In 1940, then U.S. Attorney General Robert Jackson gathered the nation's federal prosecutors in the Justice Department's Great Hall to remind them of the solemn role their morality and disregard of politics in decision-making played in protecting American democracy. The responsible, apolitical exercise of prosecutorial power, he emphasized, is crucial to maintaining a fair, just society.

A prosecutor, he said, "can have citizens investigated and, if he is that kind of person, he can have this done to the tune of public statements and veiled or unveiled intimations ... The prosecutor can order arrests, present cases to the grand jury in secret session, and on the basis of his one-sided presentation of the facts, can cause the citizen to be indicted and held for trial. ... While the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst."

What makes the indictments of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James gross is not merely that they are so substantively thin, but that they are so obviously the product of precisely the malice and the base motives that Jackson was talking about. And they are the malice and base motives of the president of the United States, who ordered the indictments up because he wants to retaliate against adversaries.

These indictments may be shocking indicia of a leader who conducts himself as a tin-pot tyrant, but by this point they are unsurprising. Trump was explicit throughout 2024 that if elected he would seek "retribution" against his political opponents, while simultaneously pledging to "end" political "weaponization." You might think that the irony of decrying the weaponization of the federal government while pledging to use the federal government to exact revenge on his opponents might animate some interest throughout America, but evidently not in enough places.

Contrary to the president's resolutely fact-challenged hooey, there's literally zero evidence that former President Joe Biden had anything to do with Trump's criminal indictments. Not the felony indictment and convictions obtained against him by the Manhattan District Attorney. Not the charges by a Georgia grand jury based in part on Trump's recorded demand that the Georgia Secretary of State "find" enough phony votes to swing the state's electoral votes to him. And not the two sets of federal indictments against him for pilfering classified documents and then refusing to return them and for defrauding the United States. There's no evidence that Biden ever communicated with anyone about these charges, let alone recommended them, let alone ordered them up.

Compare this with Trump's express directive to Attorney General Pam Bondi that she immediately indict the former FBI director who had refused his demand that an investigation into Russia's election interference on Trump's behalf be tanked, against the House Manager of his first impeachment by Congress and against the New York State Attorney General who successfully sued Trump and his family for fraud. "What about Comey, Adam 'Shifty' Schiff, Leticia???" Trump demanded of Bondi on Sept. 20. "They're all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done."

The chief federal prosecutor in the judicial district where the Justice Department was investigating Comey had concluded that there was no case against Comey and refused to bring it. Trump fired him and installed his personal lawyer, who had no criminal law background. The line prosecutors told her that there was no case. She dutifully brought the indictment anyway. No prosecutor in the office would even sign the indictment, let alone work on it, so she had to find lawyers in South Carolina to work on the case. "She had to go a couple hundred miles just to find attorneys within the Department of Justice who could choke down the humiliation of trying to represent the United States in this farcical prosecution," observed Ty Cobb, Trump's own former White House lawyer.

Letitia James' indictment, brought by the same Trump acolyte, just as tainted by retaliatory motive, appears just as weak. Trump's former National Security Adviser John Bolton, a fierce critic of his former boss, is evidently the next opponent to buy himself a criminal charge.

This conduct is the stuff of Stalin, of the Iranian mullahs, of Mussolini and, yes, of Hitler in the early to mid 1930s. This isn't Trump Derangement Syndrome. It is DEFCON 1 for our democracy.

Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.

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