Gov. Gavin Newsom and Jennifer Siebel Newsom
Multiple news outlets reported last week that federal agents have been questioning friends, former employees, and associates of Governor Gavin Newsom of California and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom. A person familiar with the matter, speaking anonymously, confirmed to The Times that multiple investigations are underway, including at least one focused on Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s finances.
In contrast to others of the administration’s political prosecutions, Jennifer Siebel Newsom presents a fairly checkered financial background. She has been the subject of allegations and at least one prior federal inquiry into potential self-dealing, improper financial arrangements between her nonprofit organizations and private entities, and possible conflicts of interest involving donors with business before the state.
Moreover, Governor Newsom’s former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, just pleaded guilty to three felonies, including lying to the FBI about confidential state litigation she leaked to a former business partner, an investigation that was initiated during the Biden administration.
So Todd Blanche and the Department of Justice, who have been pilloried in the courts and public opinion for their rank reprisal prosecutions against blameless targets such as James Comey, may be making a sort of calculated wager. Yes, the multiple investigations certainly seem of a piece with the indefensible investigations and indictments of other Trump enemies. But if they can prospect wide and deep enough, they may come up with a charge against Jennifer Siebel Newsom that they can make stick. And at that point, the calculation goes, their improprieties are redeemed. It’s all in the service of a valid prosecution. The fishing expedition has landed something in its net.
That reasoning is precisely, fundamentally wrong. And the reason it is wrong was spelled out with devastating clarity eighty-six years ago, in words that ever since have carried canonical status in the Department of Justice.
On April 1, 1940, Robert H. Jackson, then Attorney General of the United States and later Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and America’s chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, stood in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice and addressed the country’s assembled U.S. Attorneys. The speech, “The Federal Prosecutor,” came immediately to serve as a sort of Bible for federal prosecutors.
For more than eighty years, it has been taught to new prosecutors, quoted by senior ones (as well as countless courts discussing prosecutorial practices), and invoked in training sessions and ethics discussions across generations as the definitive statement of the value and danger of federal prosecutorial power.
Jackson began by declaring that the prosecutor “has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America.” Notice the important substitution for Jefferson’s “the pursuit of happiness.” Jackson was keenly aware the mere investigation of a citizen can be ruinous. This prospect is a chief reason why prosecutors are not supposed to reveal anything about pending investigations, one of several cardinal principles that Blanche’s DOJ has simply ignored.
Jackson went on to explain an alternative way an unscrupulous prosecutor can exact reputational harm: “the prosecutor may choose a more subtle course and simply have a citizen’s friends interviewed.” No doubt the Newsoms understand too well how that works.Jackson then identified what he called “the most dangerous power” a prosecutor possesses: “that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.” It is in this realm, Jackson wrote, where the prosecutor “picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass” and then hunts for a charge to fit—that the abuse of prosecutorial power is most dangerous and consummate.
Critically, a prosecutor who has taken that step—chosen the person whom they dislike or desire to embarrass and then hunts for the crime to pin on them—has already committed the cardinal sin.
Jackson makes this point with pellucid clarity. “With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes,” Jackson wrote, “a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone.”
The grave danger is not the prosecutor who can’t find a crime. It is the one who picks his target first and then goes looking: not discovering a crime and finding its perpetrator, but “picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.”
That, Jackson concludes, is when “the abuse of prosecutorial power is most dangerous and most complete.”
In truth, Jackson’s stern assessment was designed for a Department of Justice that would never even have considered bringing bogus, meritless charges to harass a president’s political enemies. That abominable practice—now a staple of Trump’s DOJ—was so far beyond the pale that it didn’t even figure in Jackson’s calculation. Jackson was speaking to prosecutors who still operated within the basic constraints of institutional good faith. That this Justice Department has shown us an even more dangerous and complete abuse of prosecutorial power doesn’t diminish the force of Jackson’s words.
Jackson’s classic admonition maps directly onto the multiple investigations of the Newsoms. Gavin Newsom is clearly a person whom Trump (and therefore Blanche) “dislikes or desires to embarrass.” In fact, Trump already called for Newsom’s arrest last year. It’s Gavin Newsom’s potential presidential candidacy, not Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s financial peccadillos, that lies at the core of the investigations.
The fresh wave of inquiries to Newsom’s friends and former employees hit around the time Trump announced his intent to nominate Blanche for Attorney General. There is no indication of any new factual development or new witness that landed Jennifer Siebel Newsom in the feds’ crosshairs.Gov. Newsom is not simply presidential timber but one of Trump’s and Blanche’s most prominent antagonists. He has called Blanche “the guy covering up the Epstein Files,” and accused Trump of selling the presidency for golf course approvals and cryptocurrency deals and a private jet. In Jackson’s taxonomy, he has made himself “personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.”
It was Gavin Newsom who revealed the multiple investigations and fanning out of law enforcement to their friends and employees. In his video, Newsom accused Trump of using the Justice Department to punish a political enemy, described the investigation as a fishing expedition sifting through “years and years of random documents,” and was direct about the motive: “Donald Trump isn’t just coming after me because of my mean tweets. He’s coming after me because I am considering running for president.”
This strategy, also adopted by James Comey in the wake of the second set of charges against him, is the complete opposite of conventional wisdom. Except that wisdom was developed in the context of a Department that follows the rules and respects the Constitution.
In an honest Justice Department, targets of federal investigations keep their heads down, say nothing, and pray that no charges are filed and no one outside a tight circle ever finds out. That is the standard playbook, and it exists for good reason: federal investigations are strictly confidential, charges are not proof, and public exposure of a federal inquiry is itself a form of punishment. DOJ policy has long prohibited the Department from confirming or denying the existence of investigations precisely for this reason.
But the Newsoms had a second, equally compelling reason to get out in front: they cannot trust this Justice Department to stay quiet. This DOJ has a well-documented track record of improperly making investigative activity public for political effect. The Department has repeatedly publicized or permitted disclosure of investigations long before charges were filed—from the criminal investigation of Fed Chair Jerome Powell, to the renewed Russia-investigation inquiries, to public disclosures concerning Comey and Letitia James.
Newsom opted to wear the target as a badge of honor and to frame the investigation as evidence of his political prominence and the president’s fear. Newsom said he was proud to join the “hit list” of people standing up to Trump. He excoriated Trump personally: “You can subpoena my records. You can investigate me. You can harass me. Put my name on every and any enemies list you have, but leave my wife and family out of your personal vendetta.”
In the normal order of things, being investigated by the Justice Department is a mark of potential criminality. In this one, it is a mark of how much Donald Trump loathes and fears you: practically a credential for the 2028 primary. Newsom understands this, and he is playing it accordingly.
The Justice Department has already committed the abuse that Robert Jackson identified as the gravest danger and abuse of prosecutorial power. They have “picked the people” they think they should get, “rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.”
Jackson closed his address by sketching the ideal he urged every federal prosecutor to embody: someone who “seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes, and who approaches his task with humility.”
It’s as fundamental a statement of DOJ’s defining mission as we have, and generations of prosecutors took it as sacrosanct. Todd Blanche has trashed it, stomped on it, and then shredded it for good measure; and he has done so proudly, invoking the superior and ultimate authority of the president for whom he has publicly proclaimed his love.
The Newsoms are the latest victims of a Department of Justice that Jackson could not have begun to recognize. And the transgression is complete already, without regard to whether a phalanx of federal investigators and prosecutors is able to dredge up some tenable federal charge.
Harry Litman is a former United States Attorney and the executive producer and host of the Talking Feds podcast. He has taught law at UCLA, Berkeley, and Georgetown and served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Clinton Administration. Please consider subscribing to Talking Feds on Substack.
Reprinted with permission from Talking Feds.
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