On November 7, President Trump ordered the Justice Department to look into Democrats he accused of extortion. Five days later his attorney general said there were no criminal investigations into what Democratic lawmakers had said. The gap between the post and the record is the real story, and the clock on it is now short.
President Donald Trump told his supporters on Saturday, November 7, that Democrats threatening his officials and donors had committed a crime, and that he was acting on it. “By copy of this statement, I am ordering the Department of Justice to look into this criminal act, immediately!” he wrote in a Truth Social post. The same post told Republicans they “should get smart, fast!”
On Thursday, November 12, Attorney General Todd Blanche stood at a Justice Department news conference and said the opposite was happening. “There’s no ongoing investigations, criminal investigations, into words that incoming senators or congressmen have said,” he said, according to NBC News. That same morning Trump posted again, asking: “Will the Seditious Six ever be prosecuted?”
For conservatives who have waited nearly two years for the accountability Trump promised, the two posts raise a practical question. Is the order of November 7 a new beginning, or is it arriving after the window for it has largely closed?
What the post says
RSN read the post directly on Truth Social. It is dated November 7, 2026, and signed “President DONALD J. TRUMP.” Its main claims, in order:
- Democrats are “threatening a lot of people, including the Attorney General of the United States, and others, with Impeachment and many other forms of punishment, even though they admit they have no reason to do so.”
- “This is extortion at the highest level, and they should be held accountable for this.”
- Democrats are “threatening our Donors … with imprisonment, and many other levels of punishment, just because they happen to be Republicans, or Republican supporters. This is Weaponization and Lawfare at another level.”
- Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan “is saying that she is going to go after all young people that believe in Republican Values.”
- “The imprisonment should be against these EXTORTIONISTS, and Republicans should get smart, fast!”
- “By copy of this statement, I am ordering the Department of Justice to look into this criminal act, immediately!”
The post came four days after Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress in the November 3 midterms. Al Jazeera, reporting the post the same day, noted that it offered no evidence that Slotkin had threatened anyone. RSN’s earlier report on the White House counsel’s letter to Rep. Robert Garcia examined what Democratic lawmakers actually said after election night, and where Slotkin’s remark came from. This article looks at the other half: what the Justice Department has done with Trump’s demands, before and after November 7.
What most coverage misses
Most coverage has treated the post as a threat to Congress, and has asked whether the Justice Department will act on it. That framing assumes the department is an instrument that does what the president posts. The record since 2025 points the other way. On the cases Trump has named most often, the department has either been stopped by grand juries and judges, or has stalled on its own, with prosecutors leaving.
RSN analysis: that matters to both sides of the argument. Critics who warn of a weaponized department are describing intent more than results. Supporters who expected prosecutions are learning that a post is not a case. Neither side’s narrative fits the documented outcome, which is a long list of announcements and a short list of results. RSN found no conviction in any of the cases discussed below.
Background: the department’s record on Trump’s named targets
The “Seditious Six.” Six Democratic lawmakers, Sens. Mark Kelly of Arizona and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Reps. Jason Crow of Colorado, Chris Deluzio and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania and Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, recorded a 2025 video telling service members they could refuse illegal orders. On February 10, 2026, prosecutors in the office of Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, sought an indictment and a grand jury refused it, The Washington Times reported, citing NBC News, which first reported it. The Times noted that “it was not clear what charges prosecutors brought before the grand jury.” That account began as a news report rather than a court record. It has since been confirmed on the record: in a Dan Abrams interview released November 12, Blanche said “the D.C. grand juries have have not returned indictments” on the matter, HuffPost reported (the doubled word is in HuffPost’s transcription).
James Comey and Letitia James. The former FBI director and the New York attorney general were indicted in September and October 2025, Democracy Docket reported at the time. Both indictments were dismissed after a judge ruled that the prosecutor who brought them had been unlawfully appointed, as The Hill summarized. Comey was indicted again on April 28, 2026, in North Carolina, over a since-deleted Instagram photo of seashells spelling “86 47.” The two-page indictment charges him with threatening the president. Even some Republicans were uneasy. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina said that unless the department had more than it had shown, “We’re going to regret this because we’re setting a fairly low bar,” The Hill reported. Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas called the case “a stretch.” In September, U.S. District Judge Louise Flanagan again postponed Comey’s arraignment; his lawyers had asked to move it to January 2027 and the trial to February 2027, and dismissal motions filed in July, including claims of vindictive and selective prosecution, are pending, MS NOW reported.
The “grand conspiracy” inquiry. This is the Florida-based investigation into the origins of the 2016 Russia inquiry, which supporters expected to reach former intelligence officials. It has produced no charges. Joseph diGenova, the prosecutor leading it, resigned in September; he confirmed his departure to CBS News but did not say why, and CBS attributed the context, disputes over how the probe was being managed, to unnamed sources. Former CIA Director John Brennan was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury in Fort Pierce on October 15, according to a sworn statement by his lawyer, CBS News reported. RSN found no reliable report on whether that appearance took place. On November 6, the day before Trump’s post, Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida who oversaw the inquiry, resigned. Blanche announced the departure but gave no reason, and the investigation “has yet to produce charges establishing the alleged overarching conspiracy,” CBS News reported. CNN reported, citing unnamed “sources familiar with the matter,” that Quiñones resigned “under pressure from department leadership.” RSN has not found independent confirmation of that account, and the department has not said it.
Deep dive: the order versus the answer
The November 7 post was not a formal directive. It was a public statement that, in its own words, served as the order “by copy.” What followed is on the record.
Blanche’s November 12 answer drew a line between speech and crime. “Free speech is allowed,” he said, according to NBC News. “But there can come a point when a criticism becomes a threat, and then when a threat becomes something criminal.” He said that point had not been reached. Asked about the November 11 letter that Aaron Reitz, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, sent to Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut over his inquiry into donors to the White House ballroom project, Blanche distanced himself. “Any office could investigate that,” he said, adding, “I’m the attorney general, so I don’t oversee every single thing that’s done.”
In the Abrams interview, Blanche added a second point that will not reassure those who wanted results. Grand jury refusals, he said, are something that “happens in any administration regularly.” Abrams pushed back: “We’ve never seen this many rejections by a grand jury in a particular place.” Asked about Slotkin’s call to focus on “the people who enabled” corruption in the administration, Blanche said that was “absolutely not a crime.”
Put the two statements side by side. The president wrote that the threats amounted to a “criminal act” and that “the imprisonment should be against these EXTORTIONISTS.” His attorney general, five days later, said the department was not investigating what the lawmakers had said, and called a separate Slotkin remark he was asked about “absolutely not a crime.” RSN found no public statement from the White House reconciling the two.
Too little, too late?
Frustration on the right with the department’s results did not start this month. In May, NPR reported that “some members of the MAGA base have expressed frustration at what they see as a failure to deliver on promises of accountability.” The sharpest critic was Jonathan Gross, a former Trump political appointee who worked on the department’s “Weaponization Working Group.” He accused Blanche of “sabotage” and wrote: “Nothing stopped Blanche from dropping these indictments while Bondi was there.” Blanche denied the charge, telling CBS News, “I don’t audition for this job,” NPR reported. More than a year after it was formed, NPR found, the working group had released no report on the January 6 prosecutions it was meant to examine.
The timing problem is now concrete. The 119th Congress ends and the new Democratic majorities take control when the 120th Congress convenes in January 2027. From then on, the administration will spend much of its energy answering subpoenas rather than issuing them. RSN analysis: an investigation opened in mid-November, into conduct that consists largely of public statements by members of Congress, is unlikely to produce charges before the new Congress sits, and the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause (Article I, Section 6) already shields lawmakers’ legislative acts, though not every public statement they make. If the goal was accountability for what conservatives regard as years of politically driven investigations of Trump and his supporters, the president’s own post concedes the point in four words: Republicans “should get smart, fast.”
There is a fair reading in the other direction. The president’s term runs to January 2029. The Comey case in North Carolina is still alive, and the Florida inquiry has not been formally closed. “We’re going to let that investigation continue as it should,” Blanche said in October of the Florida probe, as quoted by CBS News. A department that brings fewer, stronger cases may yet produce results that a flurry of weak ones could not.
Counter-arguments
The prosecutions were never legitimate. Democrats and many legal scholars argue that the failures are the system working. Grand juries and judges, on this view, have refused cases that should not have been brought. Stanford law professor David Sklansky said in a November 3 interview that the doctrines against selective and vindictive prosecution “offer little protection during the investigative stage,” and that “relatively few cases have reached the courts.” On this account, the danger is in the investigations themselves, whatever their outcome.
Blanche is right on the law. Some conservatives will see Blanche’s November 12 answer as a failure of nerve. A stronger reading is that he described the law accurately. Promising subpoenas, hearings and impeachments is the ordinary work of a congressional majority, however hostile the tone. Treating it as extortion would set a precedent that a future Democratic administration could turn against Republican members, which is the concern former Rep. Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania raised about the Comey case: “the Democrats will have the White House someday,” he told The Hill.
The base’s frustration is aimed at the wrong target. Gross and others blame Blanche personally. But the D.C. grand juries, the judge who ruled on the prosecutor’s appointment and the defense motions now before Judge Flanagan are not under the attorney general’s control. RSN analysis: a change of personnel at the top of the department would not change those constraints.
What is established, disputed and not established
Established (documents and on-the-record statements):
- Trump’s November 7 Truth Social post says he is “ordering the Department of Justice to look into this criminal act, immediately!”
- On November 12, Blanche said there were no criminal investigations into “words that incoming senators or congressmen have said.”
- A D.C. grand jury declined to indict the six lawmakers in February 2026, and Blanche has acknowledged that D.C. grand juries did not return indictments.
- The 2025 Comey and James indictments were dismissed; Comey’s 2026 North Carolina case is pending with dismissal motions unresolved.
- The Florida “grand conspiracy” inquiry has produced no charges, and its lead prosecutor and its supervising U.S. attorney have both left.
Disputed:
- Whether Democratic statements about subpoenas and impeachment amount to “extortion,” as Trump says, or to ordinary oversight, as Democrats and Blanche’s own words suggest.
- Whether the department’s record reflects weak cases, hostile grand juries in Washington or poor management. Each side cites the same outcomes.
Not established:
- That any Democrat threatened donors with imprisonment or said she would “go after all young people” who hold Republican views. RSN found no such statement.
- Why diGenova and Quiñones left. The accounts of internal pressure rest on unnamed sources cited by CBS News and CNN and have not been confirmed on the record.
- Whether the Justice Department has opened any matter at all in response to the November 7 post. Neither the department nor the White House has said so.
For earlier RSN coverage of the Comey era at the FBI, see James Comey’s 2016 internal memo on the Clinton email investigation. For the House fight over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, see our report on the impeachment vote.
Sources: Donald J. Trump, Truth Social, Nov. 7, 2026; Al Jazeera, Nov. 7, 2026; NBC News, Nov. 12, 2026; HuffPost via Yahoo News, Nov. 13, 2026; The Washington Times, Feb. 10, 2026; The Hill, Apr. 30, 2026; U.S. v. Comey indictment (E.D.N.C.); MS NOW, Sept. 25, 2026; CBS News, Sept. 14, 2026; CBS News, Nov. 6, 2026; NPR, May 14, 2026; CNN via KEYT, Nov. 6, 2026; Democracy Docket, Nov. 22, 2025; U.S. Constitution, Art. I, Sec. 6; Stanford Law School, Nov. 3, 2026.
Featured image: Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, Washington, D.C. Photo: Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
How this article was made: Right Side News researched and drafted this article with the help of AI tools. Sources are linked so readers can check them. Spot an error? Tell us in the comments and we will correct it.
