In January 2025, as Donald Trump prepared to retake office, the federal prosecutors handling the January 6 trials carried on with the grinding work of justice. Knowing the new president would likely undo some or all of their convictions through pardons, they were trying as much as anything else to create a court record for posterity. The record reflects that a defendant named Jared Wise was one of the last J6ers to go on trial. Wise was alleged to have followed the mob into the Capitol and was caught on body-cam footage shouting encouragement to rioters as they assaulted the police. The government made the case that these crimes were particularly egregious because Wise was a former FBI agent: He knew the law and had betrayed an oath to uphold it. “The evidence over the course of the trial,” prosecutor Taylor Fontan said in her closing argument to the jury, “showed that it was Jared Wise that was attacking our country, our Constitution, the country that he swore to protect.”

The case rested on the evening of January 17, a Friday, and the jury was set to begin deliberations after a three-day weekend. But that Monday, January 20, Trump took the oath of office in the rotunda of the building Wise had stormed and went to work on turning the Department of Justice inside out. By Tuesday morning, when Wise returned to the federal district courthouse in Washington, D.C., an incoming Trump official, Ed Martin Jr., had ordered the prosecution to move to dismiss all the charges. “I hope that is it,” the judge said as he gaveled the hearing to a close. Wise put a MAGA hat on his bald head and approached Fontan. “Have a nice life,” he said, and then he walked out of the courthouse, free. Ten days later, Fontan was fired. “The sequence of events,” Wise soon wrote on X, “could not have been more miraculous.”

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Most defendants stay quiet as they prepare for trial, but Wise had been displaying an unrepentant attitude since the previous November, starting with a celebratory post on X the day Trump won the election. His account, @TheWiseJared, decried the “tyrants in the Biden Administration,” “partisan DOJ prosecutors,” and his former colleagues in the Bureau, which he described as rotten from top to bottom. (“The ‘rank and file’ are just as complicit,” he wrote.) By drawing attention to his case, Wise seemed to be seeking more than clout — he was raising his hand for future service.

“As the only #J6 defendant who also happens to be a former FBI agent, I would love to somehow be part of this effort to expose misbehavior, corruption and political bias inside the FBI,” Wise posted the day after his case was dropped. “These people have been abusive to the American citizenry for too long, and it’s time.” When another user reposted him and tagged Elon Musk and Kash Patel, Trump’s designated FBI director, Wise responded, “I’m ready!!”

In Trump’s first term, there had been a constant struggle within the Justice Department over the proper limits of the president’s authority and the rule of law. It came to a head a couple of days before January 6, when almost the entire DoJ leadership threatened to resign en masse over Trump’s attempts to overturn the election. With his comeback, the argument was resolved. In the new Justice Department, there was no dispute that Trump was boss; the only question would be who got the credit for satisfying him. His first day, Trump signed an executive order that told the Justice Department and intelligence agencies to reverse “an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power.” In addition to absolving the perpetrators of crimes committed on his behalf, he moved to investigate the investigators of those crimes, directing the snake to eat its own tail.

The term weaponization was one of Trump’s rhetorical tricks, a fancy way of saying “I know you are, but what am I?” So what if prosecutors had indicted him on four occasions and convicted him of 34 state felony counts? That just meant the government was criminal. During his campaign, Trump had promised retribution. They had tried to get him, so he would get them back. Within MAGA circles, people talked of a “Grand Conspiracy,” a yearslong “deep state” plot to take down Trump that encompassed multiple FBI directors, spy chiefs, special counsels, and all the other hoaxers, probers, and impeachers who had tried to hold Trump accountable. These so-called weaponizers could now be forced to face consequences.

Much to his frustration, even as president, Trump couldn’t just wish it to be. He needed detectives to dig up evidence, however flimsy, and lawyers to draft warrants and indictments, however crackpot, and a new group of yes-men and yes-women.

Trump restaffed the upper echelons of the Justice Department with veterans of his legal-defense team. At the top was Attorney General Pam Bondi, who had represented him in impeachment No. 1. She was never a strong presence inside Main Justice, the department’s Washington headquarters — even before Trump fired her after months of mounting discontent. The person who has been effectively running the department all along is Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who had learned how to respond to Trump’s moods during the many weeks he was his lead attorney in his Manhattan trial. (He has now been given the top job on at least an interim basis.) As deputy AG, Blanche oversaw Patel, the former podcaster and grand-jury witness in Trump’s federal criminal case in Florida, who was installed across the street at the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

He also oversaw Emil Bove, the most combative cross-examiner for the defense team at the Manhattan trial, who acted as his hammer inside Main Justice for the tumultuous first few months, helping to conduct a massive purge of career civil servants at the DoJ and FBI. Over the past year, the Trump team has started to refill the law-enforcement bureaucracy with opportunists and true-believing recruits — the many foot soldiers whose names are unknown to the public. Some of these people have deep personal vendettas of their own. Last spring, @TheWiseJared went quiet, then private. The man behind the account had been hired for a job at Main Justice, working as a senior adviser in Blanche’s office. Wise was assigned to a newly constituted entity called the Weaponization Working Group.

Bondi created the working group in a departmental memo, giving it a list of targets with three of Trump’s prior legal pursuers at the top: Jack Smith, the special counsel who twice indicted him; Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who convicted him; and New York attorney general Letitia James, who had brought a civil fraud case against him and his family. The group operated from Blanche’s office space on the fourth floor of Main Justice, but its amorphous membership brought together officials from other parts of the department who were interested in more general varieties of persecution, such as the alleged weaponization of the FBI against religious conservatives and school-board protesters. Wise was looking into the prosecutions of J6ers like himself. The group’s final objectives were left vague. Trump’s executive order had called for “appropriate action to correct past misconduct,” but the department would determine whether that action would take the form of more firings or something more serious. Everyone knew what the president really wanted: arrests.

The day-to-day management of the working group was handed over to Martin, a conservative lawyer and champion of the J6 defendants. He needed a place to land after a stint as acting U.S. Attorney in D.C. (His bludgeoning behavior — he invoked his prosecutorial authority to threaten universities, medical journals, and Senator Chuck Schumer — made it impossible for him to stay permanently in that Senate-confirmed post.) Martin initially described himself to the press as the “captain” of the group and suggested that exposing weaponization might be an end in itself. “If they can’t be charged, we will name them,” he said, “and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed.” But shame was not all Martin had in mind.

Neil W. McCabe, a national reporter for the Real America’s Voice television news channel who worked as an aide to Martin at the Justice Department until last December, says Martin told higher-ups he needed an investigative staff to pursue prosecutions. His attempts to muscle up the working group met immediate resistance from Blanche’s staff members, including Bove, who supervised the group’s activities until he left the department to take a seat as a judge on the federal bench. They made little secret of their contempt for Martin, a serial failed candidate for office whose most important previous job in government, as chief of staff to the governor of his home state of Missouri, ended in a scandal related to accusations of workplace retaliation. “They didn’t respect Ed as an attorney,” says McCabe. “It wasn’t informed by anything other than their innate obnoxiousness.” Martin studied at a Jesuit university in Rome and had prepared for his weaponization role by reading books in Italian on the methods used to take on the Mafia. He talked with Trump frequently on the phone and understood his orders. “People on Blanche’s staff, and maybe Blanche himself, didn’t understand that this is a guy who is catching arrows for Trump,” McCabe says.

Someone who both served as a federal prosecutor in Trump’s first term and has been identified as a potential target of retribution in the second tells me he divided the current leadership into “competent and incompetent villains.” Whereas in the first go-round, Main Justice was populated by plenty of starchy Federalist Society members who saw Trump as a crude means to advance an ideological project, in Trump II, the conservative bar was no longer sending its best. Besides Martin, the weaponization meetings at times included a former West Virginia secretary of state who claimed the CIA had stolen the 2020 election; a former J6 defense attorney who had described federal prosecutors as “evil people” who would “put you on a cattle car to Auschwitz”; and a former Oregon judge who refused to marry gay couples before being suspended from the bench for alleged incidents of misconduct, such as invoking his legal authority during an argument with a referee officiating his son’s soccer game.

Martin set himself up in an office that he named the “Freedom Suite.” Blanche worked down the hall in a room decorated with World War II propaganda posters warning that loose lips sink ships. In an adjacent ceremonial conference room, he hung giant gilt-framed photographs of himself in the Oval Office and portraits of a pair of attorneys general from Lyndon Johnson’s administration. The décor seemed designed to display both his proximity to the president and his conversion narrative: Famously, Blanche had been a registered Democrat before he took Trump as a client and saw the evil of weaponization. To some, this sowed doubt about the depth of his belief. At a going-away party last year, a former top aide to Bondi gave a speech in which he joked he had always heard Republicans and Democrats couldn’t get along but that wasn’t true because he had worked with Blanche. The deputy AG flipped him the bird.

When it came to weaponization, his allies say, Blanche was totally committed to carrying out the president’s order, but he wanted to be careful about it. “How do you hold people accountable for the terrible, awful behavior and the violation of other people’s rights to serve a political agenda without becoming the weaponizers yourself?” says a department official involved in the initiative. “This is where the source of tension comes in.” This did not mean Blanche was a squish.........

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