{"id":46,"date":"2026-05-24T21:08:42","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T21:08:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalconsumerreportss.com\/?p=46"},"modified":"2026-05-24T21:08:42","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T21:08:42","slug":"trumps-attacks-on-justice-department-independence-then-and-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalconsumerreportss.com\/?p=46","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s Attacks on Justice Department Independence, Then and Now"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Ernest Hemingway famously described the process of bankruptcy as occurring \u201cgradually, and then suddenly.\u201d The same could be said of Donald Trump\u2019s assault on the integrity of the Justice Department. During Trump\u2019s first term, the president chipped away at the independence of federal law enforcement bit by bit over the course of four years. In the first few months of Trump\u2019s second term, the new administration smashed through many of the remaining barriers\u2014stocking FBI and Justice Department leadership with loyalists, while firing apolitical civil servants; abandoning the prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams in a crude attempt at a quid pro quo; and threatening politicized investigations into Trump\u2019s perceived enemies.<\/p>\n

Read more Donald Trump and the Department of Justice<\/a><\/p>\n

This spread of activity within the Justice Department is, perhaps intentionally, dizzying. With some exceptions, news stories that might have spiraled into multi-month scandals even during the first Trump administration have vanished quickly in the cacophony of news. The new administration\u2019s abuses of justice are in many cases close variations on tactics sampled by Trump the first time around. But now, they\u2019re happening all at once. And the administration is barely bothering to hide its actions or justify them as anything other than an effort to turn the Justice Department into Trump\u2019s personal gang of enforcers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Trump spent much of his first term raging against the limitations of his control over the department. He disliked both that he could not stop Special Counsel Robert Mueller from investigating him\u2014at least, not without political blowback\u2014and that his aides had discouraged him from demanding that the Justice Department prosecute his enemies. \u201cThe saddest thing is, because I am the President of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department,\u201d he complained during a radio interview in 2017. \u201cI\u2019m not supposed to be involved with the FBI.\u201d<\/p>\n

The result was a strange dance, where Trump would attempt to make demands on the Justice Department only to be redirected or iced out by the department itself or the White House Counsel\u2019s Office. Over the course of the first administration, Trump would return to these demands and would sometimes succeed in pushing the department to align its prosecutorial priorities with his own, particularly once William Barr replaced Jeff Sessions as attorney general.<\/p>\n

It was a gradual process of corrosion. This time, though, Trump isn\u2019t bothering with \u201cgradual.\u201d<\/p>\n

Consider the saga of the FBI directorship. Arguably, Trump\u2019s first serious effort to meddle with independent law enforcement came just weeks into his first term as president, when he asked then-FBI Director James Comey to abandon the bureau\u2019s investigation into Trump\u2019s erstwhile national security adviser Michael Flynn. That story broke following Trump\u2019s firing of Comey in May 2017, which set in motion a chain of events that ultimately led to the appointment of Mueller as special counsel. The ensuing investigation would go on to define the first two years of Trump\u2019s presidency.<\/p>\n

By the standards of Trump\u2019s second term, the degree of public outrage over such scandals seems laughable\u2014as does Trump\u2019s anxiety over potential blowback from Justice Department firings. In 2025, Trump didn\u2019t even have to bother with firing the FBI director in order to get rid of somebody inconveniently independent; Director Christopher Wray, himself appointed by Trump in 2017 after Comey\u2019s dismissal, saw the writing on the wall and decided to resign in advance. Then, Republican senators confirmed Trump\u2019s replacement pick, Kash Patel, despite Patel\u2019s long and concerning track record of affiliating himself with pro-Trump conspiracy theories and enthusiasm for retaliatory investigations of Trump\u2019s enemies. Essentially, Senate Republicans looked at a chain of events very similar to that which eight years ago precipitated a major scandal and elicited discomfort even from the Republican caucus\u2014but this time, they nodded and gave their stamp of approval.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s effort to get Comey to back off the Flynn case was an early example of what Benjamin Wittes and Susan Hennessey have called \u201cdefensive\u201d abuses of the Justice Department\u2014that is, using the department as a shield to protect the president and his friends from the normal law enforcement process. Of course, Trump\u2019s effort to derail the investigation of Flynn did not succeed, and the president likewise could never quite bring himself to shield himself and his associates by firing Mueller. Later in his first term, however, he would have help in the form of Attorney General Barr, who in 2020 worked to undercut Mueller\u2019s prosecutions of both Flynn and Roger Stone\u2014pushing the Justice Department to dismiss the case against Flynn outright and to recommend a lighter sentence for Stone. Those efforts by Barr led to the withdrawal of career prosecutors\u00a0from the cases\u2014including one attorney who resigned from the Justice Department in protest\u2014and, concerning Flynn, a prolonged court fight that ended only when Trump decided to simply grant his former national security adviser a pardon. Barr also worked behind the scenes to cut Trump\u2019s friends a break in other cases, unsuccessfully demanding that the U.S. Attorney\u2019s Office for the Southern District of New York soft-pedal the case against the Turkish financial institution Halkbank following White House lobbying by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.<\/p>\n

Again, all this took place over the span of four years. In the first month and a half of Trump\u2019s second term, meanwhile, the Justice Department has rocketed straight to where Barr ended up near the end of Trump\u2019s first term in office: seeking to get criminal prosecutions against the president\u2019s allies tossed out of court. Only a week into the new administration, the department moved to dismiss charges against Trump\u2019s two co-defendants in the Mar-a-Lago documents case and did the same in the prosecution of former Republican Rep. Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska, a Trump ally.<\/p>\n

But the closest parallel to the first Trump administration\u2019s actions in this sphere is the case of New York Mayor Eric Adams\u2014which, for those who followed the Flynn saga, is d\u00e9j\u00e0\u00a0vu all over again. Once more, the administration demanded that the Justice Department dismiss a meritorious case, and did so in a fashion that precipitated the resignation of career Justice Department employees: in Flynn\u2019s case, <\/span>former Mueller prosecutor Brandon Van Grack; in Adams\u2019s, Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon and prosecutor Hagan Scotten, both of whom wrote <\/span>dramatic letters explaining their disagreement with then-Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove\u2019s directive to drop the prosecution. Five other attorneys <\/span>resigned from the department\u2019s Public Integrity Section in protest.<\/span><\/p>\n

And, as in the Flynn case, the Adams dismissal has resulted in a dispute over the scope of a judge\u2019s discretion to deny the Justice Department\u2019s motion to dismiss the case. , Judge Dale Ho appointed an amicus curiae to review whether Rule 48(a) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure permits him to deny the motion. After receiving the amicus\u2019s recommendation, which suggested that Ho must dismiss the Adams case but may opt to throw it out permanently instead of abiding by the Justice Department\u2019s request to dismiss without prejudice, Ho is now weighing his options. (In 2020, Judge Sullivan never ruled on the issue, thanks to Flynn\u2019s pardon.)<\/p>\n

Read more Don\u2019t Count on Courts to Rein In Unregulated AI<\/a><\/p>\n

The similarities between the Flynn and Adams cases are not exact. Trump\u2019s scheme to wipe out the prosecution against Flynn was both a thumb in the eye of the Mueller investigation and a means of rewarding Flynn\u2019s loyalty to Trump over the course of that probe. It was, as were so many of Trump\u2019s abuses of the Justice Department during his first term, deeply personal. In contrast, the Adams saga appears to be far more casual and opportunistic. Trump is seemingly seeking to dismiss the case against Adams without prejudice in order to keep the possibility of future prosecution hanging over the mayor\u2019s head, so as to strong-arm him into cooperating with the White House\u2019s plans to carry out aggressive immigration enforcement efforts in New York City. It\u2019s a very run-of-the-mill example of corruption\u2014which itself suggests that Trump may be getting more comfortable in exercising this aspect of his power. No longer is it a special tool to be used only on particularly important occasions.<\/p>\n

The same is true of Trump\u2019s \u201coffensive\u201d abuses\u2014turning the department into a sword against the president\u2019s enemies. Here, too, Trump has moved with alarming speed to catch up to where he was at the end of his previous administration. From 2017 through 2021, when Trump demanded investigations, he focused on people who had been involved in some relatively prominent way with Hillary Clinton\u2019s presidential campaign or the FBI\u2019s probe into 2016 Russian election interference. Today, though, the efforts to wield the department as a weapon have been far more widespread, potentially targeting anyone whose actions or presence happen to have been inconvenient to the administration in some way.<\/p>\n

During Trump\u2019s first term, he repeatedly tried to push the Justice Department into investigating Hillary Clinton and James Comey, alarming White House Counsel Don McGahn to the extent that McGahn drafted memos in spring 2018 warning the president away from this approach. Once Barr arrived at the Justice Department in 2019, he similarly sought to bully U.S. attorney\u2019s offices into going after a range of perceived Trump enemies, including the prominent Democratic lawyer Greg Craig and\u2014somewhat bafflingly\u2014John Kerry. According to Geoffrey Berman, who led the U.S. Attorney\u2019s Office for the Southern District of New York during this period, the Southern District rejected both demands, after which Barr shopped the cases to yet another U.S. attorney\u2019s office. Kerry was never prosecuted; Craig was charged and acquitted following a jury trial, as were two other defendants pursued by the prosecutor John Durham, whom Barr appointed in 2019 to investigate the origins of the Russia investigation. In one puzzling instance, a criminal investigation of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe\u2014a longtime Trump target\u2014sputtered out into nothing, possibly because a grand jury refused to return an indictment.<\/p>\n

These investigations tended to obscure Trump\u2019s own involvement in an attempt to provide the prosecutions with a sheen of respectability, rather than trumpeting the department\u2019s obedience to the president. Today, the picture is somewhat different. Key Justice Department officials have proudly characterized themselves as working directly on Trump\u2019s behalf\u2014a major breach of the department\u2019s independence. It is likewise not a coincidence that two key figures in the current Justice Department\u2014Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, now principal associate deputy attorney general\u2014served as Trump\u2019s personal lawyers and represented him in his criminal cases until his elevation to the presidency.<\/p>\n

But the poster child for this hyper-aggressive approach is Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia who has described himself as one of the \u201cpresident\u2019s lawyers.\u201d Martin has made somewhat of a practice of sending threatening letters announcing vague \u201cinquiries\u201d into figures he feels have crossed Trump in some way, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.). The Washington Post\u2019s reporting indicates that Martin also pushed to investigate supposed fraud related to the Biden administration\u2019s distribution of grants pursuant to the Inflation Reduction Act, over which one career prosecutor resigned rather than pursue. , the government informed the bank that it was conducting a criminal probe and requested that Citi freeze money set to be distributed under the fund; during a hearing, the Justice Department was unable to provide any evidence of a violation of criminal law that would justify the freeze.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Martin is a very different character than the more cautious lawyers who populated the first Trump administration. The erosion of the department\u2019s independence between 2017 and 2021 occurred at a slower pace in significant part because of the people around Trump\u2014officials who, even if they agreed with Trump on policy matters, tried to deflect or delay his more extreme demands. Consider the success of Justice Department leadership in blocking Trump\u2019s demand to involve the department in his effort to hold onto power after the 2020 election, by refusing to go along with his plan to install Jeffrey Clark as attorney general. Or think of McGahn\u2019s memos walking Trump through the impropriety of pushing for prosecutions of his enemies, or Berman\u2019s refusal to go along with demands for his office to investigate John Kerry. This time around, Trump and his allies knew better than to appoint someone like Berman to head a key U.S. attorney\u2019s office. They went with Martin instead.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The administration is also newly seeking to exert control over the department not just through its choice of hirings but also through its choice of firings<\/em>\u2014that is, by pushing out lower-level civil servants and line attorneys who can\u2019t be trusted to cut Trump\u2019s friends a break or attack his enemies, rather than enforce equal justice under the law. Lawyers involved in Special Counsel Jack Smith\u2019s investigations of Trump, and in the prosecutions of Jan. 6 rioters, have been dismissed. Other senior career officials at the department have also been removed, including the director of the Office of Professional Responsibility, which is charged with ensuring that Justice Department attorneys are acting ethically. The first Trump administration did not display nearly as much interest in going after career officials.<\/p>\n

What changed between Trump\u2019s departure from office in 2021 and his return in 2025 that led to this opening of the floodgates? One factor is that Trump\u2019s supporters made good use of the intervening four years to more systematically lay the intellectual groundwork for seizing direct presidential control of the department, justifying it in part as necessary to respond to imagined \u201cweaponization\u201d of law enforcement by the Biden administration. (Many of the firings of civil servants were carried out under an executive order on \u201cEnding the Weaponization of the Federal Government\u201d signed on Trump\u2019s first day in office.) Another is that Trump has consolidated his control over the Republican Party such that congressional Republicans appear far less interested in pushing back against these abuses.<\/p>\n

But Trump also received a helping hand from the Supreme Court in the form of its . In holding that Trump was immune from prosecution for his unsuccessful efforts to gain the Justice Department\u2019s backing for his claims of election fraud, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the president wields \u201cexclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials.\u201d Trump can now have confidence that he can misuse the department to his heart\u2019s content without ever having to worry about criminal liability after the fact. He is also armed with even stronger legal arguments to justify his death grip around the department. After Trump v. United States, <\/em>many of the arguments that McGahn once made to Trump for the Justice Department\u2019s independence are significantly weaker, if not vaporized entirely.<\/p>\n

In other words, when Attorney General Pam Bondi says that she works \u201cat the directive of Donald Trump,\u201d she is not\u2014according to the Supreme Court\u2014entirely wrong.<\/p>\n

Read more The Limits of Naval Technology Alone<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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