This is the text of a New York Times article about the chaos in the increasingly misnamed Department of Justice.
“If we’re indicting people because the president hates them,
that’s counter to the whole point of doing my job.”
Mike Romano, former prosecutor in the Public
Integrity Section
“Our job wasn’t to engage in fact-finding investigations;
our job was to find the facts that would fit the narrative.”
Dena Robinson, former lawyer in the Civil Rights
Division
“They didn’t want the ethics office calling them up and
telling them what to do.”
Joseph Tirrell, former director of the Departmental
Ethics Office
The Unraveling of the Justice Department
Sixty attorneys describe a year of chaos and suspicion.
By Emily Bazelon and Rachel PoserPhotographs by Stephen
VossNov. 16, 2025
President Trump’s second term has brought a period of
turmoil and controversy unlike any in the history of the Justice Department.
Trump and his appointees have blasted through the walls designed to protect the
nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency from political influence; they
have directed the course of criminal investigations, openly flouted ethics
rules and caused a breakdown of institutional culture. To date, more than 200
career attorneys have been fired, and thousands more have resigned. (The
Justice Department says many of them have been replaced.)
What was it like inside this institution as Trump’s
officials took control? It’s not an easy question to answer. Justice Department
norms dictate that career attorneys, who are generally nonpartisan public
servants, rarely speak to the press. And the Trump administration’s attempts to
crack down on leaks have made all federal employees fearful of sharing
information.
But the exodus of lawyers has created an opportunity to
understand what’s happening within the agency. We interviewed more than 60
attorneys who recently resigned or were fired from the Justice Department. Much
of what they told us is reported here for the first time.
Beginning with Trump’s first day in office, the lawyers
narrated the events that most alarmed them over the next 10 months. They
described being asked to drop cases for political reasons, to find evidence for
flimsy investigations and to take positions in court they thought had no
legitimate basis. They also talked about the work they and their colleagues
were told to abandon — investigations of terrorist plots, corruption and
white-collar fraud.
Some spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared
retaliation against them or their new employers. We corroborated their accounts
with multiple sources, interviewing their colleagues to confirm the details of
what they described and reviewing court documents and contemporaneous notes. We
also sent a list of questions to the Justice Department and the White House.
“This story is a useless collection of recycled, debunked hearsay from
disgruntled former employees,” a spokeswoman for the D.O.J. responded in an
email. “Targeting the department’s political leadership while ignoring the
questionable conduct of former attorneys who do not have the American people’s
best interest at heart shows exactly how biased this story is, and further
illustrates why Americans are turning away from biased, outdated legacy media
platforms.”
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, sent this
statement: “These are nothing more than pathetic complaints lodged by
anti-Trump government workers. President Trump is working on behalf of the
millions of Americans who voted for him all across the country, not the D.C.
bureaucrats who try to stymie the American people’s agenda at every turn.”
The attorneys who spoke to us for this project, many of whom
have spent decades in government service, disagree.
On his first day in office, President Trump made it clear
that lawyers loyal to him would lead the Justice Department. One of his
personal defense attorneys, Emil Bove, became the temporary No. 2, and Trump
nominated another of his lawyers, Todd Blanche, to take the position
permanently once the Senate confirmed him.
Trump also undid one of the largest investigations in the
Justice Department’s history by pardoning or commuting the sentences of the
nearly 1,600 rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The
group included more than 200 defendants who were convicted of
assaulting law enforcement officers.
Prosecutors said they were in disbelief when President Trump
pardoned or commuted the sentences of Jan. 6 rioters. Ashley Gilbertson
for The New York Times
Ryan Crosswell, Public Integrity Section, which handles
corruption cases: When I saw it was Blanche and Bove, I was actually
relieved. OK, it’s gross that they were Trump’s personal attorneys, but before
that they were federal prosecutors in New York. They’ve done the job. They know
the prosecutors’ code. We’re the only lawyers whose job is not to get the best
result for our client. Our job is to get justice. Sometimes that means losing
or walking into court and saying we made a mistake.
But then things were 10 times worse than I thought they
would be.
Liz Oyer, pardon attorney: We had no knowledge
that the Jan. 6 pardons were coming on Day 1. Everybody was concerned that our
office was being completely sidelined from the review process.
Gregory Rosen, chief of the breach and assault unit of
the Capitol Siege Section, which prosecuted the Jan. 6 rioters: When I
was alerted to the pardons, a lot of thoughts ran through my head about how
absurd this could get, but first I had to do my job. We had to ask, Did we
believe the order was lawful and constitutional?
My team and I determined that it was. The president has the
right to pardon people and commute their sentences. So then it was a blitzkrieg
of hundreds of cases. We stepped to it.
I was numb. As career prosecutors, we don’t talk about our
feelings. We’re not partisans. We’re public servants just doing the job. Early
on, we stayed away from using emotional language about our own reactions.
Mike Romano, Jan. 6 prosecutor: Anyone who spent
any time working on Jan. 6 cases saw how violent a day that was. I’d spent four
years living with that day, the things done to people. It’s incredibly
demoralizing to see something you worked on for four years wiped away by a lie
— I mean the idea that prosecution of the rioters was a grave national
injustice. We had strong evidence against every person we prosecuted. And I
knew that if they’re going to wipe all of that away based on a lie, either I’ll
be fired as retaliation or pretext or asked to do something unethical. Or both.
Until that point, I’d hoped the second Trump term would be
similar to the first one, or similar enough for a while. Then the pardons came
down and I knew, in light of that, there is no way I can stay.
Trump appointed Ed Martin, another longtime ally, as interim
U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Martin had promoted Trump’s
baseless claims of election fraud in 2020 and then turned to the cause of
defending the Jan. 6 rioters. He had never worked as a prosecutor.
Martin soon fired 15 attorneys in the Capitol Siege Section
who prosecuted the Jan. 6 defendants. They joined more than a dozen other
prosecutors fired for working under the special counsel, Jack Smith, on the
criminal investigations of President Trump. According to the D.O.J.’s new
leadership, they could not be trusted to “faithfully implement” the president’s
agenda.
Gregory Rosen, Capitol Siege Section: When 15
employees were fired from the Capitol Siege Section, I was the angriest I’ve
ever been. Most of them were younger attorneys. I’d hired them. They came from
firms, federal and state government, all over. But some naïve part of me
thought, Maybe this is the new leadership’s “pound of flesh.”
Prosecutor, Capitol Siege Section: It was
inconceivable to me they’d fire people for no reason except they’d worked on
cases that were now disfavored. People like me, who are career attorneys, work
within a structure. We don’t have much latitude. To be told that you are being
punished for your decisions, when you were following guidance created by very
talented and skilled prosecutors above you, which judges blessed for the most
part — it’s completely bizarre. It flipped the culture of the institution. It’s
a culture now of fear. And they are losing people all the time, very good
people, who were the future of the department.
Peter Carr, senior communications adviser: I had
never seen prosecutors targeted simply because the case they brought was
something that current D.O.J. leadership did not like. How can you take these
very difficult and challenging cases involving high-profile individuals with
the knowledge that at some point in the future, someone is going to end your
career because of it?
“I laughed when I found out we were demoted. But it was
clear to me just how truly vindictive this would get.”
Gregory Rosen, former chief of the breach and assault
unit of the Capitol Siege Section
Pam Bondi, another former Trump defense lawyer, was sworn in
as attorney general. She issued a first-day flurry of 14 memos that radically
redefined the department’s mission. One mandated that government attorneys
“zealously defend” the president’s agenda, no longer giving them the latitude
to decline to sign a brief or appear in court because of a personal judgment
about a case — a longstanding practice in the department. Another pulled back
on enforcing the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a watchdog law that requires
people to disclose when they’re working for international powers.
Pam Bondi was sworn in as the U.S. attorney general on Feb.
5 and immediately set about redefining the roles of Justice Department
employees. Eric Lee for The New York Times
Katie Chamblee-Ryan, Civil Rights Division: When
Bondi’s 14 emails started coming in, one was crazier than the next. It’s hard
to explain how shocking that was. In the Biden administration, there were all
these checks in place to make sure we weren’t acting on our political biases.
It was so by the book. It was too slow, to be honest. Now that seemed farcical.
Lawyer, Federal Programs Branch, which defends legal
challenges against government agencies: Bondi’s memo on zealous
advocacy suggested we could be disciplined or fired for pushing back on legal
or factual claims we believed were unsupported. That threw up red flags for me.
It was just completely improper.
Dena Robinson, Civil Rights Division: Some of us
referred to them as “Pam Bondi’s mixtape,” both because they were so random and
there were so many dropped all at once. One thing that stuck out to me was her
insistence that we served at the pleasure of the president and that we were enforcing
the president’s priorities. We swore an oath to uphold the Constitution.
Lawyer, National Security Division: Bondi
signaled the Foreign Agents Registration Act would be enforced only in very
limited circumstances after the Justice Department had done a lot over the last
decade to give it teeth. At its core, FARA is a transparency statute, to let
the American public know when foreign actors engage in political activities or
try to influence U.S. discourse. If you’re concerned about foreign money and
influence in politics, it’s a bad time to go dark.
In a memo,
Emil Bove, as acting deputy attorney general, directed Danielle Sassoon, the
acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, to dismiss
corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York City. Bove said he
ordered the dismissal in part because the pending prosecution impacted Adams’s
ability to “support critical, ongoing federal efforts” to enforce immigration
laws.
Sassoon wrote to
Bondi, saying she couldn’t make a good-faith argument to dismiss the charges,
asking for a meeting and offering to resign. Bondi didn’t respond. Instead,
Bove took the unusual step of bringing the case to another unit, the Public
Integrity Section (PIN), which is based in Washington and was created after
Watergate to oversee enforcement of public corruption laws.
Emil Bove in April 2024, when he was a defense lawyer for
Trump. He would later be named acting deputy attorney general. Dave
Sanders for The New York Times
Prosecutor, U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern
District of New York: The New York Times reported that Bove accepted
Danielle’s resignation. That’s how we all found out. A lot of people were
shellshocked and upset, and also proud, I think. My impression was that people
thought the way Danielle handled it was right and admirable.
Ryan Crosswell, PIN: Bove’s memo to Sassoon was
such a drastic change from anything we’d ever seen.
Mike Romano, Jan. 6 and PIN: Then Bove
instructed the acting chief of PIN, John Keller, to dismiss the case. He
resigned, effective that day.
The whole staff of PIN was called into a meeting, around 25
attorneys plus support staff. John told us what happened. We were stunned.
Three of the four deputy chiefs of PIN were there. (The fourth deputy chief was
on maternity leave.) I recall them saying they anticipated being asked to
dismiss the case, and if so, they’d resign too. John was pretty matter-of-fact
and stoic. You could tell he was affected, but he was trying to be a good
leader. Some people cried.
Afterward, we went to a bar a couple of blocks from the
office and started drinking. This is, like, 2:30 p.m. I had my one beer. I told
John how much I appreciated what he’d done. I went home, and after that, the
deputies were called into a meeting, asked to dismiss the case and resigned.
Crosswell: On the morning of Friday, Feb. 14, we
got an email for a video call with Bove at 9:45. It was intense. The camera
made clicking noises as it zoomed in on Bove at the end of a long table. It was
surreal. We were watching one another’s reactions onscreen.
Bove’s spiel was short. He directed us to sign the motion to
dismiss the Adams charges. They could have done it themselves but I believe
they wanted our imprimatur. We all huddled in a conference room and tried to
figure out what to do. We had an hour. There were three options. One, someone
signs. Two, we all resign. Three, we call their bluff, don’t do anything and
see if they fire us. I recommended Option 3. I’m still thinking we have civil
service protections. But someone said if you don’t sign, they could say you’re
insubordinate, and that could affect your security clearance, which could
affect getting hired for other jobs. I backed off.
Romano: I thought 100 percent he’d fire everyone
because no one would sign. Then one of the lawyers in the section agreed to
file the motion to dismiss. I didn’t know him super well. He was older, on the
verge of retirement. People saw it as protecting the rest of us, not trying to
advance himself.
Crosswell: To my mind, he did something pretty
heroic. Then there was a daylong negotiation over how the motion would be
worded. It was important to us to be clear we were effectively put at gunpoint.
Before, I said, I don’t want to leave because I don’t want a hack to replace
me. But I started writing my resignation letter. I’m a Marine officer. Aside
from how wrong it was to drop the case for political reasons, I felt so mad
that our deputies had lost their jobs for protecting us.
Katie Chamblee-Ryan, Civil Rights Division: What
happened to PIN was an alarm blasting everywhere. That’s when I was like,
They’re just going to break every rule. They don’t care. That’s when private
meetings started among staff to talk about whether you have more legal
protections if you resign or are fired.
Trump signed an executive
order initiating mass cuts to the federal work force at the direction
of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the effort led by Elon Musk
to slash federal spending. The order called for large-scale layoffs and
directed the heads of federal agencies to fill positions only with DOGE
approval.
Defending the order in court, the government denied that the
president had given DOGE authority over personnel actions. Judge Tanya S.
Chutkan, who ultimately ruled in favor of the government, suggested this
statement could be false. She reminded the Justice Department lawyers of their
“duty
to make truthful representations to the court” and issued a warning to them
by citing Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which allows lawyers
to be disciplined for filings that aren’t based on sound facts.
Elon Musk in the Oval Office in February, when his
Department of Government Efficiency was tasked with slashing spending and mass
layoffs of federal workers. Eric Lee for The New York Times
Second Lawyer, Federal Programs Branch: When
Judge Chutkan’s order came down, that was brutal. Our bar licenses would be on
the line if someone associated with DOGE lied about things we had to represent
in court. One of the lawyers in the case said he emailed the political
leadership about what the judge said about possible sanctions and they said,
“NBD” — no big deal.
I realized that the line attorneys were just pawns. If we
got sacrificed on the way to taking these cases to the Supreme Court, that
would just be how it was. Out of 110 lawyers who were in my branch in January,
more than 75 have left. (The Justice Department said the point of the “NBD”
email “was to assure the team they had done nothing wrong” and that about half
of the 75 lawyers who have left have been replaced.)
The Justice Department asked a court to freeze a
legal challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision during the
Biden administration to tighten one of its most important air-quality
standards, the limit on soot. The E.P.A. found in 2021 that the new standard
would save thousands of lives and that the health benefits would outweigh the
cost of compliance. The Trump administration put the litigation on hold in
preparation for rolling back the regulation.
Sarah Buckley, Environment and Natural Resources
Division: We made blanket requests to courts to put cases on hold
where we were defending E.P.A. rules. The soot case was a real gut punch to me.
Soot pollution is a major public health problem. The rule we were defending
would reduce the number of people getting sick and dying, from pollution-caused
diseases, by a lot.
We’d just had oral argument in December. I thought we were
going to win. It felt like victory was being snatched away.
Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney in Washington, demoted
seven senior supervisors and leaders in the office. It was the latest step in
the purge of career attorneys involved in prosecuting the Jan. 6 rioters as
well as two Trump allies, Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro. The administration
had already removed at least a dozen senior leaders from their positions across
the Justice Department, giving some the choice to join the Sanctuary Cities
Enforcement Working Group, which was newly formed to target jurisdictions that
refused to cooperate with federal authorities on immigration enforcement.
Tovah Calderon, principal deputy
chief of the Appellate Section in the Civil Rights Division: They
assigned me and my chief to this new working group and then essentially didn’t
give us anything to do. Most of us had no experience in immigration law. They
took the most experienced, talented people out of their positions, and it had
an immediate effect. They were able to change the work of our offices more
easily without us there.
Gregory Rosen, Capitol Siege Section: I laughed
when I found out we were demoted. But it was clear to me just how truly
vindictive this would get. All of us collectively had over 100 years of
prosecutorial experience. The brain drain was beginning. Maybe the Justice
Department survives but loses all the experts.
I’d been promised the position of deputy of narcotics and
violent crime in D.C. But instead I was demoted to the Early Case Assessment
section to review arrest warrants, among other things. While the job is
important, because this is where we initiate criminal charges, I assumed Martin
viewed it as entry-level work and was punishing us.
Ejaz Baluch, former lawyer in the Civil Rights
Division
Trump-appointed leaders in the Civil Rights Division began
directing career attorneys to investigate the University of California system
for antisemitism and employment discrimination. These investigations were
overseen by Leo Terrell, a former Democrat turned Fox News commentator selected
by the president to head his multiagency task force on antisemitism. They
marked a new stage in the escalating attack on college campuses by the
administration, which had already canceled billions of dollars in federal grants
and contracts, and opened investigations into 60 universities for what it
described as a failure to protect Jewish students.
Ejaz Baluch, Civil Rights Division: The way we
did investigations drastically changed. Normally, line attorneys investigate
cases and follow the facts and law on a nonpartisan basis. If we discovered a
law was violated, we recommended a lawsuit to the leadership of the division.
It was bottom up.
That process turned upside down. It was outcome driven. The
prime example I saw was the investigation into the U.C. school system about
allegations of antisemitism on campus. In March, Andrea Lucas, who Trump
appointed to be acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,
filed what’s called a Commissioner’s Charge, which is essentially a complaint
of employment discrimination. It was my section’s job to investigate it. We
were told: “You have 30 days to do an investigation and give us a Justification
Memo” — which is what we write after we conclude there is a
legal violation.
Multiple teams of attorneys went to Berkeley, U.C.L.A., U.C.
Davis and U.C.S.F. Mostly they didn’t find sufficient evidence to bring suit.
The teams were so scared that in real time, every day, they were summarizing
and reporting up to office management, back to Michael Gates, the deputy
assistant attorney general, to create a paper trail for how they were not finding
evidence.
Julia Quinn, Civil Rights Division: Leo Terrell,
who ran the antisemitism task force, sells merch, and one of the very few
people in our office who stayed behind, who got in with the administration,
bought a hat, one of his “Leo 2.0” hats. He had it in the background of a Zoom.
Ejaz Baluch: The only school, it became clear,
where there might be a violation was U.C.L.A. One colleague said, “We have to
feed something to the wolves.” The team concluded that the complaint process at
the school was broken. Some professors we interviewed really did suffer on
campus. They were harassed by groups of students.
But the D.O.J. demand letter to U.C.L.A. asked for $1
billion in damages. We thought, $1 billion? They are making that up out of thin
air. There is no way the damages we found added up to anything like that
amount.
Trump issued the second in a series of executive orders
punishing elite law firms that had performed legal work for prominent Democrats
or helped investigate the president’s ties to Russia and his efforts to
overturn the 2020 election. The order accused the firm Perkins Coie of
“dishonest and dangerous activity” and racial discrimination; it directed
federal agencies to terminate the firm’s government contracts, stripped its
employees of their security clearances and barred them from federal buildings, including
courthouses. Perkins Coie and three other firms sued the Trump administration
to block the executive orders, arguing that they violated the First Amendment.
Dena Robinson: One of my colleagues was pulled
into working on the investigations. Every single time that this colleague
pointed out factual or legal or ethical issues, the people running them just
shrugged.
For example, the administration was saying they wanted to go
after Perkins Coie because of Trump’s commitment to ending discriminatory
D.E.I. policies. The idea of the investigation was that Perkins Coie supposedly
engaged in illegal discrimination against white men. But Perkins Coie is an
extremely white firm — only 3 percent of the partners are Black. When my
colleague pointed that out, the leadership didn’t care. They’d already reached
their conclusion. They continued instructing my colleague to just find the
evidence for it.
Our job wasn’t to engage in fact-finding investigations; our
job was to find the facts that would fit the narrative that the administration
already had. That is not how the division worked. My colleague told me that the
experience demoralized and eventually broke them. It ended up being the reason
they left the Justice Department.
PIN, which in part oversaw corruption cases brought by U.S.
attorneys’ offices across the country, was largely stripped
of the authority to bring its own prosecutions. Most of the lawyers in
the department were reassigned, eventually leaving only two, down from 38 at
the beginning of Trump’s second term.
Mike Romano, Jan. 6 and PIN: At the meeting
where D.O.J. leadership told our managers that PIN would shrink dramatically,
one of them said the administration didn’t trust lawyers in D.C.
You can imagine the level of experience it takes to
prosecute complex public-corruption cases. In New York, for example, the U.S.
attorneys have the personnel, in size and experience, to do this. But some U.S.
attorneys offices are much smaller. Maybe they don’t have anyone who has done
one of these big corruption cases before. PIN was dedicated to these cases.
The acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Alina Habba —
another former personal lawyer of Trump’s — asked to dismiss a case against two
American executives charged with authorizing $2 million in bribes to obtain a
construction permit in India.
Trump has long disparaged the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act,
which was the basis of the New Jersey case, for supposedly putting American
companies at a disadvantage. The law bars any company that sells securities
like stocks in the U.S. from paying bribes to foreign officials. In February,
he issued an order pausing its
enforcement. (Later, scaled-back enforcement resumed with a
smaller team.) The Justice Department also disbanded the
team that prosecuted
foreign officials for public corruption in their countries based on
money-laundering in the U.S. — a team that recovered hundreds of millions of
dollars stolen from poor countries.
Alexis Loeb, Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section
and later deputy chief of the Capitol Siege Section: There was a whole
series of signals that the administration would de-emphasize the prosecution of
corruption. Our laws gave American companies cover so they could resist
shakedowns to pay bribes, and it’s way too black-and-white to say they create an
uneven playing field. The laws were often used to prosecute foreign companies
and individuals. People across the political spectrum saw promoting the rule of
law abroad as important for promoting American interests and national security.
You could see these ideals fall away quickly in the moves the administration
made.
Prosecutor, Fraud Section: We were ensuring that
anyone who used U.S. banking or our stock markets was complying with the law. I
would meet with my foreign counterparts abroad, and they’d say this is a good
form of American exceptionalism. It really did change compliance globally.
I don’t think anyone expected a full pause. It was so
sweeping. And we were hearing all these reports of lobbying to affect how
individual cases were being handled, at Mar-a-Lago and elsewhere. When the New
Jersey case was dismissed on the eve of trial, that showed how much we weren’t
in normal times anymore.
Harmeet K. Dhillon, a civil liberties lawyer who has
represented several conservative activists and helped Trump challenge the 2020
election results, was sworn in as the head of the Civil Rights Division, which
has a long history of redressing discrimination.
Dena Robinson, Civil Rights Division: Harmeet
Dhillon didn’t seem to have any interest in interacting with career staff. We
knew what she was saying on radio and podcast appearances about how the career
staff didn’t want to do any of the work of the administration and that we
needed to be cleared out.
Lawyer, Federal Coordination and Compliance section,
Civil Rights Division: People had sound machines at their desks
because they were convinced that everyone and everything was listening to us.
It really was psychological warfare.
Julia Quinn, Civil Rights Division: Leadership
started dismissing racial-discrimination cases. They wanted us to include
language that suggested the cases had been brought under an illegitimate theory
of discrimination.
Jen Swedish, deputy chief of the Employment Litigation
Section, Civil Rights Division: To demand lawyers put language in
filings suggesting that we had filed a frivolous lawsuit — we thought that was
unethical. We worried about our bar licenses.
Brian McEntire, Civil Rights Division: My goal
was always to become an attorney in the Civil Rights Division. That was my
dream. I ended up working a lot on fire department cases. In Cobb County, Ga.,
we got information that even though African Americans and whites were applying
for positions at about an equal rate over the previous decade, 90 percent of
the hires had been white and 10 percent had been African American. And we
didn’t quite understand why that was.
So we did an investigation and found out that there was a
credit check that was disproportionately knocking out African Americans,
particularly for student loan debt. And when we asked them why they were doing
that, their response was essentially, Well, if a firefighter is deeply in debt
and he’s fighting a fire, he might steal grandma’s pearls. So we brought suit.
In February, we got a note saying that the attorney general
wanted us to withdraw the case. The next day, division leadership insisted that
we put additional language in the notice of dismissal that implied it was all
about reverse discrimination.
I didn’t know, quite frankly, if I could sign it. If I have
to say what I argued before was illegal, then I could have been accused of
misleading the court, which could have ended up with me being disciplined,
sanctioned and my bar license revoked. So I did not sign it. My colleagues
didn’t sign it. They pulled us all into a room, and we were all prepared to get
fired because none of us were going to sign. My boss signed a modified version
of the notice of withdrawal on our behalf.
We also had a racial-discrimination case involving the sole
African American attorney working for the Mississippi State Senate, who, during
the years she worked there, was paid less than half of what her similarly
situated white colleagues were making. It was as clear-cut a case of disparate
racial treatment you could find. The Senate stalled the case until Trump’s
appointees could come in and order our section to drop it. When you talk about
the rule of law and treating people fairly and equally, that’s obviously a slap
in the face.
Liz Oyer, former pardon attorney
Liz Oyer, the former pardon attorney at the Justice
Department, testified before Congress about the circumstances of her firing.
Oyer lost her job after she refused to recommend restoring gun rights to the
actor Mel Gibson, who had a misdemeanor conviction for domestic violence. The
Justice Department said the disagreement over Gibson was unrelated to the
decision to fire Oyer.
Liz Oyer, pardon attorney: In February, I was
assigned to a working group that the attorney general created to restore gun
rights to people convicted of crimes. I was asked to identify suitable
recipients, so I looked for people who had committed minor low-level offenses
in the very distant past and demonstrated exemplary conduct in the community
for many years since their conviction. The pool was narrowed to nine people.
And then I was asked to add Mel Gibson to the list.
Mel Gibson has a history of domestic violence, and I’m well
aware from my experience and training that it is very dangerous for a person
with a domestic-violence history to possess a firearm. As attorney general,
Bondi has the power to restore rights without my blessing. My recommendation
was sought, I believe, to give a veneer of legitimacy to what was actually a
political favor for a friend of the president. I said I couldn’t recommend
restoration. And then I waited for the other shoe to drop.
I finally got a phone call from Paul Perkins, an associate
deputy attorney general. It was strongly suggested to me that Mel Gibson is
someone who had a personal relationship with the president and that really
should be all I needed to know. I felt sick. I literally did not sleep at all
that night. I wrote back still not making the recommendation. At 2 o’clock that
afternoon, I was in a meeting when I learned that I was fired. My deputy told
me to grab my bag and literally pulled me out of the room by my elbow and told
me in the hallway that she had gotten a call saying that there were security
officers in my office waiting to walk me out of the building. I threw
everything into a grocery bag and walked out of the office. I passed a lot of
people I knew on the way out, and everybody was just looking on in shock.
Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, issued a
statement saying that I was lying about the circumstances leading up to my
firing. Then I was invited by the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee to
testify in front of Congress. The administration sent armed U.S. Marshals to my
home to deliver a letter warning me about testifying. A career employee who was
still at the department helped me get it called off before they got to my
house, where my teenager was home alone. I felt the purpose was to intimidate
me. And I think it was intended to send a message to other department
employees, too, who might be thinking about speaking up.
I needed a lawyer. I spent the entire weekend calling all of
the lawyers that I know at law firms around D.C. Everybody I talked to was
saying: “Thank you so much for what you’re doing. We’ll do whatever we can
behind the scenes to support you.” But nobody actually wanted to sit behind me
at a congressional hearing. Nobody wanted to put their name on a letter to Todd
Blanche.
Unfortunately, only Democrats attended the hearing. There
were no Republicans. It has really perplexed me that there’s not a shared level
of bipartisan concern about what’s happening inside the Department of Justice.
A senior lawyer in the Office of Immigration Litigation,
Erez Reuveni, acknowledged in court that the Trump administration wrongfully
deported Kilmar
Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran construction worker who lived in Maryland for a
dozen years, to El Salvador, where he was being held in a notorious
maximum-security prison. In previous administrations, including Trump’s first
term, the government routinely worked to get people back when they were
deported without legal authority. In this case, however, Bondi put Reuveni on
leave and then fired him.
David McConnell, director of the Office of Immigration
Litigation: Erez was one of the more aggressive litigators over the
years. He vigorously defended Trump 1 policies. I thought he’d be the go-to
person for defending them in the second term. When he got fired, everyone doing
district court work thought, This could happen to me. Traditionally, we didn’t
have a lot of turnover in the office. But now I’ve heard that around 60 out of
320 attorneys have left since February.
Sarah Buckley, Environment and Natural Resources
Division: When Erez Reuveni got fired, that really affected morale. He
was working under the gun with his clients to say, This isn’t a reasonable way
to proceed in court — what’s a reasonable way? And they punished him for it.
Ryan Crosswell, PIN: To do our job, you have to
be willing to do the right thing when no one is watching. If prosecutors are
just going into court to win at all costs, think of all the other things taking
place you’ll never know about.
“He was working under the gun with his clients to say, This isn’t a reasonable way to proceed in court — what’s a reasonable way? And they punished him for it.”
Sarah Buckley, former lawyer in the Environment and
Natural Resources Division
The Associated Press obtained an internal memo sent by
Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump-appointed head of the Civil Rights Division,
instructing voting-rights lawyers to focus on investigating voter fraud and to
“vigorously enforce” a Trump executive order transforming how elections are
run. The order purported to institute new voter-ID requirements, grant DOGE
access to voter data and change the rules of absentee voting and the counting
of absentee ballots. Courts later blocked parts of the order.
Anna Baldwin, Civil Rights Division: When the
president issued his executive order related to voting, the Civil Rights
Division was initially charged with defending it. But many provisions of it
were an unlawful power grab — under our Constitution, Congress and the states
set the rules of elections, not the president.
Lawyer, Voting Section, Civil Rights Division: The
Trump administration had already made us dismiss our Georgia statewide lawsuit
for intentionally suppressing Black votes. They didn’t ask for any information
about it. They just told us to dismiss it. Then they issued a press release
condemning the Biden administration for bringing the lawsuit — accusing us, the
line attorneys, of fabricating evidence. It was obvious they didn’t look at the
memo explaining what the evidence was.
Lawyer, Housing Section, Civil Rights Division: I
was detailed to work in the Voting Section enforcing the National Voter
Registration Act, which says states have an obligation to make sure that their
voter rolls are accurate. We were tasked with obtaining states’ voter rolls, by
suing them if necessary. Leadership said they had a DOGE person who could go
through all the data and compare it to the Department of Homeland Security data
and Social Security data. The idea was, We want to identify undocumented
immigrants that have registered to vote. There was no pre-existing evidence
this is a problem.
I had a concern that the data would be used not for purging
voter rolls of people who aren’t eligible to vote but for broader immigration
enforcement. I had never before told an opposing party, Hey, I want this
information and I’m saying I want it for this reason, but I actually know it’s
going to be used for these other reasons. That was dishonest. It felt like a
perversion of the role of the Civil Rights Division.
A memo from F.B.I. officials ordered field offices to devote
one-third of their time to immigration enforcement — which meant scaling back
investigations related to national security, corporate fraud and violent crime.
Gregory Rosen, Capitol Siege Section: The
F.B.I. had to divest serious resources from investigations of violent crime,
gun and drug trafficking and child exploitation. Agents were diverted from
those cases because they had to be on the street doing immigration roundups.
Prosecutor, D.C. metro area: It’s unprecedented
to shift resources away from national security to this degree. Virginia and
D.C. have the most important offices for counterterrorism and espionage. We get
cases from the Middle East, long and complex investigations of terrorist threats
from abroad and also domestically. In the Eastern District, there were 12 to 14
lawyers in the national security unit and now there are four, with no deputy or
chief. In D.C., the national security unit is down about 50 percent. I was
recently on the floor where F.B.I. agents work on domestic terrorism and it was
completely hollowed out.
You have to have good, experienced, trained people doing
this work on a daily basis. If you don’t, because you demand they do
immigration shifts, there is real danger to national security and public
safety.
Prosecutor, Ohio: We’re in northern Ohio. We
don’t have an immigration problem here, but our agents — I.R.S. and Secret
Service and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — were getting
detailed to Homeland Security. I was getting frustrated. We have a certain
amount of time to bring charges, and often we don’t find out right away when a
business is committing fraud, so we may lose a year or two. Then it takes time
to do these investigations. Agents have to get the records and do the
interviews. We don’t have time if they’re riding around trying to hit daily
immigration quotas.
The Trump Justice Department withdrew from a consent decree
with Minneapolis intended to address a pattern of racially discriminatory
policing and excessive use of force, based on a D.O.J. investigation in the
aftermath of the 2020 murder of George Floyd. The Justice Department also
refused to stand by the factual findings about police abuses in Minneapolis and
five other cities, retracting
them from the record.
Katie Chamblee-Ryan, Civil Rights Division: I’d
left D.O.J. by then. I found out when I started getting a million texts. People
were saying, “I’m sorry.” At first I had no idea what they meant. I expected
something bad, but it was so much more total and cruel than I imagined. The new
leadership was erasing our work.
Withdrawing the findings was completely unprecedented. And
if you read the Minneapolis findings and the remedies we negotiated with the
city, you’ll see they document retaliation against journalists or civilians who
film the police, the use of weapons or tear gas indiscriminately in a crowd or
law enforcement agents hiding their identities. And we’re seeing federal agents
do all those things now.
There was a statement from the Justice Department in court
saying you can’t do these things. They took that statement away, and now the
federal government is the most prominent violator.
Trump pardoned a series of white-collar offenders, including
Charles Scott, who had been convicted last year in Ohio of helping the chief executive of
his company manipulate its stock value.
Prosecutor, Ohio: Scott was sentenced to 42
months for a multimillion-dollar fraud. His family was wealthy. He spent all of
two weeks in jail. That put a damper on a lot of the work we were doing, to
know that someone who defrauded everyday folks in Ohio was able to find their
way to a pardon.
Afterward, defense attorneys are telling us they can’t get
their clients to take good or reasonable plea offers because they felt they’re
better off spending their money on a political donation, drawing Trump’s
attention, and getting the case dismissed or going to trial and getting a
pardon.
Alexis Loeb, Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section: When
prosecutors bring a new case, do they need to think about how the Trump
administration views the defendant? Those are not the kinds of considerations
prosecutors are taught they should pay attention to — very much the opposite.
The Justice Department subpoenaed more than 20 doctors and
hospitals that provide gender-related care to minors (including puberty
suppressants, hormone therapy and surgeries) accusing them of having “mutilated
children in the service of a warped ideology.” Trump had already issued a
series of executive orders dismantling protections for trans people, banning
them from military service and allowing open discrimination by federal
workplaces. The subpoenas demanded patient information protected by privacy law.
Barbara Schwabauer, Civil Rights Division: It’s
one thing to say we’re no longer going to stand up for trans people in this
administration, we’re not going to file briefs in support of them. But to
affirmatively go after them? I could not in good conscience continue to be a
part of that. These are teenagers.
Lawyer, Federal Coordination and Compliance section,
Civil Rights Division: Under the Biden administration, the Justice
Department had joined private plaintiffs in suing Alabama over its ban on
gender-affirming care. Now attorneys on the case were told by leadership to
produce, on a rolling basis, all communication that they had with all parties
and each other. It felt like we were being investigated by our own office. It
was very threatening and ominous. Like, what do we think they’re going to do
with that information? Nothing good.
Bondi fired around 20 prosecutors and support staffers who
worked on the special counsel Jack Smith’s investigations into Trump’s efforts
to overturn the 2020 presidential election and his refusal to return classified
documents after leaving office. One of the lawyers fired that day was Joseph
Tirrell, the department’s top ethics adviser.
Peter Carr, senior communications adviser: These
were support staffers, you know, the people who helped us with managing the
operations of the office or with travel arrangements and reimbursements. You
have paralegals who help prepare documents for discovery. The idea that someone
can be terminated from the Justice Department for a case they were assigned to
work on is something that has never happened before.
Joseph Tirrell, director of the Departmental Ethics
Office: I had done some work for Jack Smith, so I assumed that would
bring some heat down on me. But in my gut, I also think they didn’t want the
ethics office calling them up and telling them what to do.
As a federal employee, you’re restricted from accepting
gifts from anyone because of your position. I briefed Ms. Bondi about the
ethics rules, and we talked about accepting gifts from employees in the
department — for the most part, leaders can’t accept gifts from their
subordinates.
We had about a 10-minute conversation about whether or not
she could accept challenge coins from offices within the department. And that
seemed to me an odd thing given everything else that we might have discussed.
But that started to be a recurring theme with the A.G.’s office. They didn’t
want to return gifts, they didn’t want to not accept gifts, whatever the
source.
We got a request about some cigars from Conor McGregor and a
soccer ball from FIFA. And I felt like I really had to go to the mattress to
convince the A.G.’s office: You can pay for the item or you can return the item
or you can throw the item away. There’s no other way to do this. (A Justice
Department spokeswoman said that, after consulting with ethics officials, the
soccer ball was accepted on behalf of the department and the cigars were
destroyed.)
And then I got a call from the general counsel at the F.B.I.
about changing exceptions to the gift rules because his boss, Kash Patel, felt
like he should be able to accept more expensive gifts. I reminded him that his
client was not Mr. Patel, but the United States.
Trump demanded the prosecution of several of his perceived
political enemies, including the former F.B.I. director James Comey and New
York’s attorney general, Letitia James. Based on the results of investigations
by career prosecutors, Erik Siebert, the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern
District of Virginia, told senior Justice Department officials that he did not
think there was sufficient evidence to indict Comey or James. Siebert was
forced to resign under pressure from Trump, who then installed one of his
attorneys, Lindsey Halligan, an insurance lawyer who had never prosecuted a
case before.
With no career attorneys agreeing to handle the case,
Halligan personally asked a grand jury to indict Comey on charges related to
allegations that he made a false statement to Congress. Halligan later obtained
an indictment of James for mortgage fraud. Comey and James pleaded not guilty.
Mike Romano, Jan. 6 and PIN: No one
should be charged with a crime because the president says “Do this,” and the
people he has installed do what he says. The decision should be in the hands of
people who know the evidence and have experience evaluating it and working
criminal cases. If I was in that office, I’d wonder what the point is of
exercising my professional judgment. If we’re indicting people because the
president hates them, that’s counter to the whole point of doing my job.
Prosecutor, D.C. metro area: The thing is, Erik
bragged about how close he was with Trump’s former lawyers at D.O.J. But it
didn’t save him.
We all knew Erik said no, and the career attorneys
recommended against it. So for Halligan to go ahead was enraging. The Eastern
District of Virginia has a long reputation of being very proficient and
competent, and it all vanished.
This is the whole problem with the White House directing
criminal investigations. This is what you get. We won’t get the benefit of
credibility from judges that we had, and I’m even more concerned about juries.
I really fear the Justice Department — which has a good record of convicting
dangerous, violent people — won’t see the same success rate, because people
will think it’s not on the level.
Ryan Crosswell, PIN: The Eastern
District of Virginia handles some of the biggest espionage and counterterrorism
cases. Now it’s being led by someone who doesn’t know what she is doing.
The Times reported that Trump demanded $230 million in
compensation for being prosecuted following his first term. Bondi and Blanche,
Trump’s former lawyers, could decide whether Trump receives the money. (Asked
about the $230 million demand, a spokesman for Trump’s personal legal team
emailed, “President Trump continues to fight back against all Democrat-led
Witch Hunts, including the ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ hoax and the
un-Constitutional and un-American weaponization of our justice system by
Crooked Joe Biden and his handlers.”)
Bondi testifying at a hearing for the Senate Judiciary Committee in October. Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
Mike Romano, Jan. 6 and PIN: It seems comically
corrupt. First, there was nothing inappropriate about this prosecution. Second,
he won the presidency, so how was he harmed to the tune of $230 million? And
third, he has appointed the people tasked with deciding whether he gets the
money, and we’ve seen that his appointees do what he wants. It’s as if he’s
robbing the Treasury to pay himself.
Prosecutor, D.C. metro area: It shows the
president has no regard for ethics or rules or the appearance of impropriety or
any of the guardrails we used to have before. It feels like this should be
criminal, but he’s acting as if he has immunity, which he does, from the
Supreme Court.
The Mar-a-Lago case was buttoned up. They begged him to give
them the documents so it wouldn’t rise to the level of the F.B.I. going in to
get them. To say there’s abuse here — it’s absurd.
Two career prosecutors in Washington were put on leave
because of a sentencing
memo they filed in the case of Taylor Taranto. Taranto was convicted
in May of crimes including illegal possession of firearms and ammunition after
he showed up in Obama’s neighborhood in Washington with two guns and hundreds
of rounds in his van. The sentencing memo mentioned that Taranto reposted a
social media post by Trump, which disclosed Obama’s address. The memo also said
that Taranto was accused of participating in the Jan. 6 riot. (Trump pardoned
him for the Jan. 6 charges before trial.)
The next day, another pair of prosecutors substituted
a new
sentencing memo that did not mention Trump’s post or Taranto’s
connection to Jan. 6. At the sentencing hearing, Judge Carl J. Nichols, a Trump
nominee, praised the prosecutors who were put on leave for upholding “the
highest standards of professionalism” in the case.
Mike Romano, Jan. 6 and PIN: I’ve worked with
both of those prosecutors, and Judge Nichols was right — they are excellent.
With that sentencing memo, they were just doing their jobs. They were stating
facts that were already known. Jan. 6 was relevant because the defendant’s participation
in the riot is relevant to the risk of his future criminality.
Prosecutor, D.C. metro area: The D.C. office is
hemorrhaging bodies, and they will probably get rid of two competent people for
stating relevant facts that were on the record.
I don’t think people will truly understand what’s happening
to justice in America until it impacts them. Even my family: My parents voted
for Trump. I don’t think they see it as a priority. I mean, they’re not
going to be criminally indicted anytime soon. When I tell them what’s
happening, I don’t think they really believe me.
It would take a lot of restraint not to retaliate in the
next administration. A lot of career people are helping the administration now.
I have a list in my head, and if we get out of this, some of them I’m holding
to account. A lot could be validly criminally probed. But the back-and-forth
will not be good.
Dena Robinson, Civil Rights Division: I wouldn’t
even call it the Justice Department anymore. It’s become Trump’s personal law
firm. I think Americans should be enraged. We all deserve better than this. I
keep telling my colleagues still working in the division that I’m holding the
line with them from the outside. But I feel guilty that I’m not holding the
line with them from the inside.
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