President Trump talks to the media before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House on Sunday in Washington, D.C.
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Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
President Trump is openly directing the Justice Department to go after his political adversaries, adding to a sense of unease inside the department about job security and ethical obligations.
Even in an era of nonstop social media posts, Trump’s weekend update stopped many government attorneys in their tracks. The president said he wanted to see justice served.
“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” he wrote.
What Trump said couldn’t wait are criminal investigations of his most prominent critics: former FBI Director Jim Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and California Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff.
His post emerged only hours after the top federal prosecutor in northern Virginia left his job under pressure. Erik Siebert had worked closely with Trump’s top DOJ leaders this year, but he concluded he could not seek criminal charges the president wanted against James.
Now Lindsey Halligan, who had been serving as a special assistant to the president, was sworn in Monday as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, though she has no prosecutorial experience. Most recently, she’s been helping Trump remove what he calls “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian museums.
“This attorney general sent a memo on Day 1 that made it clear that Justice Department lawyers were the president’s lawyers, and we are now seeing how that’s playing out and how dangerous it is — how it disintegrates the rule of law,” Stacey Young, a former DOJ attorney who now leads a group called Justice Connection that helps Justice Department workers, said of Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Already this year thousands of employees have left the Justice Department through dismissals and forced resignations. Nearly all of the public integrity unit is gone, as are three in four lawyers in the civil rights division.
Many people inside the department are afraid, Young said. After all, she said, if the president is willing to fire a prosecutor for not pursuing his enemies, anybody at the department could get fired.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump was understandably frustrated with lawmakers and state officials who investigated him.
“The president is fulfilling his promise to restore a Department of Justice that demands accountability, and it is not weaponizing the Department of Justice to demand accountability for those who weaponize the Department of Justice,” Leavitt said.
The Justice Department has traditionally operated with some measure of distance from the White House on criminal investigations. But that distance seems to have closed this year in a way that feels different to longtime observers.
During the presidency of Richard Nixon, public servants at the DOJ felt squeezed between what the president wanted and what the law required. But even Nixon was not as clear and open as Trump is now about what he wanted to happen.
“In this situation you have a president who is openly, brazenly bragging about his ability to seek retribution against his political enemies,” said George Washington University law professor Stephen Saltzburg.
Saltzburg said it looks as if the Trump White House is insisting career prosecutors use their power to make life hell for people who challenge Trump — and on the other side of the coin, to drop investigations or pardon people who support the president, including the people who rioted at the U.S. Capitol four years ago.
Trump’s political appointees took an oath to support and defend the Constitution when they arrived on the job. That oath may soon be put to the test, if it hasn’t already, Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith wrote recently in his newsletter Executive Functions.
“The Article II truism about presidential power cannot justify continued service to a president and administration openly indifferent to law,” Goldsmith wrote. “That is an issue of personal and professional ethics and integrity.”
Federal prosecutors decide which defendants to charge, and when and where. But there are still some outside checks on that power. In recent weeks, grand juries in Washington, D.C., have refused to indict people, and magistrate judges have turned away requests for search warrants.
That skepticism, which followed the federal occupation of D.C., may carry over into other cases. Take the claims by Trump’s critics of selective or vindictive prosecution, for example.
In the past, there’s been a very high bar to succeed in court on that allegation. But now that Trump is so open about his demands, judges may think differently.
“I think the president’s announcement of what he wants the Justice Department to do is so out of line with our history of promoting equal justice under law and fairness that I don’t think that any federal judge is going to look at this and be happy about what the president is doing,” Saltzburg said.
