President Donald Trump publicly directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to aggressively target his political enemies with investigations over the weekend — and MSNBC's Jonathan Lemire reported it had Democratic leadership privately sweating.

The president posted — and then deleted — a message to Bondi complaining that "nothing is being done" about former FBI director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, a day after federal prosecutor Erik Siebert complied with Trump's demand for his resignation for failing to bring mortgage fraud charges against James.

"There's some speculation that this was meant as a private message to Pam Bondi," Lemire told "Morning Joe." "The White House has not confirmed that, but the writing of it might have been meant as a DM, as opposed to a Truth Social post because Trump then took that post down, tried to clean it up with a subsequent posting.

"But this is, we know President Trump campaigned on the idea of retribution. That was one of his campaign platforms last year, and this is what that appears to look like, and we have seen U.S. attorneys across this country find a lack of evidence, there has not been a charge yet against Letitia James, the New York State attorney general. There have not been charges yet against Sen. Schiff or others."

"We have also seen, though, an effort by this president to remove a U.S. attorney who wouldn't bring charges, and he makes mention of that in this post, too, saying he needs to be replaced with someone perhaps more compliant, and I think this is what Democrats have been warning about for months, that we'd get to this step," Lemire added.

"Will there be follow-through? We'll see in the days ahead, but this is, as one senior Democrat put to me over the weekend, this is a five-alarm fire."

"Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough agreed, saying that Trump had been announcing his intention to pursue criminal cases against the prosecutors who indicted him and the lawmakers who presided over his impeachment.

"Well, yeah, this is actually what Democrats and members of the media have been worrying about for years," Scarborough said. "I mean, you know, for years, the president promised and, you know, he said, 'I am your retribution,' and then as it got closer and then when he got elected, 'Oh, I'm not going to have time for retribution, it's up to them,' and this Truth Social post laid it all bare. Then the president sort of circled back and tried to soften his comments a little bit later, but it's very interesting."

"I would guess being an attorney for Donald Trump, who understands, as Rudy Giuliani understands, as Rudy Giuliani learned, you can say one thing when you're in front of the press, outside of a federal courthouse," Scarborough added. "You go into the courthouse, you better actually stick with the law and stick with the facts. When you're talking to a judge, bad things will happen to you eventually. Maybe not that day, but eventually you will be held to account if you try to lie."

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