Holy Damage Control, Batman: CNN originally reported late in the day Wednesday that the Justice Department was opening a probe into whether E. Jean Carroll, the New York woman who successfully sued Donald Trump and won $88.3 million in damages for sexual abuse and defamation, lied during the legal proceedings against Trump, and that Andrew Boutros, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, would be leading the investigation. Then, on Thursday, Boutros said, Hey, not me!, categorically denying that he was investigating Carroll.

This is extraordinary on so many levels. First and foremost, it’s shocking and disgusting that the Trump administration would even contemplate doing this.

It’s important to dip briefly into the facts here. Yes, in a 2022 deposition, Carroll misrepresented the fact that Democratic billionaire Reid Hoffman donated to her defense fund. Her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, has said that Carroll recalled later, sometime in 2023—it seems worth bearing in mind that she was in her late seventies at the time—that she had received some outside donations and that she told Kaplan, and Kaplan immediately told Trump’s lawyers. Those lawyers tried to pounce on this new information to cast doubt on Carroll’s credibility, but the judge barred Trump’s lawyers from using it at trial. Two juries subsequently found Trump liable for both sexual assault and defamation.

That’s the background. Here’s the important part, as detailed by Lisa Rubin in a recent MS NOW column: Trump appealed, twice, trying to get appellate courts to agree that Carroll was lying, and he lost both times. First, a three-judge appellate panel upheld Trump’s conviction and believed that Carroll just forgot: "Ms. Carroll plausibly represented that she had forgotten about the limited outside funding," the panel wrote. Second, eight of 10 active judges on an appellate panel in June 2025 denied a request for rehearing by Trump’s lawyers. (And even just last month, a third appellate panel denied a rehearing of the defamation case.)

If you look at that June 2025 ruling I linked to above, you’ll see an interesting name listed as counsel for "defendant-appellant": Todd Blanche.

This, of course, is the same Todd Blanche who is running the Department of Justice today. When Trump fired Pam Bondi as attorney general and stories came out that Trump had been displeased with her lack of zeal about going after his enemies, you, like me, probably wondered how anybody could possibly be more of an unethical, corrupt, cowardly lickspittle than Bondi was. She brought—or tried to bring—prosecutions against Trump antagonists Letitia James, James Comey, James Brennan, Fani Willis, and more. When career prosecutors declined to bring those cases, she fired them and brought in incompetent hacks to do Trump’s bidding. In some cases, federal judges found these hacks to have been installed illegally.

Bondi was venally corrupt, on an absolutely Wagnerian level. Just this week, in fact, a retired chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, backed by 120 judges, attorneys, and law professors, brought a blistering ethics complaint against Bondi demanding that she be investigated and disbarred. That complaint is mostly about her handling of the Epstein files because, remember, she behaved indefensibly there too.

So how could anyone be more corrupt than that? I’ll tell you exactly how, through Trump’s eyes: They could succeed where Bondi failed. That was her crime. Not obviously and serially violating departmental ethical canons. Her crime was not doing it well.

Hence, Blanche. The fact that his name was on that appellate denial—that he was one of Trump’s lawyers in the Carroll proceedings—means he has personal skin in this game, which in turn means that there’s no way on earth this should be happening on his watch. And indeed, he is said to have "recused" himself on the matter of the Carroll investigation. So it was tossed to Boutros, in Chicago.

But Boutros, as I noted above, says he’s not investigating Carroll. He maintains that he’s only investigating Hoffman’s nonprofit, American Future Republic. It’s based in Chicago, you see, so there’s the veneer of justification. But this just raises the question: What has American Future Republic done wrong? It’s allowed to donate money to a legal defense fund. It’s a 501(c)4, not a (c)3, the basic difference being that a (c)4 is allowed to be more directly political (also that donations to a (c)4 are generally not deductible as charitable contributions).

GuideStar records show that the group did donate $7 million to Kaplan’s former law firm in 2020. That is by far its largest single donation. But even so, so what? The material question here isn’t whether Hoffman partly or even wholly paid for Carroll’s defense. The question is whether she lied about it. Three different panels of judges believe she did not.

What’s really going on with this investigation, one sniffs, is this. Trump is running out of appeals here. As Lisa Rubin wrote in the column I cited above: "In other words, Trump is facing down the increasingly real possibility of paying Carroll more than $88 million, before interest, with only the Supreme Court to potentially rescue him." So he and his current lawyers are trying to resuscitate the issue that a judge prevented them from using at the original 2023 trial.

That’s not necessarily a crazy, last-ditch legal strategy for a person faced with writing that kind of check. The problem, though, is that the person is the sitting president of the United States, and "his current lawyers" are the U.S. Department of Justice, which he has corrupted. And by the way, if you want to know more about this Boutros fellow, just read Michelle Goldberg’s column today about his ghastly attempt to prosecute six people, including onetime Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, on felony conspiracy charges. The case fell apart last week after prosecutors admitted to misconduct before the grand jury. As Goldberg put it, "If Trump didn’t manufacture scandals on such an industrial scale, the case that collapsed last week in Chicago would have been a huge story."

So many things would have been huge stories under any other presidency. Trump’s purchase of Dell stock and the awarding of a large Pentagon contract to the company. White House intervention to get a $620 million contract funneled to a company affiliated with Don Jr. The ongoing ICE scandals, with Democratic pols being prevented from being able to inspect horrid conditions at ICE’s detention camps. The new homeland security secretary vowing to cancel international flights to certain liberal cities. The plainly illegal effort to put Trump’s face on a new $250 bill. Any one of those, in normal times, would be a major scandal. And those were just this week.

I pondered writing about each of those. I chose the Carroll matter because it’s not only obviously corrupt but another cannon blast at the rule of law and the independence and integrity of the Justice Department. And because it’s something new: Are investigations into liberal nonprofits to become a regular thing now? So far, Trump has used the DOJ completely unethically, but he’s used it just to go after a handful of personal enemies. If he and Blanche open up the gates to start harassing liberal groups on a much wider basis, then we’re truly in tinpot dictator territory. It can, and will, get worse.

Last week’s quiz: "Oh I’d love to be an Oscar Mayer wiener …" For Memorial Day weekend, a quiz about cooking out.

1. The earliest documented instance of a hamburger bun being decorated with sesame seeds comes from where and when?

A. Lindy’s, Brooklyn, 1910s

B. Shoney’s, West Virginia, 1920s

C. Bob’s Big Boy, California, 1930s

D. Hamburger Hamlet, Washington, D.C., 1940s

Answer: C, Bob’s Big Boy, California, 1930s. Part of the story here; another part here. I’ve always wondered why. Adds a touch of "class," I guess?

2. Boston may be called "Beantown," but baked beans were first produced on a mass scale in this city.

A. New York

B. Birmingham (U.K.)

C. Philadelphia

D. Pittsburgh

Answer: D, the Burgh, which you should have gotten because who famously mass-produced baked beans? H.J. Heinz, that’s who. However, there’s a tricky wrinkle here, which is that at first, the beans were much more popular in the U.K. (which they still are) than in the U.S., so he initially sold them mostly in England and eventually built two factories there.

3. Pickle relish is most closely associated with this city, because it is an almost mandatory hot dog topping there.

A. Buffalo

B. Cleveland

C. Chicago

D. St. Louis

Answer: C, Chicago. This is a Chitown weenie, apparently. Although, also apparently, "weenie" is first and foremost a Rhode Island thing.

4. If Ward took the Cleavers on a Memorial Day picnic back in their day, perhaps joined by the Rutherfords, assuming they packed some cans of soda pop, they also had to remember to bring a can opener, or a "church key," because the soda cans then had no pop top. In what year did the pop top debut in the U.S. soda pop market?

A. 1964

B. 1967

C. 1969

D. 1973

Answer: A, 1964. The "ring-pull" tab was invented in 1959, first appeared on some beer cans in 1962, then finally hit the soda pop market in 1964, on cans of Royal Crown. The man who held the patent died with a net worth of $41 million—in 1989, when $41 million was real money.

5. Food scientist William A. Mitchell developed this staple picnic ingredient in 1966. It took off like a rocket because, unlike its competitors, it could be distributed frozen.

A. Minute Maid orange juice

B. Miracle Whip

C. Pepperidge Farm pie crusts

D. Cool Whip

Answer: D, Cool Whip. Oh, those Jell-O molds of my youth. You can still find it in your grocer’s freezer, and it still sells like hotcakes.

6. According to a 2025 study by Statista, what is the bestselling hot dog in the United States?

A. Nathan’s

B. Ball Park

C. Oscar Mayer

D. Hebrew National

Answer: B, Ball Park, according to this. They originated in 1957 in Detroit—specifically, at Tiger Stadium. What happened to Oscar Mayer, I wonder? I bet they had 70 percent market share when I was a kid.

This week’s quiz: "You scream, I scream …" Continuing the summer motif, a quiz about ice cream.

1. Many ancient cultures had frozen desserts—shaved or crushed ice mixed with honey or other syrups, for example. But in which ancient empire did they concoct the first frozen dairy dessert, with water buffalo milk, flour, and (eeew!) camphor?

A. Persian

B. Mughal

C. Incan

D. Chinese (Tang empire)

2. Which American Founding Father was noted for his passion about ice cream, so much so that he is credited as having written out the first known U.S. ice cream recipe?

A. Thomas Jefferson

B. George Washington

C. George Mason

D. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney

3. Nancy Johnson, while living in Philadelphia in 1843, patented a device that began to expand access to ice cream from elites like the men in question 2 to the broader public. What was her invention?

A. The portable ice cooler

B. The insulated quart container

C. The hand-cranked churner

D. The automated vanilla bean extractor

4. Howard Johnson, the orange-roofed (rooved?) twentieth-century American roadside staple, was famous for offering how many flavors of ice cream?

A. 10

B. 28

C. 31

D. 101

5. Match the classic Dairy Queen product to its description.

6. Low-fat ice cream was made possible in part by the discovery that a certain protein gave manufacturers the ability to add less fat content but still keep the product rich and creamy, preventing the formation of dreaded ice crystals. Where was this protein found?

A. In the urine of rhesus monkeys

B. In the sphincter muscles of certain dog breeds

C. In bat guano

D. In the blood of certain Arctic fish

7. In Stranger Things, Steve and Robin worked at an ice cream shop in a 1970s mall (until it was destroyed). What was it called?

A. Chilly Vanilly’s

B. Lickety Split

C. Count Chocula’s

D. Scoops Ahoy

You can of course buy merch with this shop’s logo, as if it actually existed. Answers next week. Feedback to [email protected]. 

—Michael Tomasky, editor 

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