DOJ Weaponization Goes Private | Michael Caputo

Hans Mahncke: Michael Caputo, welcome to the Counterlawfare Institute.

Normally, of course, we do these things in person. Today we're making an exception because of the situation you're facing, which is both very time-sensitive and, in a way, quite shocking, especially as someone studying lawfare here at the Counterlawfare Institute.

Everyone knows you've been subjected to ten years of lawfare. Everyone knows they threw all this Russia stuff at you, and we thought maybe it was finally over. We can get into some of what happened to you over those ten years, but I think far more important right now is that, as we speak, a completely new form of lawfare has unexpectedly been unleashed on you.

It's a sort of privatization of DOJ weaponization. I think that's probably the best way to put it.

Tell us, what exactly happened to you?

Michael Caputo: Well, you were just visiting here about ten days ago, Hans. A couple of days after you visited, my next visitor was a process server who served me with a civil case initiated and signed by a lawyer from Foley & Lardner, Jack Korba.

Korba appears to have been one of the Assistant U.S. Attorneys at the United States Attorney's Office in the District of Columbia. His section, a very small section of the office, was running a criminal investigation into my OAN movie, The Ukraine Hoax.

They opened that investigation in the first quarter of 2021, after Joe Biden was sworn in. Then they essentially put it into a closet under prohibitive access, and we weren't able to get it closed until the end of 2025.

Korba's section was spying on me, my family, the cameramen, and other people involved in my OAN documentary for an entire year of the Trump administration.

What's really crazy, Hans, is that we had no idea. You and I were sitting out on the lake relaxing. In fact, I think we talked about how it might be time to forgive everything that's happened. Here we were in this beautiful Catholic town of Ave Maria, talking about how faith helps us through these kinds of situations.

Within days, I got served. Then I got served three times, one day, the next day, and the next day. All the documents were the same.

What's happening here is that Jack Korba left the small National Security Section that had been investigating me for my journalism, joined Foley & Lardner, and is now suing me civilly.

This is an export. It is the privatization of DOJ lawfare. I don't think anybody has seen this before.

Hans Mahncke: No, I haven't come across any instance of this.

Normally in lawfare, you have a combination of 501(c)(3) groups and activist lawfare organizations. They draft some kind of blueprint for how to target Donald Trump, Michael Caputo, or whomever, and then people within government run with it. Some rogue prosecutor, whether at DOJ, in New York, in Atlanta. We've seen it all.

Or at least we thought we'd seen it all.

Michael Caputo: We did.

As we sat here in this peaceful little village in the middle of the Everglades, I was feeling like this chapter of my life was coming to a close. The end of lawfare against my family. The things they've done to my wife, myself, and my daughters have been unconscionable.

Hans Mahncke: I remember your wife saying while I was there that there was a time when there were always cars out front and people harassing you, spying on you and your family. I think she even said something to the effect of, "Luckily, it hasn't happened for a while." There was a sense that maybe you were beyond that now.

Michael Caputo: But after the first service of documents from Jack Korba and Foley & Lardner, a couple of days later I walked into a guy sitting in a car in front of our house, staking me out.

I live in Ave Maria, in the middle of the Everglades. It's 13,000 Catholics. I'm a student of theology at Ave Maria University. Everybody in Antifa knows it now. DOJ knows it now. So I might as well say it publicly.

You've been here. You've been to our beautiful oratory. It's like the Vatican without the communists, and until recently, without the FBI and without Antifa.

But the FBI has been to this little village in the middle of the Everglades several times. They've told me they were here. They've insisted on meeting me while they were here. We're halfway between Naples and Fort Lauderdale. It is God's country here.

But now we not only have alligators, we have DOJ crawling all over us.

When they served me those documents after you left, and then a couple of days later, it became clear to me what this was all about.

Hans Mahncke: Let's break it down.

Korba worked in the U.S. Attorney's Office in D.C. We know he worked in the National Security Section, a small section. We know that section investigated you for years.

I haven't seen his particular name on any of the documents, but the names are redacted. So I think it's fair to say that, given the size of the division and your prominence, he at least knew about the investigation and may have been involved in it in some government capacity.

And I think we should remind viewers that you yourself worked in that office for a while, at the same time the office was investigating you, which you didn't know.

Michael Caputo: Isn't that wild?

It's surreal.

I've been involved in foreign policy and intelligence matters since the days of the Sandinistas and Contras. This is what I do. But this is beyond the pale. I've never seen anything like this.

People don't understand the extent of the surveillance. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington sought a search warrant covering all of my information, from banking to emails to location data and everything else, ten days after the 2024 election victory.

I worked on that campaign. I was involved in anti-weaponization policy, among other things, working with the policy division.

They were surveilling me the entire time I worked for Donald Trump.

I worked very closely with Ed Martin. Ed and I were both working on policy, particularly anti-weaponization policy. Ed became one of my dearest friends, and I respect him immensely. He has as much interest in anti-weaponization policy as I do. Me, because I've been through it. Him, because so many of his friends have been through it.

When it became clear that he was going to implement the president's anti-weaponization policy, Ed became interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. I was sent there to work with him and help get some of that early anti-weaponization work moving.

I was basically a volunteer acting chief of staff in Ed's office at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington.

Who else was there at the time? Jack Korba, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the small National Security Section.

He was a floor away from me. I saw him in the coffee room more than once. I recognize him now from his pictures at Foley & Lardner.

That guy was in my office while his section was investigating me.

I found out about the investigation through a Google user alert. I'm sitting in the office and my Gmail dings. I open it, and it essentially says, "We've had an FBI subpoena on your emails. For two and a half years, we haven't been able to tell you. We can tell you now."

I was stunned.

Hans Mahncke: And it's not just emails. I've seen your warrant.

They take everything. Your search history, YouTube history, browsing history, calendar. Anything that falls under the Google umbrella, whether it's Gmail, YouTube, the browser, or something else, they get it all.

Michael Caputo: I can tell you, the Google searches worried me. Imagine the damning recipes they're going to come up with.

Hans Mahncke: But that's the thing. These guys get to see all of that information, and you don't even know they're getting it because Google informs you long after the event.

I can only imagine how horrific that is for anyone, including people who've done absolutely nothing wrong. We all have our privacy, or at least we think we do. Then suddenly you realize that for three, four, or five years they've effectively had access to everything.

In some ways it's worse than having a guy sitting outside your house. Everything you do with your computer is recorded.

Again, we cannot prove that Korba personally ran your case. But we can prove that he worked in the small office that was conducting this investigation.

Michael Caputo: And I've been pursuing this ever since I received that Google user alert in March 2025.

It wasn't until the end of December that the case was finally closed. I had to insist on it being closed because they couldn't even locate the file. I guess it was under prohibitive access.

It was closed in December 2025, and I thought it was finally over.

But when it was closed, that's when I found out they had this broad search warrant on me dating back to ten days after the 2024 election.

Hans Mahncke: That's the craziness of it. The audacity of doing this after President Trump had already been reelected, after everything you'd already been through.

Michael Caputo: We're probably pushing half a million dollars in legal fees. Lost revenue is several million. My family was completely destroyed.

Hans Mahncke: Your home back in Buffalo, everything.

Michael Caputo: Everything.

Hans Mahncke: And your health, most of all.

Michael Caputo: I'm feeling well now. Thank God, the cancer is gone.

But stress causes cancer, and they know that.

Roger Stone is a dear friend of mine. Paul Manafort, J.D. Gordon, Carter Page, all of us have talked in one way or another about how it's not just Brennan and Comey and the famous names.

There are mid-level and higher-level people inside DOJ and the FBI who became obsessed with us. We all had our obsessives. Paul had his. Roger did. J.D. did. Certainly Carter did.

I did too.

We just didn't know who they were.

Here's the crazy thing, Hans. My obsessive has decided to come out and introduce himself.

In the face of Jack Korba, the deep state has come out and said, "Hi, I'm the deep state."

The guy who was obsessed with me has come forward.

Thank God for Miranda Devine and for releasing all of this. I filed a bar complaint against Korba because what he's doing is, in my view, patently unethical and may be illegal.

He's privatizing an investigation that his small government office worked on, and he's making money from it.

If people want to see the documents, they can go to lawfaredoj.com. That's the website I'm building so everybody can see the documents involved in this lawfare.

You'll find a copy of the bar complaint there.

What Korba is doing is, at a minimum, inappropriate, and it may be illegal. Anyone who has been involved in my case knows that some of the information written into this complaint appears to have come from the investigation of my film, The Ukraine Hoax.

It has been exported. It has been privatized.

Hans Mahncke: Let's break that down a little more, because we haven't yet talked about what this lawsuit is actually about.

This guy works at DOJ for all these years. He's in the section investigating you. Then he leaves DOJ and goes to Foley & Lardner.

He's listed there as "of counsel," so he's not a partner and he's not a regular associate. They bring him in, presumably at least in part because of his experience at the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Then somehow this guy ends up representing an 88-year-old client, Gilbert Hyatt, whom you had previously consulted for.

You have a consulting business. You have clients. You earn money.

In essence, Hyatt wanted you to promote his foundation, make introductions, and so forth. From what I can see in the lawsuit, you actually did make introductions.

The allegation is that you were somehow in breach of contract because you hadn't told him beforehand about all this alleged Russia stuff. That you supposedly had connections with Russia, that you had worked with someone connected to Russia, and that you'd been investigated over Russia.

The complaint calls you worse than Benedict Arnold. There's constant innuendo that somehow you passed secrets to Putin.

It was astonishing to read. I lost count of how many Russia references there were.

As a lawyer, I kept asking myself: this is supposedly a breach of contract case, so where is the breach of contract?

Instead, page after page is Russia, Russia, Russia.

I don't know every detail of the underlying contract, but it is an extremely strange 85-page filing. They're talking about $100,000. Even assuming there were some legitimate contractual dispute, it would appear to be a fairly ordinary breach of contract case, of which there are thousands.

Instead, you get an 85-page complaint littered with allegations and innuendo about Russia.

Then I ask myself: the lawyer worked in the very office and section investigating this Russia-related nonsense about you. He leaves government, goes to Foley, somehow picks up this client, and suddenly there's an 85-page lawsuit filled with Russia allegations.

It's one of the most bizarre things I've seen.

If we zoom out from the details, what we're left with is the privatization of DOJ weaponization.

DOJ was targeting you. This guy goes private, and now, according to your allegation, he's leveraging or monetizing what happened inside government.

We don't know exactly what is going on. What do you think it is? Is it simply, "I have to get Caputo"? Is it about money? What do you think is happening here?

Michael Caputo: I've gotten some criticism from friends in the legal world who have read my bar complaint against Korba and Foley & Lardner, which is available at lawfaredoj.com.

I think he's monomaniacal.

You have people at the middle and upper levels of a bureaucracy that has been weaponized against people like me, and each one of them has their favorite person to obsess about.

What really bothers me is my family.

I have three girls. I'm a girl dad. My daughters have suffered through this for ten years.

My eldest daughter is 24 now. God bless her. She took the brunt of it when she was 16 or 17 during Russiagate. My younger daughters, who are 12 and 14, are now watching process servers come up to the house and asking me what's going on.

They remember being chased down the street by Antifa. They remember people trying to burn our house down.

It's been a long time since we felt safe here in the Everglades. But three process servers, none of them good experiences, and suddenly it starts feeling like Buffalo again.

What bothers me is that the people who do this have families of their own.

Ben Rhodes had daughters around the same age as mine while all of this was happening to my family. He knew what was happening. He could read the stories about my daughters being harassed. Yet it continued.

A father of daughters did that to another father of daughters.

I live in a Catholic town. I'm studying theology. I talk to priests, nuns, and theologians all day long.

These people don't care what happens to our families and our children. They don't care that we had to leave the hometown where I grew up because people were threatening to kill us. We had people arrested for it.

And now what? Jack Korba is going to start it all over again?

But here's the difference.

Jack Korba is not at DOJ anymore.

That's what makes this leap into privatization so interesting.

Why does Jack Korba think only Michael Caputo is going to get attention from this? Why does he not understand that now people know who he is?

For years, the people carrying this out were faceless and nameless. Now one of them has stepped out into public view.

Why does he think he can do this to my family and start driving all of this back toward us again?

Hans Mahncke: That's certainly one of the themes I've known about for a long time.

But since founding the Counterlawfare Institute this year, I've been traveling and speaking with victims, many of them. Some interviews are on video, some aren't. We have more videos and articles coming.

I've talked to dozens of victims of lawfare, some well known and others almost completely unknown.

Nearly every one of them has two things in common.

The first is that there is never any accountability. The people who came after them never seem to face consequences.

The second is exactly what you're talking about: their families.

Whether they're targeted directly or indirectly, lawfare affects families in horrific ways. Every single time.

Some families broke because of it.

I was so happy to meet your family and see how strong everyone is.

Michael Caputo: My wife's a rock.

Hans Mahncke: Absolutely.

But what they put you through is extraordinary. Tell us about the pebbles being thrown at your window when you were sick.

Michael Caputo: I was Assistant Secretary of Health during COVID. It was an incredibly stressful time.

After Russiagate had subsided, the president was having communications problems and brought me in as Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at HHS during COVID.

I was commuting from Buffalo and away from my family at a time when Antifa was harassing them.

Every morning we'd meet and hear the death count. There was a period when I was the one reading those numbers out. It's hard to explain the kind of pressure that puts on you.

Then I got cancer. Head and neck cancer.

It was discovered after a COVID meeting.

I stayed on as Assistant Secretary, but I went home and underwent treatment. I had throat-origin cancer. I could barely swallow because radiation had narrowed my throat so much. I was allergic to the chemotherapy and developed severe tinnitus, which remains today.

Because it was during COVID, I was also quarantined from my family. I felt like a ghost in the attic.

My little girls would walk across the street to the Catholic church and to school in their uniforms, and they would be chased by Antifa. That's documented. People were arrested over it.

At the same time, I thought I was going to die.

Sleep was incredibly important, but I could hardly sleep. People who have gone through head and neck cancer will understand this. I couldn't lie down because my throat had become so narrow and the radiation had changed my saliva. If I lay down, I would choke.

Even sitting upright in a lounger, I'd wake up about once an hour choking. According to the sleep monitor, I was getting about nine minutes of sleep per hour.

I'd wake up drowning, clear my throat, then spend another 45 minutes trying to get back to sleep.

Somebody figured that out.

People would come by our house and throw pebbles at my bedroom window when the light was off, trying to make sure I couldn't sleep.

They knew which bedroom I was in.

These were neighbors.

That's why some of the best analysis of what we're facing recognizes that evil can be incredibly ordinary. It isn't just Brennan and Comey or people in Washington. Evil can be in your neighborhood.

Somebody in my neighborhood thought it was a good idea to throw pebbles at the window of a man with cancer to make sure he couldn't sleep.

And here we go again.

For five years we've been able to keep our heads down. I've helped the president. I've helped Ed Martin. I've been involved in campaigns. But I'm not out in front anymore. I don't do television much anymore. I don't get nearly as many death threats.

Now Jack Korba has left the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia and gone to Foley & Lardner.

His section spent five years investigating me and couldn't meet even the minimum standard necessary to bring an allegation against me.

For five years they tried to prove that Russians funded my movie, The Ukraine Hoax. They couldn't prove it because Russians didn't fund it.

The movie, by the way, is available free on Rumble at my Michael R. Caputo channel.

They investigated it for five years and came up with nothing.

Hans Mahncke: When you first sent me the complaint, I saw Russia on seemingly every page.

Then you mentioned that Korba had worked in the office, so I looked it up. Indeed he had, and specifically in the National Security Section.

I'm still wondering how he got to Hyatt, the client. How did that connection happen? I think we'll probably find out over the next few months, and we'll certainly keep tracking the story.

Michael Caputo: We'll only find out if the U.S. Attorney's Office gives us the information.

Judicial Watch has been a great assistance. For more than a year and a half they've been trying to obtain FOIA documents and have sued for them.

We're now at the point where we're negotiating with the U.S. Attorney's Office about who they will reveal by unredacting documents.

We believe Jack Korba's name is underneath those redactions.

The only way we're going to find out is if the office agrees to unredact them.

The American people need clarity. And for clarity, we need names.

The interesting thing here is that we're not revealing Jack Korba. Jack Korba came forward and introduced himself to all of us.

Hans Mahncke: I'm still grappling with this whole new form of lawfare, and I hope it doesn't become a broader phenomenon.

The idea of people taking information they learned in government and then leveraging it outside government for money has been around for a long time. People taking security clearances or government experience into the private sector and monetizing them has also been around for a long time.

But what we're talking about here is different.

What is alleged here is someone taking lawfare they were involved with in government and then carrying it into the private sector.

As you've said, we still need to find out what is under those redactions.

But if that is what happened, that's a whole new arena, and it's very worrying.

Michael Caputo: It's a clear ethical problem, which is why I put it in the bar complaint.

You're not allowed to take the proceeds of an investigation you're working on in the federal government, go outside government, and then make money from it.

More than that, you're not supposed to leave government after working on an investigation and then represent someone in a matter involving the person who was the target of that investigation.

He can't do this.

It's important for us to understand what is happening here and the role of Foley & Lardner in it.

This is the privatization of DOJ lawfare.

If this becomes a cottage industry, we're seeing the beginning of something completely new.

Hans Mahncke: Michael, I'm so sorry you're going through this again.

As we both mentioned at the outset, we sat together just a few days ago thinking the worst of it was over. Then, days later, it started all over again.

Michael Caputo: Isn't that crazy?

I immediately went to the chair of our theology department and said, "Look, I'm supposed to forgive. Does that mean I can't fight?"

We talked through it for a while.

Maybe this gets a little too philosophical for some people. Living in Ave Maria tends to make you focus a lot on God.

But what we concluded was that forgiveness doesn't require surrender.

I'm allowed to forgive them. I should forgive them.

But I don't have to surrender, Hans.

You know what that means?

Click. I'm back.

Hans Mahncke: You certainly are.

We didn't wish for it to be this way, but here you are.

I wish you a lot of strength over the next weeks and months as you deal with this.

And there's also a broader lesson here about the various forms of lawfare, including forms we didn't even know existed.

It's lurking. We need to be vigilant. We need to fight back against it.

All strength to you.

Michael Caputo: Hans, I just want to say one thing.

I've known Donald Trump for a long time. I drove him around the Republican Convention in 1988.

During Russiagate, I was talking to him at the White House about how I was reacting on television. I was doing a lot of TV then. I was 100 pounds heavier. Cancer is a great diet.

You wouldn't recognize me from those days.

I was talking to the president about all the things I was doing on TV, and he said, "Michael, I don't care what you do. All I'm telling you is don't be a pussy."

Let me tell you, all week, that's all I've been hearing.

In this fight, we cannot be chicken.

We cannot be polite.

Not anymore, my friends.

Not anymore.

Hans Mahncke: Michael Caputo, thank you so much.

Michael Caputo: Thank you.