A former Department of Justice lawyer warned on Friday that President Donald Trump is propping up "flimsy," "politically motivated prosecutions" to bolster his claims of election fraud. Liz Oyer, who served as the Justice Department's pardon attorney, writes in a New York Times opinion essay that the administration's legal attacks on a "tired mailman" and other "civilian" targets not only make a mockery of the president's voter fraud claims but also expose a growing "weakness." Because the pardon attorney handles clemency recommendations, the essay amounts to a critique of the department from one of its own former officials.

Oyer frames her argument around an announcement that, she says, promised far more than it delivered. "When the deputy attorney general personally announces an indictment from Justice Department headquarters, it signals a matter of national importance," she writes. "So when Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter announced that he would hold his first news conference, observers rightly expected a major case. Instead, Mr. McCotter announced an indictment of a rogue postal worker for improperly disposing of mail."

The case centered on a Utah mail carrier who had been covering a colleague's route. According to Oyer, he said he began feeling "overwhelmed" and sought to "lighten his workload" by discarding a batch of undelivered mail in a church dumpster. He told federal law enforcement that the act was a "poor decision" made out of "frustration" and "laziness," and said he believed the discarded mail consisted of junk advertisements. Prosecutors, however, said the batch included 300 primary mail-in ballots. The carrier — a 34-year-old with no prior criminal history — was charged with a single felony for the destruction of mail.

Oyer writes that while the carrier's intent clearly had nothing to do with election interference, "that did not stop the Justice Department from offering him up to the public as an election saboteur." The deputy attorney general called him "a danger to the public and to the integrity of the electoral system."

Attorney General Todd Blanche and McCotter then made the rounds on Fox News to tout the prosecution of the "tired mailman." In Oyer's assessment, "Their chest-thumping highlights how desperate Justice Department leaders are to substantiate the president's claims of election interference, and how miserably they are failing. At the news conference, Mr. McCotter admonished reporters: 'Remember, folks. Voting fraud is real.' In other words: We may not have much proof, but trust us."

Polls show relatively few Americans have been persuaded by the election fraud claims Trump has been advancing for more than half a decade. But Oyer argues that "what's different and scarier now" is that "the Justice Department's leadership is working together to validate the president's election lies from the top down. Turning fiction into fact is now part of the job description. A refusal to concede that Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election has become a litmus test for all his political appointees."

According to Oyer, the department initially targeted specific individuals who had angered the president — among them Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and former FBI Director James Comey. "Now, it has adopted a dragnet approach, trawling to find perpetrators on whom to pin conspiracies cooked up by the president. Ordinary citizens are being ensnared," she writes. That shift is the crux of her warning: in her telling, the dispute over the election is no longer confined to public figures but is reaching private citizens who now face federal charges.

She points to the case of David Hearn, who was arrested and tried on a felony charge after merely putting his hand in the water of the Reflecting Pool during a bike ride — an incident that, she notes, blew uply in the faces of Trump and his allies.

Cases like these, Oyer argues, show that Trump has moved beyond pursuing high-profile figures. "They were people the president viewed as enemies," she writes. "Now, he's getting desperate and targeting civilians." She concludes: "So far, the courts have consistently rejected Mr. Trump's politically motivated prosecutions. Most Americans can see these cases for what they are: flimsy and pathetic — a sign of Mr. Trump's weakness." Her essay leaves the courts as the arena to watch: by her account, their consistent rejections of these prosecutions are the record against which any new cases will be measured.