As DOJ Lawyers Face Alarming Pressure to be “Trump’s Lawyers,” Judges Are Sending Up Flares.

Trump’s demand for fealty to him, rather than to the law, has broken DOJ.

By Sheldon Whitehouse

From his first week in office, President Donald Trump made clear to the Department of Justice’s 10,000+ career lawyers that no one would be spared a personal loyalty test this time around. Trump’s demand for fealty to him, rather than to the law, has broken DOJ. Federal judges across the country are taking notice.

The MAGA plan to ensure DOJ loyalty to their dear leader started early. Trump installed his personal lawyer, Emil Bove, to run DOJ until Senate Republicans could confirm Trump’s other personal lawyers, Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, to run DOJ full-time. Bove’s DOJ reassigned senior career officials to a “Sanctuary Cities Enforcement Working Group” (a glorified holding pen), fired over a dozen prosecutors who had investigated Trump’s crimes, and fired dozens more who had obtained convictions in cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol—a warm-up to Trump’s mass pardons.

Trump then appointed MAGA loyalists to carry out purges at U.S. Attorney offices. One, Ed Martin (so toxic as to be unconfirmable), proudly declared that he and his subordinates would serve as “Trumps’ (sic) lawyers,” and in his new unconfirmed position proclaimed, “No MAGA left behind.” Subtle, he isn’t.

On her first day as attorney general, Bondi told DOJ attorneys that any refusal to sign off on administration arguments deprives the president of the benefit of “his lawyers” (emphasis added). She vowed to take action against officials who “substitute their personal political views or judgments for those that prevailed in the election,” implying that the DOJ is there to enforce prevailing electoral political views or judgments.

DOJ lawyers who declined to implement the MAGA political agenda were fired or forced to resign. Their offenses? They opposed administration attempts to dismiss cases in exchange for political favors, they wouldn’t bend pardon procedures to restore guns to Trump allies, and they refused to lie to a judge about an illegal deportation. In other words, they wouldn’t violate their oaths as prosecutors and officers of the court.

Qualified civil servants, including many who worked through the first Trump administration, are choosing to leave, taking their experience and skills with them. Who’s taking their place? Underqualified political hacks without the experience or skills to hold their own in court, but who are willing to disregard their professional and ethical obligations—willing to argue with a straight face, for instance, that Trump’s executive orders punishing law firms were “straightforwardly legal.”

Career DOJ lawyers committed to the rule of law are being pushed to their breaking point, under MAGA pressure to forgo their duties as “officers of the court”—which include integrity, candor to the tribunal, and loyalty to the Constitution—to keep their jobs in a MAGA DOJ. This is real-life weaponization of the Department of Justice; not the imaginary, gaslight version of “weaponization” Republicans made up so they could be outraged by President Joe Biden and explain away Trump’s crimes.

Federal judges aren’t falling for it. Judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans alike—including by Trump—have not only ruled against Trump’s unlawful actions but also increasingly use tough warnings about the absurdity of government arguments and actions and about Trump DOJ lawyers’ baseless assertions, evasive answers, and lack of candor.

One judge found that the DOJ lawyers engaged in “deliberate evasion” and “willful and intentional noncompliance,” and that they “failed to respond in good faith” in an effort to “obstruct discovery and evade compliance with this Court’s orders.” In normal times, that would set off a red flashing light at DOJ.

In another case, a judge warned that a DOJ lawyer “tried to frustrate the judge’s ability to get at the truth of what happened here, and then set forth sham declarations. That’s not the way it works in the U.S. District Court.” A Reagan appointee wrote that DOJ lawyers defending a Trump executive order failed to “reflect the diligence the Court expects from any litigant, let alone the United States Department of Justice.”

DOJ lawyers arguing an immigration case were told that they had produced “a terrible, terrible affidavit,” containing “pure hearsay,” “assumptions” and “putting words in people’s mouths.” The judge said, “I expect more from the government than this kind of very shoddy work,” adding that, if it were a criminal case, “I’d throw you out of my chambers.” Another judge wrote of the government’s arguments in the same case: “Of great concern to this Court is that Respondents contradict themselves throughout the entire record” and that “This Court takes clear offense to Respondents wasting judicial resources.”

Bove—longtime flouter of ethics standards, enforcer of some of this DOJ’s most egregious demands of career lawyers, and, astonishingly, nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit—received the same treatment when he appeared alone to defend the administration’s quid pro quo with New York Mayor Eric Adams. A judge called Bove’s defense of dismissing the charges against Adams “not just thin, but pretextual” and Bove’s suggestion that DOJ has “virtually unreviewable” power to dismiss charges in similar cases “fundamentally incompatible with the basic promise of equal justice under law.” (Thanks to the same whistleblower fired for his candor to the court, we now know Bove also told DOJ lawyers they “would need to consider telling the courts ‘f**k you’” and ignoring judges’ final orders.)

These and other similar comments by federal judges—including references to contempt of court, even criminal contempt—would have provoked immediate internal reviews in the U.S. Attorney’s office I ran in Rhode Island; now they are proof of MAGA DOJ bonafides.

The idea that Trump or the administration has done anything illegal is a heresy forbidden among MAGA Republicans, so they’re obliged to blame the refs for calling fouls on their team. A Senate Judiciary Committee Republican recently called rulings against Trump “a full-blown judicial assault on the separation of powers that strikes at the very foundation of the republic.”

Hyperbole has consequences: The backdrop to this sorry saga is a campaign of MAGA threats, where ruling against the administration can put judges and their families in danger. The U.S. Marshals Service reports that 162 federal judges—many of whom had ruled against the Trump administration—received threats just between March 1 and mid-April. One federal judge who ruled against the administration received nearly a dozen separate credible death threats. Threats to judges and their families often come from the far-right’s social-media “flying monkeys,” launched by provocations posted by Trump, Elon Musk, and their MAGA allies. This raises doubt about how seriously a MAGA DOJ will discharge its responsibility to investigate any orchestration of threats against judges, potentially as conspiracy, aiding and abetting, or a racketeering enterprise. And what will the marshals do to enforce orders if, as seems inevitable, evasion and obstruction cross over into contempt?

Even Trump’s favored Supreme Court justices have scoffed at arguments Trump is forcing DOJ lawyers to make. (Trump is seemingly starting to wake up to the fact that “his” justices were handpicked by Leonard Leo and his interests.) District courts are still upholding the rule of law, even in the threat atmosphere they face, and sending up warning flares about the lawlessness and misconduct they see.

Amid all this, will Republicans in Congress who were so exercised about “weaponization” care enough now about the rule of law to do anything? If they sincerely care about “weaponization” at DOJ, they should heed these judicial decisions that provide abundant evidence of things gone badly awry.

Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat, represents Rhode Island in the U.S. Senate.

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