

she would have a whopping motion for vindictive prosecution. I mean, basically before the second Trump administration, vindictive prosecution motions never succeeded because it was never possible to establish that the federal government was indeed going after someone, not because they committed a crime, but because DOJ just didn't like them. And it turns out you can establish that

if DOJ indicts you for something that isn't a crime and the president and his attorney general have been out to get you for several years. And E. Jean Carroll can absolutely establish both of those things, right? The idea that she committed a crime here is insane, particularly given the judicial findings about her knowledge, right, in representations, about the outside funding, in addition to the fact that Donald Trump has been after her for several years.

And you add to that that you have this other judicial opinion in the Kalmarra-Breggo-Garcia case. that found this DOJ does engage in vindictive prosecutions. So there are lots of aspects of this E. Jean Carroll case that stink to high Kevin and absolutely suggest this is a vindictive investigation and if it becomes one, a vindictive prosecution as well. You know, this all dovetails with reporting we had, I think it was this week, because every week in the Trump administration is 16 weeks long.

But I believe it was this week that the New York Times was reporting about the fact that the DOJ has become such a joke and is bringing it. these paper-thin cases, that it's really having an effect with both grand juries and judges who were saying, like, we used to give the federal government the benefit of the doubt, but now they're bringing in such trash cases to us that, like, you know, the grand juries which famously indict ham sandwiches are like, this ham sandwich did nothing wrong. It is shocking, and I'm glad, like, that should be the response of grand juries and judges to what the Department of Justice is doing. What a joke we are. I mean, I will.

say this is all happening as the president's trying to strong-arm Republicans in Congress to move his slush fund forward as he's trying to strong-arm Republicans to give him a billion dollars for a vanity project as the reflecting pool, the FACTA project of repainting the reflecting pool gets worse and worse and worse. And there's a giant octagon being erected on the stuff. The White House. Just the corruption and the unlawful behavior and the just eye-werectagon. wateringly self-aggrandizing behavior of this administration is it's all really bad press at a time when he's mismanaging perhaps the two most important things in his portfolio, the Iran War and the cost of living in the United States. This is a former Trump communications advisor,

Alyssa Griffin on CNN, talking about the inopportune moment Trump has chosen to launch this suit against E. Jean Carroll. What do they get out of putting this out there? months before midterm. Absolutely nothing. It's not a headline that they want. And we've seen a number of these cases go forward, James Comey and others, where they overreach. This should be the last thing Donald Trump wants to talk about

in the twilight of his presidency. I agree. I mean, we say that a lot about the twilight of his presidency. Like, why would he want to do this? But this is just, do you see any sort of political strategy behind this? Because it is not a, it's not about the law. It's really about politics and vindication. So no and yes.

On one hand, you would think reminding the country that you were found guilty by a civil jury of sexually abusing a woman might not be like the best political strategy. You know, on the other hand, there is this unfortunate reality that American politics has a real problem with misogyny. And so, you know, inviting men to think like, yeah, I've destroyed your savings account and the economy sucks. but I am basically giving you a permission structure to abuse women is a brand of politics. And I think, frankly, it's a brand of politics that Donald Trump and a lot of the Republican Party has leaned into. So, you know, is there a strategy here? Who is to say, right, I don't know if these people are capable of thinking about strategy. But if there is one, it's very dark and really horrifying.

Because they've exhausted the well of vilifying brown people. well, they've never exhausted that well, but they're like, let's tap a different vein. Exactly. The racism and the xenophobia. Here's some different. Haven't been really turning the tide. Let's go back to misogyny. That old chestnut.

Leah Littman, you brilliant woman, thank you for offering brilliant analysis on an utterly stupid thing that we have to talk about because this is the Trump presidency. If you are not subscribed to strict scrutiny or runaway country, now is the time to do so because you can get more of this kind of content. And we thank you for your time, Leah, and we thank you for your time. All you beautiful subscribers. Thanks.

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