Pulitzer Prize Winner Warns of Trump’s Dismantling of Justice Department

• “The cumulative damage done to the once-respected Justice Department is so profound that it may not regain any semblance of its former self in our lifetimes.” – Carol Leonnig

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Carol Leonnig is sounding the alarm about what she calls the “unraveling” of the U.S. Department of Justice under Donald Trump’s renewed presidency.

In a detailed essay for The New York Times, Leonnig describes how Trump has “taken a wrecking ball” to one of the country’s most vital democratic institutions — a department that has long served as a safeguard of the rule of law and an independent check on executive power.

“The Department of Justice under Donald Trump is still standing,” Leonnig wrote. “But inside, he and his lieutenants have taken a wrecking ball to this core pillar of our nation’s governing system.”

Leonnig, a longtime Washington Post investigative reporter and co-author of the forthcoming book Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department, said her findings come from “hundreds of interviews” with current and former federal prosecutors, FBI agents, and Justice Department officials. Together, she said, they paint a picture of an agency hollowed out by political purges, fear, and the dismantling of long-standing norms.

According to Leonnig, Trump’s first term set the stage for the damage now unfolding. “It’s true Mr. Trump started it all when, in his first presidency, he tried to bend this venerable law enforcement agency for his own personal and political gain,” she wrote. “Mr. Trump frequently failed in that effort, but, as we learned after two years of reporting, all the while he was quietly succeeding in destabilizing the institution’s foundations — and weakening its resolve with his brand of bare-knuckle attacks.”

That strategy, she said, “imperiled the rule of law that has long assured all Americans impartial and fair justice.”

While much of the initial damage came from Trump’s open assaults on the department, Leonnig said the process was accelerated by his political opponents. “Later, the desperate desire of Attorney General Merrick Garland and President Joe Biden to avoid any appearance of partisanship led the department to put off looking into evidence of a potential crime and gave Mr. Trump an advantage that few appreciated at the time,” she wrote.

“Mr. Garland’s delays softened the ground and would eventually help Mr. Trump remake the Justice Department into his own cudgel.”

Leonnig said Trump has since “gutted department teams that have long shielded Americans from domestic terrorism, corporate fraud and foreign manipulation of our elections.” Among the hardest hit, she noted, is the Public Integrity Section, a unit created in the aftermath of Watergate to investigate government corruption. “Its force has been reduced from more than 30 prosecutors to two,” she wrote.

She said Trump has “anointed himself the country’s law enforcer in chief,” bulldozing the department’s traditional independence from the White House and transforming it into a weapon against political opponents. “Repeatedly this year Mr. Trump has redirected the department’s traditional power to enforce laws and prosecute criminal cases to hound his critics and political foes,” Leonnig wrote, noting that career prosecutors who objected were overruled or pushed out.

“The cumulative damage done to the once-respected Justice Department is so profound that it may not regain any semblance of its former self in our lifetimes,” she warned, citing the voices of “career law enforcement officials with whom we have spoken.”

Many of those officials, Leonnig said, are “disconsolate at the dizzying speed with which they see their beloved institution breaking the founders’ promise that American citizens be punished according to the law, rather than a king’s whims.”

Leonnig traced the roots of the department’s decline back to 2016, when Trump began publicly targeting FBI agents and prosecutors who investigated his campaign’s ties to Russia. Those attacks, she said, “tarnished their careers and left the agency’s career staff in a defensive crouch.”

By 2021, when Biden and Garland sought to rebuild trust, Leonnig said the pendulum had swung too far toward timidity. “Though Mr. Trump lost in 2020, some FBI agents and top Justice officials remained hesitant in the wake of the brazen Capitol attack to look at fresh evidence linking him to a possible crime,” she wrote.

“Mr. Garland’s hope to avoid even the whiff of political motivation would hobble the department in one critical way: It sidestepped the mounting evidence that suggested Mr. Trump illegally plotted to interfere in a free and fair election and overturn his 2020 defeat.”

Leonnig said this hesitancy created a vacuum that Trump later exploited. “Justice’s early avoidance and delay gave Mr. Trump a running start as he readied himself in 2022 for a re-election bid,” she wrote. “To his supporters, Mr. Trump painted himself as a martyr and victim of an agency led by a Democratic cabal hellbent on keeping MAGA’s greatest champion out of power.”

The perception of persecution, Leonnig explained, was key to Trump’s political resurgence. “His supporters’ claim of a radical-left conspiracy helped propel Mr. Trump to victory,” she wrote. Once back in office, she said, “Mr. Trump flipped the script. After denouncing the Justice Department for eight years, he quickly seized the levers at the agency to target and punish his political foes.”

Among those who resigned rather than comply with politically motivated orders was John Keller, former acting chief of the department’s Public Integrity Section. Leonnig said Keller left his position “rather than comply with an order to dismiss bribery charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York.”

Keller told Leonnig, “It feels to me we have crossed the Rubicon. The idea of charging your enemies without a solid factual basis — that’s the hallmark of a dictatorship. That’s when the rule of law and our governing system is just wholly broken.”

Leonnig said Keller’s departure reflects a broader exodus of experienced prosecutors and agents. “Since taking office Jan. 20, Mr. Trump and his appointees have driven out or fired combined centuries’ worth of frontline expertise that will take decades to replace,” she wrote. “Seasoned national security prosecutors and agents have sounded the alarm in our interviews: These departures leave us less prepared to stop the next terrorist attack or foreign state’s spying operation.”

Leonnig also reported that Trump’s Justice Department has brought criminal cases against former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Senator Adam Schiff of California — all of whom have been critical of Trump. She said that “a deep and bipartisan bench of Justice veterans say the department has reached a frightening tipping point and warn that grave dangers now loom for all Americans.”

Without an independent Justice Department, she wrote, “malevolent actors can freely engage in crimes knowing they will never face consequences.”

Leonnig concluded with a warning that resonates beyond partisan lines. “Without the real Justice Department, anyone who crosses the president is vulnerable to prosecution regardless of the facts,” she wrote. “Finally, without a real Justice Department, a president holding the reins of a corrupted institution can remain president permanently, free to manipulate election results, with no real threat of being dethroned.”

“In repurposing the Justice Department for political revenge, Mr. Trump has taken a cudgel to its credibility,” Leonnig wrote. “For the next generation at least, Americans on both ends of the partisan divide can reasonably wonder if criminal charges are justified by facts or are the machinations of a White House directing its law enforcement arm to harass its political opponents.”

Follow the Vanguard on Social Media – X, Instagram and Facebook.  Subscribe the Vanguard News letters.  To make a tax-deductible donation, please visit davisvanguard.org/donate or give directly through ActBlue.  Your support will ensure that the vital work of the Vanguard continues.

Categories:

Tags: