Lawfare Daily: The Department of Justice, or the Department of Revenge?

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Trump 2 in the Justice Department is absolutely nothing like Trump 1 was. This is entirely different set of issues. And even the people experiencing it dealing with it in real time, on day one, couldn't grasp, couldn't wrap their minds around.

What was actually beginning to happen?

It's the law fair podcast. I'm Mike Feimberg, senior editor-in-law fair, and I'm sitting down today with New York Times reporter, Devlin Barrett. This isn't simply a question of,

whatever the new policy is, we'll just execute the new policy. The Department of Justice is about right and wrong. And you want decisions of right and wrong. It's a punishment, decisions of guilt and innocence, to be decided by people who aren't making those decisions

for political reasons or ideological reasons. [MUSIC] Today we are discussing his new book, "The Department of Revenge," which chronicles in number of changes that have occurred over the past 18 months at the FBI and Department of Justice,

which may have changed both organizations permanently. Now, as I was reading this, there was a question that occurred to me repeatedly, nowhere so much as the end of the work. And I originally planned to ask it to you as we wrapped up this interview,

but the more I thought about it,

“I think it might be a good place to actually start,”

because it sort of gets at what I think is your overarching thesis. And I'm going to put you on the spot and ask you a very blunt question, which is, can Americans trust the Justice Department anymore? There have been so many changes that you chronicle, and we'll get into the specifics,

but the Justice Department today is not the Justice Department of even 18 months ago. And if I'm a judge, if I'm a defendant or defense counsel, if I'm a journalist, or if I'm just an American citizen, can I trust what's coming out of the RFK building, the Hoover building, and the various offices that support them both throughout the country?

I mean, it's a great question, and you're right. It does sort of get to the heart of what so much of the book is about. You know, the last chapter is titled Credit Incredibility, and I think the credibility question is a huge issue for this department, because of the changes in this administration.

And I think the short answer to your question is not as much as they used to, and particularly in some areas.

“I think one of the things that's hard sometimes to convey to people who,”

you know, don't live and breathe this stuff, is that the Justice Department and the FBI are vast organizations, that do a lot of different things every day. You know, I think sometimes in the coverage it can start to feel like, "Oh, well, the Justice Department is what 10, 20 people.

It's more than 100,000." So one of the quotes that really stuck in my head, in the course, they're reporting for the book, was someone who said, you know, we're all kind of mold people now, we're just keeping our heads down, and hoping that, you know, we don't get tasked

with one of these really ugly political unfounded cases. But we know, you know, that's happened to people we know, and we know there's in some ways there may be no avoiding it, if and when that time comes. But I think the American people should generally have the understanding

that there are still a lot of good work being done at the Justice Department and the FBI, and that can be done at the Justice Department, the FBI.

a tremendous amount of credibility, like you said, with the courts especially, sometimes with jurors, and often with the public, is in cases regarding the people that the president doesn't like, or the people the administration doesn't like.

“And I think what's really amazing about that basket of cases”

is you're really talking about sort of two very different collections of people. It's the powerful and the powerless. On the powerless side, you have a lot of protesters who are being charged with things that in, you know, like you said, 18 months ago,

would never have risen to federal criminal charges of anything.

And I put this in the basket of, you know, if you recall officials in the administration often say, if you touch a cop, we're charging you with assault. First of all, that's not what the law says. Touching a cop is not assault.

And second of all, the second group of people is the powerful, which means, you know, New York's Attorney General, as an example, at Tisha James. In a very different context, but still I would argue, you know, someone with, with power, and voice, and influence, James Komi, the former FBI director. So those are the types of cases, those are the types of defendants,

where I think the Justice Department has done tremendous harm to its own credibility. And where there are legitimate questions when cases get filed. But I do think there's still a large category of work that can be trusted.

“Not that you should ever have blind trust in the Justice Department.”

You know, one of the things I have to say is, I'm not an institutionalist, right? I'm a reporter.

I have always viewed, I've been covering this organization, this entity for more than 25 years.

I have always viewed it with a degree of skepticism and doubt. And I think that's a healthy thing, as long as you keep perspective. So that's a very long answer, but I think there are many categories in which they have the same rough amount of trust that they used to, but I think there are hugely important categories. If you think about just the whole notion that you cannot trust, you may not be able to trust

the corruption work of the Justice Department and the FBI. That's an awful situation if that's where we have found ourselves. So I'm going to want to get specifically into the corruption work in a moment. But before we do, let's just set the scene for our audience. You describe a series of steps that fundamentally alter the character of the Justice Department

as an institution and also a number of personnel shifts, firing force, retirements, transfers, and the like, that really change the human capital landscape as well. But before we delve into that, how would you describe the DOJ and the FBI in just a few sentences as of January 19th, 2025? Great question. So I would say just before the Trump administration comes back into power,

the FBI and the Justice Department are weakened. They are in a dangerous place, but they are functional and they are carrying out the mission more or less in keeping with how it's been carried out for decades. Congress is not really defending them anymore. The public certainly has doubts depending on your politics. But they are functional place with some significant weaknesses and problems I would say.

Well, let me poke at that answer a little bit because as you know in many of our listeners know, I'm not entirely in objective bystander and discussing this. I was at the Justice Department. I was at the FBI and the Justice Department. Of course. Do you think that the mistrust that was beginning to creep in from both the legislature and from the public was something that was avoidable,

could Christopher Ray and Merritt Garland and Lisa Monaco have made choices that avoided that

or is this just a natural second order consequence of a sort of hyperpartisan political

work? It's something I have thought about a lot and something I've talked to a lot of just

“Department people about a lot and FBI people out where I come down on it is and I think what my”

reporting shows is that when you look at the end of the Biden administration, things like the pardon for Hunter Biden, the president's son, things like the other some of the partens sort of the protective partens Biden did as he left office. I think we're very harmful to the idea that the Justice Department could still function fairly in political cases. And I think in some ways that was the deepest cut for people like Merritt Garland who is running

no confidence from their own president, from the person who had been arguing for the rule of law

“and for the independence of the Justice Department. I think there's plenty that could have been”

done differently that might have helped. I think of the political pressure on the department as almost being a rising tide of the ocean. You're not pushing back the ocean. You can better protect your institution from the water, from the rising water. That is something you can do and I think there were times that they were able to do that reasonably well and I think frankly there were things that they were not well equipped to do and did not do particularly well

in preparation for what was to come. Man, there is so much I agree with there and so much

I stressuously descend from me. Hit me. I mean, you know, I think you are 100% right. They did not as far as I could see at least even attempt to shore up any sort of obstacle to being

“overrun by political actors and ideologues. I think a mistaken judgment that is going to be”

written about decades, if not a century from now, was the belief on everybody's part that the events of January 6th represented the last gas of a movement that had been defamed as opposed to the start of a particular viral strain of it. But that said, with respect to the partens, it's hard for me. I was not remotely a fan of most of Joe Biden's partens to get into like FBI-Soterica. I thought his statements about Leonard Peltier were just actually incorrect and

not well-thought out whatsoever, but it's hard for me to disentangle that from any of the partens and commutations that Trump executed out of that of his turn, or Mark Rich in the Clinton Administration, or George Bush, partying most of the Iran-contra malifactors. Like, I just don't know

“I guess I'm falling down a little bit more in the sort of ocean metaphor, and I think the ocean”

was rising long before. Oh, the end of the Biden Administration. Oh, certainly. To be clear, I would argue that the real turning point in the Justice Department's independence and the FBI's independence was the 2016 election and the fallout from how the FBI made decisions there. I don't want to, you know, for someone who should write a book about it. Yeah. Done. Next. But I think, and my point about the end of the Biden Administration is really this. The Biden partens, I think, were harmful

in the sense that they encourage the notion that essentially everybody does this. You know, I think one of the harder things to convey to people in this moment were in as to, as to why what's happening at the Justice Department matters so much is I hear, I hear two general reactions to people who are like, "Well, is it really all that important or dangerous?" And the first things, well, everyone does this anyway. Biden, partens, son, you know, so and so, partens, whoever,

like, presidents have always used partens badly. And that's true to a degree. But what you're seeing

here is the mass production of partens. You're seeing a sort of philosophical expansion of the part and power in a way that we haven't seen before and the way that I would argue is very different. I'm so flippin old, I covered the Mark Rich partens and it's after math and the fall, and I covered that investigation. But no one who covered that at that time, I think, could envision where the pardon power is now being used and deployed and how it sort of casts a fall over

everything that the administration does. The only other point I would make is that I really think the degree to which the by-nears for the Justice Department could have gone better is the Merrick Garland was not the most compelling speaker. Neither was Christopher Ray, that's not a fault of their character, that's just, you know, a comment and observation on their skill set. And I think one real big opportunity missed from that sort of interregnum between the two Trump terms was

start to regenerate some trust, start to regenerate some faith that there are adults in charge and those adults are doing reasonably well at pursuing the types of criminals and the types of

“problems that those institutions have pursued for generations. Yeah, I think you really needed”

in a turning general in the mode of Edward Levy who after the Watergate scandals made the reestablishment of trust and DOJ his number one priority. And in fairness, I think Garland did that too. But the difference between them is that Garland's way of doing that I think was for everybody to keep their head down and speak entirely through the work product. Whereas Levy, I think, I mean, I have a book of his speeches on the shelf from that era. He did a concerted

outreach campaign, absolutely. You do the same thing, but your entire book is about after this period. So I do want to go on. All right, so your book opens and based on the conversation we've had for the past 15 minutes or so, I'd say that the Justice Department is almost like a well-tuned marathon runner with a really bad spraying angle. Like the bones of functioning no puns intended, like the innards are working, it knows what to do, but it's already a little bit handicapped.

So Trump is inaugurated and things happen very quickly, but what in your view is the first event

did either DOJ or the FBI that really sends up a flare. This time is going to be different. So it really starts at 3 p.m. the day of the inauguration and 3 p.m. is when about 10 senior Justice Department officials get notified by email that they're being reassigned immediately to something called the sanctuary city's working group, which no one's ever heard of. You know, you can sort of guess what it might be based on the title, but it's pretty clear that these people

are being forced out of very important jobs. People who were very senior and had a ton of were frankly not known into the outside world, generally, but who have a ton of credibility and institutional cloud inside the Justice Department. And I think the ouster of those people was so important because it's almost like you're pulling out all the important pins in an engine, and once you pull those pins out, what happens is the Trump administration has tremendous control

to start making sweeping changes inside the department with far less resistance. And I will

say one of the things that was striking to me about covering the first day because I do think

“day I spent an entire chapter on day one. I think day one is incredibly important, but even the”

people experiencing day one inside the department in real time did not necessarily understand the implications and the consequences of what they were experiencing, and what they were observing. So for example, I spoke to people who that first day had a fairly good understanding of who was being forced out. And even then they thought, oh, well, you know what? This might be good for the department because the Trump administration will go this far. I'll get rid of these people.

They'll find people that trust more to do similar jobs, and that'll be it. And that'll that'll be the end of it. But the reality was that was the end of it. That was the very beginning of it. And it was a far more strategic and a far more chaotic and disruptive administration that they put in motion than the first Trump term. I mean, one of the things that I try to convey in the book is that Trump too in the justice department is absolutely nothing like Trump won was. This is

entirely different set of issues. And even the people experiencing it in dealing with it in real time on day one couldn't grasp, couldn't wrap their minds around what was actually beginning to happen. All right. So those individuals are moved and we're talking real career luminaries. We're talking about people like Toscus and EYC who have been a DOJ for ages and, you know, the government throws around the phrase subject matter expert a lot, probably too much. But, you know,

“something like Toscus, I think he was the longest career employee at DOJ. And I can speak for”

myself as I ascended the latter at the FBI. I never worked on an indictment. Controversial, non-controversial,

did not have to get his sign off on. And overnight, all these people, most of whom were in the national security sphere, if I recall, are all of a sudden told that they're going to be in the sanctuary city's working group where they're apparently going to severely or criminally litigate against municipalities and the United States that do not cooperate with us. I don't think it really goes anywhere simply because all those people end up resigning. And it's not clear that the sanctuary city's

working group was even ever meant to be a real thing. It might have just been, you know, the phone-lined room we put people to make them miserable. But once that happens and you get like, you know, a

“cord group of people who choose to leave, what next happens? So I would just, the only thing I would”

add to that is, as important is that as those changes are to the national security division when they move out people like George Toscus. Look at what they do to, you know, it includes the top ethics official and the department includes a lot ahead of the head of public integrity, it includes a very important senior anti-trust lawyer. There's a strategy and an intelligence to what they do and and then those three PM emails that I will say as a reporter, I didn't grasp

at the time, but what as I worked on the book and I sort of like unpacked all this was really breathtaking. So three PM that's what happens in about an hour's time after those emails go out. The person running the department that day for the Trump administration, a guy named Emil Bovy, who is a former defense lawyer for Donald Trump, he has a meeting with senior officials to talk about a pending investigation of Tom Homan, Trump's chosen immigration's are, and Tom Homan

according to sources and this is fairly well understood. It was recorded in an undercover FBI saying taking a cab of bag with $50,000 worth of cash in it. So that investigation hadn't

concluded, but that investigation was off to an incredible start from the point of view of an

“investigator. And it's I think it's just as telling that the first order of business for the new”

administration is to find out exactly what the FBI and the DOJ has on Tom Homan. And the fact that that happens on the first day, I think says a lot about how the administration is going to approach questions of corruption, cases of corruption, allegations of corruption. So I think that's hugely important. And they also begin rolling through sort of the upper echelon of immigration judges, which obviously is something, you know, the immigration is just something Trump cares about a lot,

but you know, when Trump, the first Trump administration started, it was comical sometimes how poorly the people making decisions seem to understand how the government really worked. I think what's

so remarkable about what happens at the Justice Department in the second term is how they move to

immediately take control of all these parts of the enterprise they can take control of. And make sure that there are no parts of the machinery that they're not in control of. And that speaks to me to a degree of education and intelligence that they have spent in the four years out of office figuring this stuff out and preparing. And in that four years, Donald Trump is in dieted multiple times. And one of the points I make in the book is I don't think the public

necessarily thought through what is it going to be like if the president is someone who has been a defendant and is now has the most power of any official in the country. I have covered a lot of defendants over a lot of years. I don't know many who don't come out of that experience whether they win or lose their cases. I don't know many defendants who come out of that anyway other than

“incredibly bitter and angry. And I think one of the things that really did not maybe get all the”

attention and thought that it should have by the electorate or even by reporters is what is a government run by a former defendant going to look like. And I would say part of my book tries to explain this is what it looks like. That's the world-wide series of phenomena zurück. They come from the ice on a drone guide fighter. Up the 22nd, 16th uni,

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on a board. Game of Thrones, a night of the same kingdom and of course House of the Dragon.

All of this awaits you with a new star. Also, streamed up the 22nd, 26th uni, the new star of the House of the Dragon and all of the series of Game of Thrones. Only on HBO Max. Yeah, so you own in on Emile Bova's decision with respect to Tom Home and right away, and you sort of just rift now a little bit about what corruption investigations are going to look like.

And I don't think people who've never worked at DOJ or any of its components, even those who are

very much supporters, understand how central to the organization's identity, the public integrity section, commonly known as pin, that oversaw public corruption investigations, was to really representing in most people's minds the best of what the Justice Department was, both in terms of ethics and integrity, but also in terms of just raw skill, blurring, writing, advocating, like it really was sort of the crown jewel.

You know, if the Office of Legal Council is the intellectual crown jewel of the Justice Department,

“pin, I think, was very much the litigatory crown jewel. And pin doesn't really exist in any”

recognizable former fashion anymore. What exactly happened there? So pin gets demolished largely because the Trump administration decides early on that it wants the pending criminal indictment against New York City's mayor, Eric Adams, to go away. He's been charged in the series of essentially pay for play or influence pedaling allegations. And the administration decides, and you can see in Trump's public statements that even before

he's sworn into office, he's sort of moving toward this notion that this case should go away.

But once they're in power, one of the male bovis first tasks is to kill the Adams case.

And he tries to do that first with the Federal Prosecutors in Manhattan who brought the case, and they resist mightily, they're either fired or resigned in protest. And after that sort of embarrassing public reputation from the prosecutors in New York in the movie, then turns to the public integrity section and says, you guys now have to file this motion seeking to throughout this

“case. Before you go on, what happens when he brings it to the headquarters pin personnel?”

What do we know about the individuals who resigned from SDNY rather than do it? Are these sort of left wing deep state actors or are we dealing with a different type of person? No, we're dealing with straightforward career prosecutors, including Danielle Sesson, who was running that office in New York and essentially a temporary basis while they waited to see who Trump would nominate for the job, who has pretty impeccable conservative legal circles credentials.

You know, one of the things that the book tries to lay out, which happens over and over and over again, is when the Trump administration wants DOJ to do something and even their own, some of their own people, even some of their own fellow conservatives, fellow Republican lawyers, say, wait, this is a bad idea. This is not the road to go down. Those Republican lawyers will be fired or have to resign because the administration simply refuses to accept a counterargument on stuff like this.

“And that's what happens to Danielle Sesson. That pattern repeats itself over and over and”

part of why I think the book is in a helpful addition to all the public reporting. As you know, public reporting tends to get flashpoints and certainly the Adam's case was a flashpoint. That was covered. But I think when you can pick out the other parts that weren't previously known and show the pattern, the pattern is is pretty compelling. And the pattern is that they are

over and over and over and after they do that to the career prosecutors in New York who oppose the just abandonment of this case, that pressure then turns south to the public integrity folks.

“And what happens to those public integrity folks at the RFK building in DC?”

They're presented with a one hour ultimatum from Emile Bovey who says, I need two people to sign this motion. Whoever signs this motion will emerge as leaders of the public integrity section, which everyone on the call understood to mean that he was willing to promote anyone who was

willing to sort of put their name on this thing they didn't believe in. And it's just an amazing

moment. And part of the reason why they understood that this was a dangle of a promotion was because the people above them in the senior positions had already resigned the previous day because they were the first recipients of the pressure from Bovey to get this done. And so this ultimatum comes in. They have sort of a very scrambled rushed debate amongst themselves. And eventually, one of the senior lawyers agrees to sign the Adam's dismissal motion. And there are some,

“I think, understandable and depending on who you talk to, pretty honorable reasons for doing that,”

for signing it. But I will say, I think at the time the pinstaff hoped the public integrity

lawyers hoped that if nothing else this would preserve the entity of the public integrity section, preserve their work, preserve their cases. And in fact, it pretty much failed to do that. The public integrity section was torn apart more or less. It exists on paper today, but it is largely non-functional. And the consequences of that non-functional public integrity section are massive. And when far beyond even what people in the department feared would happen if you got rid of

the public integrity section. All right. So we've talked a lot about sort of the decline and fall

the public integrity network. But DOJ prosecutes a lot of matters that have nothing to do with public

corruption. Is it similar dynamic happening in the national security division in the organized crime and gang section in the various white collar sections? You know, is pin functionally just an

“example of something going on in a lot of places or is it sway generous? I think there are things”

that are unique to pin situation. For example, because pin acts as a sort of quality control for corruption cases across the country. Losing pin means that you lose even the application of broad standards to how you pursue corruption cases. But other divisions have different types of problems. So for example, the national security division, counterterrorism and counter espionage. What happened there was so many people left and so many other people were sort of

tasked out, formed out to like pretty random collection of priorities. Everything from, you know, immigration to, you know, obscene file review that the effectiveness, the the capacity of the national security division has declined dramatically according to the folks I've talked to. And there's a lot of empty chairs there. One of the commonalities of all these parts of the Justice Department is there are so many more empty chairs than they used to be. You know, the criminal division is

down something like 20% of its people. That's a huge problem for trying to do the amount of work that you did before. And when you look at the criminal division, they've struggled with other issues like the creation of a new fraud division that sort of now everyone's a little bit confused to what exactly their job is. Well, and who they report to, it's not rare anybody is this indigenous justice department group, or is it a collective of DOJ lawyers on loan to the White House?

Because there's been reporting both ways. Right. And I'll be honest, I think as we sit here today, I think there is still just a tremendous amount of uncertainty within the building, even by the people running the building as to exactly how this is going to work. It's a lot to unpack and repack. And just as another example, the tax division of the Justice Department doesn't even exist anymore because they shut it down completely. When we should be clear here, we're not

speaking colloquially. We're not saying like, there are a lot of empty chairs and they're not doing as many cases. Like, they've been removed from the org chart. Correct. The tax division no longer

their criminal cases have been formed out to the criminal division and their civil cases have been formed out to the civil division. But I will just say one of the things my, I have a chapter called playing favorites in the book, which is all about how the veteran tax prosecutors in the department were absolutely horrified by the way their cases started being handled and dropped or settled

“on orders from the Office of the Deputy Attorney General. That has been, I think, one of the more”

alarming and consequential decisions of the first year. But it also, I think, I don't, I don't want

to come off as like a doom and gloom or because I don't think that way about the department in general. I also think the tax division weirdly holds some answers for what the future might look like and the way some of this could be made whole again in that, unlike most of the other parts of the Justice Department. The tax division largely because of the Watergate scandals has a series of laws that are laws passed by Congress, protecting and limiting how tax information, tax investigations

are used and those laws are designed to prevent the misuse of tax investigations. Yeah, I had to sit through every single year, very long training sessions on what the steps were to obtain tax information. There's a lot of them. There's a lot. What you were allowed to do with it once you've received it, the answer's not much. Yep. And how you had to dispose of it once you were

done using it and it had the pragmatic effect of, I never met a single agent who ever attempted to

get tax information for a criminal investigation. It just wasn't, the juice was not where the squeeze in less you were fundamentally looking at a tax-based charge. Right. And look, to be clear,

“I think you can see the beginnings of ways in which this administration is trying to change that,”

this administration is trying to loosen that up, but it is hard to do because the laws that are on the books. And I think when you talk about one of the odd quirks and contradictions of the place is that we could very well be in a situation a few years from now, where the tax division is long gone and forgotten, but the rules of the tax division, the limitations of the tax division, have actually

like survived in some way. I'm not predicting that. I think reporters should never predict anything,

but I do think there is an important lesson there for the DOJ and for people who are concerned about the Justice Department's independence. All right. I'm going to take your last statement as a challenge, and I'm going to ask you to predict the future. Or at least, or at least help us figure out the broad parameters along which it may travel. Sure. We've only scratched the surface of your book, but I will simply say the picture it paints of DOJ is a building in utter disarray,

lacking what lawyers would call neutral principles to make sure that its decisions are a political. The very title of your book demonstrates its thesis, which is that the Justice Department in a very real sense has become a cudgel used to go after the president's enemies. We're in uncharted territory for American legal history, since the founding of the department, shortly after the reconstruction error during the reconstruction error. Can it ever come back

to what it was before? Exactly what it was before. My prediction would be probably not.

“And some of that is, I would argue, due to even broader events, like I think the government and”

our country were still at large, is still digesting and processing exactly what the Supreme Court presidential immunity decision is going to mean for how the government works. I'll just give you one small data point that was so striking to me when it happened earlier this year that the Justice Department, senior officials, and these pitched battles with local bar groups, which handle attorney discipline because they don't want bar groups,

disciplining senior Justice Department officials for how they conduct case or any potential misconduct. And the background to this is that in the wake of the attempt in 2020, 2021 to overturn the election through whatever court, well, like 59 courts found completely

found themselves disparate. Right, or under threat of disarmament, I will say as someone who

covers lawyers a lot, I will say I find there is a shocking lack of enforcement of legal ethics rules, of forcing lawyers to behave as officers of the court. But in this instance, what so bizarre to me is as, you know, some of these Trump administration lawyers are fighting these bar associations, they are arguing in filings that the presidential immunity decision means that bar associations cannot conduct misconduct investigations of lawyers working for the government.

That is a pretty sweeping application of the Supreme Court ruling and I can't pretend to see inside the Supreme Court Justice's heads to know whether they would follow that view. But like my main point is the implications of that are so vast, but they're particularly

“important for the Justice Department, which are the lawyers for the federal government.”

Let's introduce a dichotomy. You've been to a number of criminal trials, I'm guessing. Yes. Probably more than me. What is an assistant U.S. attorney? What is a federal prosecutor say before they speak when they're introducing themselves to the court? They say for the United States. When they, when they introduce themselves, you know, it would be, you know, I'm not a lawyer.

I never have it, but they would be devil and bear it for the United States, your honor.

Right. And so the reason I bring that up is I just, I do want to footstomp for our audience. The notion that the Justice Department writ large is the president's law firm is a new one. There are components of the Justice Department, like the office of legal counsel,

“which pronounces on the constitutionality of proposed executive actions, that in a sense”

are advising the president of legal matters. But the notion that the Justice Department is in service of the White House and essentially a wing of really well-educated foot soldiers who operate in a very specific arena is very new and really flows from a legal theory, the unity,

unitary executive, which wasn't even articulated until after water gates and has never really been

put into practice until now. So we are still in very much uncharted territory. So I would go further than that. I would say not only is this a new approach for the Justice Department, this approach is incredibly offensive to many DOJ lifers. You know, the Justice Department, in these confrontations that you see between senior Trump administration officials and career lawyers of the Justice Department, you see time and again people like Amel Bovi

or others making the argument that you took a note to the Constitution, and that's true. Everyone who works at the Justice Department takes an oath to uphold the Constitution. But what Bovi and others are arguing in these confrontations in which the fire people is that oath requires you to do whatever the president wants you to do. And that is radically different from how generations of Justice Department lawyers have understood that oath. And I don't think that is an incredibly novel

and aggressive interpretation of what the oath means. And a lot of the people who left, I can tell you just remember to spoke to many of them. A lot of the people who left on their own terms left largely because they found that demand, that particular insistence, that your loyal to your country is defined by your subservience to the president's wishes. Really, really difficult and impossible to swallow essentially. And so that is really one of the fundamental tensions that

like goes all through the book, and it's a pattern that repeats itself again and again and again, where lawyers have these sort of late-night crises of conscience where they think,

“"I took an oath, I believe in my oath. I think my oath tells me that I cannot do this."”

And the answer comes down pretty quick from that. Okay, find your fired. So let's talk about what this means, not in any sort of metaphysical or jurist potential sense, but like in just sort of like logistics and brass tax, there are a number of positions

I'm not just talking about the prosecutors. I'm talking about individuals who are in between the prosecutors and the assistant attorneys general. People like the principal deputy assistant attorney judge. Individuals who are experts in their field have been doing this for decades are turning down

a mint from the firm world, but they don't change administration to administration always.

You know, I dealt with the same one throughout the Obama Trump and Biden years, who only left very recently. The FBI has even more, like in Bousers. Yeah, normally there is exactly one political appointee at the FBI. Maybe two, if you count the general counsel, who is traditionally chosen by the director, but one of the things that really worries me, and I think you hinted this to in your book, is that those days are over.

We are not going to have a country for generations, if ever, where there is a quantum of apolitical positions of the justice department that do not change every four years. Right, and I think it's a hugely important point for how the work actually gets done, and how well the work actually gets done. And I guess what I would say is this, one of the most aggressive things about this administration has been, it's all out assault on civil

service protections. This is across many agencies, obviously, not just the justice department,

“but remember that justice department is a fundamentally unique agency within the government.”

It's not like the Department of Agriculture. It's not like the Department of Commerce. This isn't simply a question of, well, whatever the new policy is, we'll just execute the new policy. The Department of Justice is about right and wrong, and you want decisions of right and wrong, decisions of punishment, decisions of guilt and innocence, to be decided by people who aren't making those decisions for political reasons or ideological reasons. And it's not a perfect institution,

but it's always been built on that principle. And when you enact a practice of just firing civil

servants, because they won't do something they think is wrong, you are going down the path as you say to creating an institution that is dominated by boldly political decision-making. And I think one of the challenges of telling that story, one of the challenges of conveying that story to people,

“is I think sometimes in the world of the public, they hear stories about fired federal workers,”

and they think, oh, well, I don't have those kind of job protections why should they? The reason why it's different for civil service generally, but especially for prosecutors and agents, is that if you can just fire prosecutors and agents for doing a case that anger some politician, that institution will change radically over time. That institution will become a more effective institution, a more cowardly institution, and almost certainly more vindictive institution.

And so when I talk about the firings and the resignations, I always try to explain them in terms of

it's not really about the people being fired or resigning as bad as it is for those people. The civil service protections are not actually meant to protect the civil servants. Those protections are meant to protect the public from having terrible people in these

“important government jobs with real power. And I think one of the ways in which this time”

we're in is incredibly risky is one of the things one of my chapters of my books is called the worst lawyers money can buy. And I called it that because we're starting to see instances where really unqualified people are making really important decisions. And that has tremendous consequences, not inside the building although it does that, outside the building for everyone else. And I hope that people understand that this is not ultimately about bureaucracy or

ultimately about jobs. It's a story about right and wrong. And if you just fire everyone you disagree with. If you just fire everyone you think you can't trust. You're going to end up with institutions and just Department of FBI that punishes the innocent as well as the guilty. Well on that ominous note with that final warning I think we will leave things. I will simply note and closing that we have barely scratched the surface of the events covered in this book. And if you found the

a good encapsulation and analysis of how that building has fundamentally changed over the past 18 months.

Devlin Barrett thank you again for joining us on the Law Fair podcast. Thanks my great to see.

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