President Donald Trump once promised to “drain the swamp” — a metaphor for cleansing Washington, D.C., of corruption. Instead, the Justice Department is being drained of corruption fighters amid evidence of malfeasance in his own administration.
The Justice Department had 36 attorneys working full-time on corruption cases when Trump returned to office in January. “Today it has two,” said NOTUS. The lawyers who worked for the department’s Public Integrity Section have “either quit under pressure, resigned in protest or been detailed to other matters across the nation.” The loss of personnel “screams that public corruption cases are no longer a priority” under Trump, said former prosecutor Andrew Tessman.
The news comes amid reports that Trump border czar Tom Homan last fall “accepted a bag of cash from undercover FBI agents” in a sting operation, said CNN. That bribery investigation was shut down after Trump returned to power, and White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said the sting was an example of the “weaponization” of the Justice Department by the Biden administration. Trump, meanwhile, is publicly pressuring the Justice Department to go after his enemies, said The Washington Post. In a Truth Social post, the president last week ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to quickly prosecute his “political rivals and back U.S. attorneys willing to get that job done.”
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“Pam Bondi isn’t the president’s enforcer,” former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade said at Bloomberg. The Justice Department has “abided by norms and policies to protect its independence from political influence” since the Watergate era. Now Trump is “blasting through those norms.” The rule of law requires that “each person be treated equally in our legal system.” U.S. attorneys around the country must now decide “whether they are willing to become just another instrument of political power.”
There are “two different rules of law in Trump’s America,” said Albany Law School professor Ray Brescia at MSNBC. The president has sent National Guard troops into Democratic cities while pardoning Jan. 6 rioters. His administration has pursued allegations of mortgage fraud “only against adversaries of the president.” And it has forced out both prosecutors who either decline to go after Trump’s enemies and those who have made cases against his allies. Bottom line: “There’s the rule of law for Trump’s foes, but the rule of law is optional for his allies.”
What next?
Trump’s public pressure on Bondi to prosecute “political foes” like former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James “could backfire if any cases get to court,” said NBC News. The posts on Truth Social will make it easier for defense attorneys to argue their clients were “targets of selective prosecution.”
Trump’s Justice Department can still “punish” his critics without bringing charges, said The Washington Post. Those investigations cause Trump’s targets to hire defense lawyers at “hefty rates” and cause them “reputational damage” regardless of the outcome. For the president, that “might be part of the point.”
