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Is Trump’s Justice Department trying to discredit itself?

The DOJ used to avoid spectacles like the Louise Lucas raid.

On Wednesday, when FBI agents raided the office of one of the most powerful Democrats in Virginia, Fox News just happened to have one of its Washington-based foreign correspondents on the scene in the small city of Portsmouth. What an extraordinary coincidence!

The raid targeted state Sen. Louise Lucas, the 82-year-old president pro tempore of the Virginia Senate, who is nationally prominent for two reasons. Lucas was the driving force behind the 10-1 Democratic congressional map that Virginia recently enacted to retaliate against similarly biased Republican maps drawn by red states. She’s also a pugnacious tweeter who gleefully mocks her political opponents online. After her congressional maps became law, Lucas posted an AI image of four incumbent Republican members of Congress working at McDonald’s.

Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser.

There are two possible explanations for why this raid happened. As MS NOW’s Carol Leonnig reports, the Justice Department has apparently been investigating “evidence that [Lucas] solicited or accepted bribes” for three years. Three years ago Democratic President Joe Biden was in office, which suggests that the probe into Lucas is legitimate.

At the same time, Leonnig also reports that Lindsey Halligan, a former insurance lawyer who Trump illegally attempted to install as the top federal prosecutor in eastern Virginia, pressured prosecutors to bring charges against Lucas prior to the midterm elections, believing that “it would be good for the White House to be able, before the midterms, to accuse a prominent state Democrat in Virginia with bribery.”

Halligan was also a central figure in the failed prosecutions of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James; last September, Trump appeared to order former Attorney General Pam Bondi to target Comey and James, both of whom Trump resents for investigating him in the past. Trump’s Justice Department has since indicted Comey a second time, claiming that a social media post where Comey arranged seashells to spell “86 47” was an explicit threat to kill Trump.

Which brings us back to the fact that Donald Trump’s de facto state media outlet just happened to have a reporting team on the scene when the FBI raided Lucas’s office. It’s hard to imagine how Fox News could have known that it needed to have a reporter in Portsmouth unless the Justice Department tipped them........

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