President Donald Trump has been trying to use the Department of Justice as his personal law firm. Under Trump’s DOJ, cases are dropped for personal political reasons or built without evidence. The DOJ has also sought to prosecute Trump’s adversaries and political foes, including James Comey, the former FBI director, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general whose office filed a civil lawsuit against Trump in 2022.
Those cases have faced some challenges: On Monday, a federal judge threw out the government’s charges against Comey and James.
But Trump’s attempts to use the Justice Department for political ends are leaving their mark inside the department as well. Emily Bazelon, a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine, spoke to some of the thousands of DOJ attorneys who have resigned or been fired since January. Through their stories, she navigated us around the turmoil happening at the department, the pushback to Trump’s directives, and where it all leaves us.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Let’s go back to the beginning. It is day one of the new Trump administration, and what is going on at the DOJ?
On the very first day, Trump first of all makes it clear that lawyers who are personally loyal to him are going to be in charge of the Justice Department. That starts with the attorney general, Pam Bondi, but there are other people he puts in place as well. And then the other thing he did was that he pardoned all of the people accused of rioting and violence on January 6th in the insurrection at the US Capitol.
This was the biggest investigation in the history of the Justice Department. They felt really strongly that this was a really important signal to send – that the US government would not tolerate the kind of violence and disruption that could have derailed the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election. Prosecutors had devoted themselves to these cases. It was just a huge blow to the people who worked on all of these matters.
In February, President Trump’s pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi, is confirmed. Tell us about her and tell us what the so-called “Pam Bondi mixtape” is.
Pam Bondi is a former state’s attorney from Florida. She had prosecutorial experience. She was also a personal lawyer for Donald Trump. And this kind of idea of a mixtape, as one of the lawyers put to us, was that she issued a flurry of 14 memos on her first day. She paused the enforcement of certain corruption laws that prosecutors traditionally work hard on and make a priority. She talked about zealous advocacy — the idea of the lawyer’s commitment as being a commitment that was to the President as opposed to simply the Constitution. And there were other kinds of moves like that, that just made it clear that all of the priorities of the Justice Department were shifting.
What were they shifting to?
They were shifting to President Trump’s agenda: an agenda that was against any kind of diversity efforts, an agenda that was toward immigration work and away from traditional aspects of the Justice Department’s purview, like prosecuting public corruption.
I want to ask you about some of the specific cases that these attorneys talked to you about when you interviewed them. There was a lawyer who said they lost their job in April because of Mel Gibson. What happened there?
This is the pardon attorney Elizabeth Oyer, who my colleague Rachel Poser interviewed. And Oyer’s story is that she was reassigned to this unit that was looking into pardons of people who’d been accused of gun crimes. And the idea came up of pardoning Mel Gibson, who had a misdemeanor conviction for domestic violence.
And it’s been strongly suggested to her, she says, that Gibson had a personal relationship with the president. She was basically given the message that she needed to find some way to pardon Mel Gibson. But because of his history of domestic violence, she was very reluctant to do that. She said no to the idea of a pardon, and she was immediately fired.
Moving forward in time, let’s talk about what you learned was happening in the Civil Rights Division. There’s one story you tell about something called the “Firefighter Cases.” What happened there?
My colleague Rachel interviewed a lawyer named Brian McIntyre in the Civil Rights Division. He had been working on a case in Georgia where Black people and white people were applying for positions in the fire department at about the same rate, but 90 percent of the hires were white people. And so Brian McIntyre was wondering why.
And when they asked the fire department, the answer was that Black people tended to have more student loan debt. And so then the fire department said, “Okay, well, our problem with that is if you have a firefighter and he’s deeply in debt and fighting a fire, he might steal grandma’s pearls.” So this was apparently the reason for hiring fewer Black firefighters. And the Civil Rights Division sued.
In February, they got a note saying that the Attorney General Pam Bondi wanted to withdraw the case and they went further in a way that was really distressing to the lawyers by asking for additional language in dismissing the case that would say that it was all about reverse discrimination. In other words, the real victims here were white people. And so these lawyers in the Civil Rights division, they really wrestled with whether they could sign this order because they didn’t think it was true. And in the end they did not sign it.
As the year progresses, how does the Trump administration start divvying up resources at the DOJ? What do we see Trump prioritizing?
There’s a really important order that happens where about a third of the manpower and resources of law enforcement agents is supposed to start going to immigration work. And that means that these FBI agents are not going to be doing the things they were doing before because their work hours are a finite resource.
Prosecutors told us that they saw these agents being pulled off of cases involving white collar crime or national security, counter-terrorism, child exploitation. Those are the kinds of big cases that just take a lot of labor. And so if you have your FBI agents out on the street picking up people for immigration detention, then they’re not going to be able to do these more longer-term cases that, in the view of the prosecutors, are very important for keeping Americans safe.
Moving forward to late September, Donald Trump has demanded that the DOJ pay him $230 million for investigations into him that happened during the Biden administration. How does that play out within his Department of Justice?
This is a really unprecedented demand. And also remember that the people who are going to decide whether Trump gets this big payout are his appointees, his former lawyers in the Justice Department, right? Pam Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche.
From the point of view of the Justice Department lawyers we interviewed, this just seemed comically corrupt to them. They just really couldn’t imagine how the president could think this was an appropriate use of federal funds.
One of your sources told you it would take a lot of restraint not to retaliate in the next administration. This person said they have a list in their head of career people who are helping the administration they want to hold to account. Did you come away from this reporting concerned that there is a cycle of retribution here that may be becoming entrenched?
It’s too soon to say there is going to be a lot of temptation to move in that direction because some people are going to feel like they’re surrounded by people who they watched do things that were unethical or traitorous to the colleagues around them. It’s hard to let all of that go.
I think there are different ways that could be addressed. There are employment repercussions, like questions of whether everyone gets to stay in the job. And then there’s the much more serious question of whether they’re going to be criminal investigations. That’s the kind of tit for tat retaliation that I think could really send the justice system into a tailspin.
Another of your sources tells you that the average American does not really care what is happening at the Justice Department because we think it doesn’t affect us. Is there an argument that this does in fact affect us, that we should really care what’s going on here?
I think there is: the rule of law. The idea of the stability of law is vital to American prosperity and social well-being, right? I mean, stability is honestly the most important thing we get from law. And when you live in a country where the president can turn the huge might of federal law enforcement against anyone he wants, then you’re kind of betting it’s not going to be you. But the odds are not the same as they were before when this kind of retribution was just off the table.
And since Watergate, we have lived in a country where there was a very deliberate, carefully erected separation between the White House and its political influence and investigations and criminal prosecutions from the Justice Department. So once that is gone, eventually you see that play out in all kinds of ways in Americans’ lives. Even if it starts by seeming it’s just about a few people like James Comey and Letitia James.
