By the telling of former advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, Donald Trump sexually abused her in a New York department store sometime in the mid-1990s — she’s not sure even what year. He also defamed her, she insisted, when, after she sued, he said she’s “not my type” and that she was “trying to sell a new book” that “should be sold in the fiction section.”

Launching a lawsuit the same year as her book, What Do We Need Men For?, sure was convenient timing on her part, as was filing a second one after New York tailored a law for her to do so. Evidently, she needed a man to make a few million bucks. She followed that up last year with a book titled Not My Type: One Woman vs. a President.

Now, the Justice Department is looking into whether Carroll committed perjury along the way. CNN broke the “exclusive” on Wednesday evening, reporting, “Prosecutors’ theory hinges on a 2022 deposition statement by Carroll, 82, that she received no outside funding for her lawsuit, though it was later revealed that billionaire Reid Hoffman had paid some legal fees and expenses.”

CNN couldn’t help but editorialize this news: “The probe is the latest move in the department’s ceaseless, and somewhat strained, efforts to meet Trump’s demands to target his long-standing personal foes.”

But hold the phone for an update:

One day after CNN published this story, US Attorney Andrew Boutros said in a statement that the Northern District of Illinois “has not opened — and has never opened — a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll.”

CBS News appended an editor’s note to the top of its story: “After this report was published, one of the sources for the story provided updated information stating that writer E. Jean Carroll is not the target of a criminal investigation and that her testimony regarding the funding of her civil lawsuits against President Trump is being examined as part of a related investigation into a nonprofit run by Reid Hoffman that helped pay for some of her legal expenses.”

In other words, she’s not out of the woods yet.

To be sure, Trump is not and has never been a moral model. From his multiple extramarital affairs and marriages to his “locker room” talk about doing to women almost exactly what Carroll alleged, it’s actually plenty believable that he’d do something he shouldn’t be doing with a woman. He also hasn’t exactly conducted himself with presidential decorum in response to her accusations.

Yet Carroll’s story is questionable at best. If anything actually happened, was it one of those consensual things that went too far and she later regretted? Why wait until 2019 to say anything about it?

Referring to her second lawsuit alleging battery and defamation, PJ Media’s Athena Thorne notes, “Recall that New York State deliberately suspended the statute of limitations for one year via New York’s Adult Survivors Act, which was conveniently active from Nov. 24, 2022, to Nov. 24, 2023. Carroll filed her suit within minutes of the Act going into effect. Why, it’s almost as if the whole thing was choreographed!”

Indeed, it reeks of the rank lawfare the Left has waged against Trump for the entire last decade. The Russia hoax, both impeachments, the real estate case in New York, the stolen election prosecutions — all of it was fundamentally phony. His home was raided. His tax returns were leaked. He faced 90 baseless criminal charges.

The jury in Carroll’s case found Trump guilty only of unwanted kissing and, er, use of his fingers, not for rape — despite repeated false framing by the Leftmedia. Heck, even Carroll said, “I have not been raped.”

On grounds of presidential immunity, Trump has repeatedly sought Supreme Court intervention to no avail, including the latest deferral just this Wednesday.

Some will say, as CNN editorialized, that Trump is weaponizing the DOJ. Unfortunately, there’s a bit of truth to that, just as there is reason to vehemently object to Trump’s $1.776 billion weaponization “slush fund” for allies who were targeted by the previous administration.

My cynical response is that leftists don’t much like playing by the rules they created. Barack Obama and Joe Biden were far more subtle in their speech and specific directions than Donald Trump, but they thoroughly weaponized the justice system and other parts of government to destroy Trump and conservatives. Democrats in Congress and across the country have done likewise. Assuming there ever actually is an investigation of Carroll, Trump is fighting back in kind against a woman who, as best I can tell, completely deserves it. Cry me a river.

On the other hand, as we approach America’s 250th birthday, this is not quite what the Founders had in mind, and the work of every American should be to restore their vision for our great nation.

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