Former Justice Department lawyers who served during Donald Trump’s second term describe an institution transformed by political directives and personal loyalty. In interviews and detailed reporting, more than sixty former attorneys recount the rapid dismantling of guardrails that once separated federal law enforcement from political power. Their descriptions paint a picture of a department where prosecutions were shaped by presidential preference, internal dissent was punished, and decisions about national security, civil rights, and public corruption were filtered through the priorities of the White House.
The Justice Department rejects these characterizations. A department spokeswoman called the reporting “a useless collection of recycled, debunked hearsay from disgruntled former employees” and said that focusing on political leadership while “ignoring the questionable conduct of former attorneys who do not have the American people’s best interest at heart shows exactly how biased this story is, and further illustrates why Americans are turning away from biased, outdated legacy media platforms.” The White House responded similarly. Spokeswoman Abigail Jackson stated that the accounts were “nothing more than pathetic complaints lodged by anti-Trump government workers” and said “President Trump is working on behalf of the millions of Americans who voted for him all across the country, not the D.C. bureaucrats who try to stymie the American people’s agenda at every turn.”
The attorneys who left the department say their concerns began the moment Trump returned to office. On his first day, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of nearly 1,600 people who had participated in the attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, including more than 200 who had been convicted of assaulting officers. Gregory Rosen, who led the breach and assault unit within the Capitol Siege Section, said he initially thought that the appointments of Emil Bove and Todd Blanche, both of whom had been Trump’s personal defense attorneys, might at least preserve some sense of professional standards. “When I saw it was Blanche and Bove, I was actually relieved. OK, it’s gross that they were Trump’s personal attorneys, but before that they were federal prosecutors in New York. They’ve done the job. They know the prosecutors’ code. We’re the only lawyers whose job is not to get the best result for our client. Our job is to get justice. Sometimes that means losing or walking into court and saying we made a mistake.
But then things were 10 times worse than I thought they would be.”
Liz Oyer, who served as the department’s pardon attorney, said that staff had no advance notice of the mass clemency order. “We had no knowledge that the Jan. 6 pardons were coming on Day 1. Everybody was concerned that our office was being completely sidelined from the review process.” For Mike Romano, who had spent years working on January 6 prosecutions, the pardons immediately signaled that career work could be erased for political reasons. “Anyone who spent any time working on Jan. 6 cases saw how violent a day that was. I’d spent four years living with that day, the things done to people. It’s incredibly demoralizing to see something you worked on for four years wiped away by a lie I mean the idea that prosecution of the rioters was a grave national injustice. We had strong evidence against every person we prosecuted.”
After the pardons, a wide restructuring of the department began. Ed Martin, a Trump ally with no prosecutorial experience, became interim United States attorney for the District of Columbia and dismissed fifteen attorneys who had handled Capitol riot cases. Dozens of other attorneys were pushed out across divisions. A former prosecutor in the Capitol Siege Section described it as “completely bizarre” to see attorneys fired “for no reason except they’d worked on cases that were now disfavored.” Rosen later learned he had been reassigned from a senior post to an early case review role. “I laughed when I found out we were demoted,” he said. “But it was clear to me just how truly vindictive this would get. All of us collectively had over 100 years of prosecutorial experience. The brain drain was beginning. Maybe the Justice Department survives but loses all the experts.”
The shift in mission became even clearer when Pam Bondi, another former Trump defense attorney, took office as attorney general and issued fourteen directives on her first day. These directives instructed career lawyers to “zealously defend” the president’s agenda, restricted their ability to raise legal or factual objections, and signaled that enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act would be limited. Civil rights attorney Katie Chamblee-Ryan said the directives arrived rapidly and were stunning in their scope. “When Bondi’s 14 emails started coming in, one was crazier than the next. It’s hard to explain how shocking that was. In the Biden administration, there were all these checks in place to make sure we weren’t acting on our political biases. It was so by the book. It was too slow, to be honest. Now that seemed farcical.” Another attorney said the directives suggested consequences for challenging unsupported claims, which they viewed as “completely improper.” Robinson, also in the Civil Rights Division, described Bondi’s emphasis on service to the president’s priorities as out of step with the purpose of the division. “One thing that stuck out to me was her insistence that we served at the pleasure of the president and that we were enforcing the president’s priorities. We swore an oath to uphold the Constitution.”
The Civil Rights Division and other units soon faced pressure to produce predetermined findings. Robinson recalled how leadership pursued an investigation into Perkins Coie, a law firm connected to Democratic work, alleging discrimination against white men. “The idea of the investigation was that Perkins Coie supposedly engaged in illegal discrimination against white men,” she said. “But Perkins Coie is an extremely white firm only 3 percent of the partners are Black. When my colleague pointed that out, the leadership didn’t care. They’d already reached their conclusion.” She added that her colleague’s experience was “the reason they left the Justice Department.”
Attorneys described similar concerns in a high profile inquiry into the University of California system. Teams fanned out to several campuses and concluded that evidence of legal violations was generally lacking. Yet the department sent UCLA a demand letter seeking one billion dollars in damages. Baluch said attorneys were stunned. “We thought, 1 billion dollars They are making that up out of thin air. There is no way the damages we found added up to anything like that amount.”
While politically aligned investigations were accelerating, other longstanding enforcement efforts were curtailed or reversed. A ProPublica investigation found that Trump issued pardons in “at least a dozen criminal cases that originated during his first term,” including cases involving bribery and kickback schemes. Frank O. Bowman III, a law professor who studied these matters, told the outlet that the collective effect was part of “the systematic destruction of the Justice Department as an objective agency that seeks to uphold the law and fight crime.”
One pardon that drew scrutiny involved Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, who pleaded guilty to money laundering charges in 2023 and who had helped increase the value of a cryptocurrency linked to the Trump family. In another case, Charles Scott, convicted of stock manipulation in Ohio, was pardoned after serving only two weeks of a 42 month sentence. A prosecutor involved in the Ohio case said the clemency had discouraged defendants from accepting reasonable plea deals since they believed it was more effective to seek political favor. Alexis Loeb, who served in the Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section, said the shift raised a fundamental concern. “When prosecutors bring a new case, do they need to think about how the Trump administration views the defendant? Those are not the kinds of considerations prosecutors are taught they should pay attention to very much the opposite.”
As enforcement priorities changed, internal ethics standards became a point of conflict. Joseph Tirrell, the department’s former ethics director, described repeated efforts to convince political leadership to follow rules limiting gifts. He said he had to explain that senior officials could not accept cigars from Conor McGregor or a soccer ball from FIFA unless they paid for them or returned them. “I felt like I really had to go to the mattress to convince the A.G.’s office: You can pay for the item or you can return the item or you can throw the item away,” he said. He added that the general counsel at the FBI asked about creating broader exceptions because Director Kash Patel believed he should be allowed to accept more expensive gifts. Tirrell recalled reminding him that “his client was not Mr. Patel, but the United States.”
Reports from MS NOW later revealed additional benefits Patel received, including use of the FBI’s private jet to attend a wrestling event where his girlfriend performed and a security detail of elite FBI agents. Former FBI agent Christopher O’Leary said there was “no legitimate justification” for these arrangements. “This is a clear abuse of position and misuse of government resources,” he said. “She is not his spouse, does not live in the same house or even the same city.”
Career attorneys who objected to political pressure sometimes faced immediate consequences. Oyer recounted how she refused to recommend restoring gun rights to actor Mel Gibson, who had a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction. She testified that she believed her recommendation was being sought to create the appearance of legitimacy for a political favor. “My recommendation was sought, I believe, to give a veneer of legitimacy to what was actually a political favor for a friend of the president.” She said that after she declined to recommend Gibson, she was fired and later told that armed United States Marshals had been sent toward her home with a warning against testifying to Congress before another official intervened.
Attorneys described additional shifts in priorities across the department. A memo instructed FBI field offices to divert one third of their time to immigration enforcement, which limited resources for terrorism, espionage, violent crime, and child exploitation cases. One prosecutor said the change was “unprecedented” and warned that national security units had been “completely hollowed out.” Prosecutors in several districts said that agents from agencies like the IRS, Secret Service, and ATF were reassigned to immigration duties, which hindered long running investigations that require consistent and specialized attention.
The effects also reached voting rights cases. After Trump issued an executive order reshaping election rules, attorneys said they were required to defend provisions that courts later blocked. A lawyer in the Voting Section said career attorneys had already been told to drop a lawsuit about suppression of Black votes in Georgia without reviewing any evidence. “It was obvious they didn’t look at the memo explaining what the evidence was,” the lawyer said.
The Human impact of policy decisions also emerged in immigration cases. In one example, senior attorney Erez Reuveni acknowledged in court that the administration had unlawfully deported a longtime Maryland resident, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, to a maximum security prison in El Salvador. He was placed on leave and then fired. David McConnell, director of the Office of Immigration Litigation, said colleagues were stunned because Reuveni had aggressively defended Trump era policies in the past. The firing contributed to what McConnell said was a wave of departures, with about sixty attorneys leaving the 320 person office.
The most direct example of political prosecution came when Trump demanded criminal charges against James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Erik Siebert, the interim United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, told senior officials he did not believe evidence justified charges. He was forced to resign and replaced by Lindsey Halligan, an attorney with no prosecutorial background. According to former colleagues, no line attorneys agreed to handle the case, so Halligan personally sought an indictment for Comey on charges related to alleged false statements. She later obtained an indictment of James for mortgage fraud. Romano said that prosecution decisions should never be made because a president directs them. “No one should be charged with a crime because the president says Do this, and the people he has installed do what he says.”
One of the final episodes described by former attorneys involves Trump’s request that the government compensate him for the costs associated with his past prosecutions. The New York Times reported that Trump sought 230 million dollars and that Bondi and Blanche, who both previously served as Trump’s personal lawyers, would decide whether he received the payment. Romano said the request was absurd. “It seems comically corrupt. First, there was nothing inappropriate about this prosecution. Second, he won the presidency, so how was he harmed to the tune of 230 million dollars And third, he has appointed the people tasked with deciding whether he gets the money, and we’ve seen that his appointees do what he wants. It’s as if he’s robbing the Treasury to pay himself.”
For many former attorneys, the cumulative impact of these episodes represents a profound shift in how the department operates. The loss of experienced personnel, the sidelining of normal legal processes, and the pursuit of cases aligned with presidential priorities have left them concerned that the damage will outlast any single administration. Robinson summarized her view of what the department had become. “I wouldn’t even call it the Justice Department anymore. It’s become Trump’s personal law firm. I think Americans should be enraged.”
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