Had you time-traveled back to 2023, and started telling people that President Donald Trump’s Justice Department would soon be trying to imprison a woman who had accused him of rape, most would likely have dismissed it as a paranoid #resistance fantasy. Yet now, it appears to be reality. Reporting in both CNN and the New York Times suggests that the DOJ has opened a criminal inquiry into E. Jean Carroll, the journalist who successfully won $88.3 million in damages from Trump after federal juries determined he sexually abused her in 1996 and later defamed her . The allegation now under investigation, per reporting, is that Carroll committed perjury during a deposition for the case. This is, without a doubt, an authoritarian abuse of power: the president weaponizing the Justice Department to go after one of his most prominent and effective critics.…