For years, President-elect Donald J. Trump has made it known that people he believes to be his enemies should be prosecuted.
This week, his allies in Congress laid out a template for how to go after one of them in particular: Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming representative who has been a focus of Mr. Trump’s anger.
In a report released on Tuesday, House Republicans said Ms. Cheney should face an F.B.I. investigation for work she did for the congressional committee that examined Mr. Trump’s attempts to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election. They accused her of tampering with one of the committee’s star witnesses who gave damning testimony about Mr. Trump.
The recommendation had no binding authority, and any investigation of Ms. Cheney would have to be opened by Mr. Trump’s Justice Department once he enters office. Still, the House subcommittee’s report detailed a road map for what an inquiry might ultimately look like — while also relieving Mr. Trump of the potentially fraught step of explicitly ordering the inquiry himself.
Appearing to have it both ways, Mr. Trump seized on the House report on Wednesday morning, saying that it could present problems for Ms. Cheney, but avoiding responsibility for having been the cause of them.
“Liz Cheney could be in a lot of trouble based on the evidence obtained by the subcommittee, which states that ‘numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney, and these violations should be investigated by the FBI,’” he wrote in a post on Truth Social.
While Mr. Trump has never been shy about his desire to see his enemies punished, he has often exercised a measure of caution when it comes to taking credit for potential prosecutions.
In an interview this month on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” for instance, the host Kristen Welker asked him whether he planned to order prosecutions against his adversaries, such as the Biden family.
“I’m not looking to go back into the past,” Mr. Trump said.
He was also asked whether he wanted Kash Patel, his choice to lead the F.B.I., to launch investigations into his opponents.
“I mean, he’s going to do what he thinks is right,” Mr. Trump responded, distancing himself from the process. Then, after explicitly saying he would not direct investigations, Mr. Trump added that if people had been “dishonest or crooked,” there was probably “an obligation” to investigate them.
Mr. Trump likes Mr. Patel as the person to run the F.B.I. because the two share a similar vision of how — and against whom — to use the bureau’s powers, said Daniel C. Richman a former federal prosecutor and a law professor at Columbia.
“Putting loyalists like Kash Patel in office means that barely articulated whims are likely to be acted on,” Mr. Richman said.
A spokesman for Mr. Trump said on Wednesday that the nation’s “system of justice must be fixed and due process must be restored for all Americans.” Still, he added that Mr. Trump has often said that the Justice Department and the F.B.I. “will make decisions on their own accord because he actually believes in the rule of law.”
Prosecuting political rivals or detractors was a theme of Mr. Trump’s first term in the White House.
During his first presidential campaign, he often joined crowds at his rallies in chanting, “Lock her up!” — a reference to his opponent Hillary Clinton, whom he and other Republicans believed should have been investigated for using a private email server while she was secretary of state. After he won that election, however, Mr. Trump appeared to soften his stance, telling The New York Times editorial board that he did not want to “hurt the Clintons.”
But Mr. Trump, facing a special counsel investigation of his own, changed his mind again in 2018, telling his White House counsel that he wanted to order the Justice Department to investigate Mrs. Clinton. He also wanted them to investigate James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director whom Mr. Trump had fired, leading to the appointment of the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
Mr. Mueller investigated whether Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign had ties to Russia, which the intelligence community had already determined had interfered in the election in order to hurt Mrs. Clinton.
While the White House counsel ultimately declined to approve his plans to investigate Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump made clear on social media during his years in office that he believed various people should be prosecuted.
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has singled out Ms. Cheney in a similar fashion, saying outright that she and other leaders of the Jan. 6 committee should go to jail. He has also suggested, over the course of several months, that Gen. Mark A. Milley, his onetime chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be tried for treason, even executed.
Mr. Trump has called for Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought two criminal cases against him last year, to be “thrown out of the country.” And after he was arraigned on the first of Mr. Smith’s indictments, he said that, as president, he would appoint “a real special prosecutor” to “go after” President Biden and his family. (He has since backed away from his position on specifically investigating the Bidens.)
In Mr. Trump’s first term, critics were concerned that he was seeking to violate the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence.
Now, Mr. Trump will be entering the White House again with his allies having spent the last four years in search of lawyers who are willing to abide by a maximalist view of presidential power. Some of those lawyers take the view of the unitary executive theory, which argues that the president is the person with lone control over the executive branch, including pockets of seeming independence like the Justice Department.
Mr. Trump is not just relying on the levers of government to go after those he has publicly said are his enemies. He has also taken a direct hand in civil lawsuits against his perceived adversaries in the media in particular.
Over the weekend, ABC News agreed to pay $15 million in damages and $1 million in legal fees to settle a defamation suit he brought against the network, accusing its star anchor George Stephanopoulos of making on-air statements that damaged his reputation.
Mr. Stephanopoulos said several times in a March segment that Mr. Trump had been found by a civil jury to be “liable for rape.” Mr. Trump was found liable for sexual abuse, and while the jury ruled that Mr. Trump had not committed rape under the narrow definition of that term in New York law, the judge later said he had concluded that Mr. Trump’s actions constituted rape as the term is ordinarily understood.
Seemingly emboldened by the victory against ABC, Mr. Trump filed another lawsuit on Monday against The Des Moines Register, saying that the newspaper had engaged in “election interference” by publishing a poll just before Election Day that showed him trailing Vice President Kamala Harris.
The House report on Ms. Cheney, prepared by a Republican-led subcommittee on oversight, was specifically focused on the former representative, who broke with her G.O.P. colleagues over their ongoing support of Mr. Trump in 2021. But she has also infuriated Mr. Trump not only because she helped to lead the congressional investigation into him, but because she crossed party lines in the election and campaigned against him in support of Ms. Harris.
The report claimed that Ms. Cheney may have violated “numerous federal laws” by secretly communicating with Cassidy Hutchinson, a star witness for the Jan. 6 committee, without the knowledge of Ms. Hutchinson’s lawyer.
When Ms. Hutchinson was first approached to provide testimony to the committee, she was represented by a lawyer who had once worked in the Trump administration’s White House Counsel’s Office.
After meeting with Ms. Cheney, she hired a different lawyer and her subsequent public testimony was damaging to Mr. Trump. It included allegations that he had been warned his supporters were carrying weapons on Jan. 6, but expressed no concern because they were not a threat to him.
The report asked the F.B.I. to investigate whether Ms. Cheney’s dealings with Ms. Hutchinson were carried out in violation of a federal obstruction statute that prohibits tampering with witnesses. The report also accused Ms. Hutchinson of lying under oath to the committee several times and suggested that investigators examine whether Ms. Cheney had played any role in “procuring another person to commit perjury.”
Setting aside the details of Ms. Cheney’s interactions with Ms. Hutchinson, Alan Z. Rozenshtein, a former Justice Department official who teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School, said that the speech or debate clause of the Constitution would likely hinder any inquiry into Ms. Cheney. That provision, which is intended to protect the separation of powers, generally shields lawmakers from being questioned outside of Congress about official conduct.
“The speech or debate clause is very broad,” Mr. Rozenshtein said, “and would be a substantial, if not insurmountable, obstacle to any investigation into Liz Cheney for her actions as part of the committee.”
Chuck Rosenberg, a former U.S. attorney and F.B.I. official, also said that an investigation of Ms. Cheney could be difficult to push toward criminal charges.
“I believe that in order to go to jail there has to be compelling evidence that you committed a crime,” Mr. Rosenberg said. “That does not seem to be the case here.”
