Let’s be honest about what the last few years looked like. A sitting president was hauled through one courtroom after another — not because the evidence was overwhelming, but because the right people with the right bank accounts decided it should happen. Activist judges nodded along. Billion-dollar donors wrote checks in the background. And the rest of us were told this was “justice.”
Well, the DOJ just sent a clear signal that the era of one-directional accountability may be ending. Someone on the other side of one of the most high-profile legal crusades against Donald Trump is now under federal scrutiny — and the reason should disturb anyone who still believes that an oath means something in an American courtroom.
From The Post Millennial:
The Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into author and former advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, who accused President Donald Trump of rape in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room at an unspecified time in the 1990s. She was awarded a large settlement after a jury found Trump liable for battery in a civil trial, with jurors unanimously agreeing that Trump had “sexually abused” Carroll.
Carroll, who wrote of the encounter with Trump in her memoir prior to bringing the civil suit, is under investigation over whether or not she committed perjury in her two suits against Trump. The first was over the alleged sexual assault and the second was for defamation after Trump denied the sexual assault allegations in 2019.
Good. It’s about time somebody looked into this.
The DOJ deserves real credit here. This isn’t a political stunt. It’s a straightforward question with enormous implications: Did E. Jean Carroll lie under oath about who was funding her legal war against the President of the United States?
A deposition, a denial, and a billionaire’s checkbook
Here’s the core of it. During a 2022 deposition, Trump attorney Alina Habba asked Carroll directly about outside financial support for her lawsuit. Carroll’s answer was unambiguous — she said she was solely responsible for her legal fees. No donors. No silent partners. Just her.
That was not true. Two weeks before the trial, Carroll’s own attorneys quietly disclosed that billionaire Reid Hoffman — LinkedIn co-founder and prolific Democratic mega-donor — had been covering some of her legal fees and expenses the entire time. Habba told the court that Carroll had “conspired to conceal the truth for nearly six months.”
And the judge’s reaction? Lewis Kaplan essentially shrugged. He didn’t find the concealment troubling enough to act on. When Trump’s team raised the issue on appeal, the Second Circuit accepted an even more remarkable explanation: Carroll had “plausibly represented” that she simply “forgot” about the billionaire bankrolling her case. The court wrote — apparently without irony — that Carroll “simply was not involved in the matter of who was or was not funding her litigation costs.”
She forgot. A tech billionaire is subsidizing the most consequential lawsuit of your entire life, and it just slipped your mind during a formal, recorded deposition. That explanation wouldn’t survive a middle school mock trial, but it sailed through the Second Circuit without a hitch.
Political operatives with a plan
None of this happened organically. Carroll herself acknowledged in 2023 that it was anti-Trump commentator George Conway who encouraged her to publicize the alleged incident from her memoir and pursue legal action against Trump. Conway — a man who built his entire public brand around opposing the former president — just happened to be the spark.
Then came the money. Hoffman, explaining his involvement in a 2023 Washington Post interview, offered the kind of language you’d expect from a press release: Carroll was “challenging someone who was so much more wealthy and powerful,” and her voice “shouldn’t be squashed.” Generous sentiment from a man worth billions who has funneled enormous sums into Democratic political infrastructure. The whole arrangement had the subtlety of a sledgehammer — identify a legal weapon, fund it, point it at Trump, and let the courts do the rest.
The right way to run an investigation
What separates this DOJ inquiry from the lawfare circus of the past few years is precisely what its critics will try to ignore: it’s being conducted with genuine procedural discipline. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who represented Trump personally in the Carroll civil litigation, has fully recused himself. He’s nowhere near this case. Federal prosecutors in Chicago’s Northern District of Illinois — not Washington, not Manhattan — are running the investigation. That geographic and institutional distance matters.
Compare that to how the original case unfolded. A judge who waved away apparent deception in a deposition. An appeals court that treated amnesia about billionaire funding as perfectly reasonable. And at the end of it all, an $83.3 million defamation verdict built on testimony that federal prosecutors are now examining for potential perjury.
Perjury isn’t some procedural footnote. It is a federal crime that carries up to five years in prison, and for good reason. The entire architecture of American justice depends on witnesses telling the truth when they raise their right hand. When that obligation becomes optional — when courts look the other way because the “right” person is doing the lying — the system rots from the inside.
This investigation won’t undo the damage of years of weaponized litigation. But it represents something that has been in painfully short supply: a commitment to the principle that truth under oath is non-negotiable. Regardless of who you are. Regardless of who you’re targeting. In America, the oath still has to mean something — even when breaking it served all the right political purposes.
Key Takeaways
- The DOJ has opened a federal perjury investigation into E. Jean Carroll over her sworn deposition testimony.
- Carroll denied receiving outside legal funding, but billionaire Democratic donor Reid Hoffman was secretly paying expenses.
- Acting AG Blanche’s full recusal demonstrates this investigation follows proper procedure, not political motivation.
- Courts previously dismissed the deception — now federal prosecutors in Chicago are taking it seriously.
Sources: The Post Millennial, CBS News
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