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Career DOJ Lawyers May Leave If They Fear Turbulence Under Trump

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What Politico calls a collective sense of dread has taken hold at the Department of Justice, which drew Donald Trump’s rage like no other part of the federal government during his campaign. Some career attorneys may resign rather than sticking around to find out whether threats from Trump and his allies are real or campaign bluster. Those threats range from mass firings of “deep state” lawyers to dropping special counsel Jack Smith. “Everyone I’ve talked to, mostly lawyers, are losing their minds,” said one DOJ attorney. “The fear is that career leadership and career employees everywhere are either going to leave or they’re going to be driven out.” Most of the department’s 115,000 employees were around for controversies during Trump's first term. Critics believed the Trump White House meddled in some of the department’s high-profile prosecutions. Both of Trump’s attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and William Barr, eventually lost the president’s confidence. DOJ veterans know Trump’s anger at the department has only deepened in the past four years as it launched two unprecedented criminal prosecutions against him. Mark Paoletta, a conservative lawyer working on Trump’s transition, offered a stark warning to career Justice Department lawyers Monday that those who refuse to advance Trump’s agenda should resign or face the possibility of being fired. “Once the decision is made to move forward, career employees are required to implement the President’s plan,” Paoletta wrote on X.

“If these career DOJ employees won’t implement President Trump’s program in good faith, they should leave,


“Many federal employees are terrified that we’ll be replaced with partisan loyalists — not just because our jobs are on the line, but because we know that our democracy and country depend on a government supported by a merit-based, apolitical civil service,” said Stacey Young, a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Smith, who charged Trump with two federal criminal cases in 2023, is likely to leave before Trump's inauguration. An early indicator of how much disruption Trump plans will be his attorney general pick. A more conventional pick — like Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) or former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe — would signal more upheaval than eight years ago but not tectonic changes. A more radical choice — like Ken Paxton, the ultra-conservative Texas attorney general, or Kash Patel, a former Trump National Security Council aide and Trump attack dog — would portend extreme turbulence. Will Trump give a senior DOJ post to Jeffrey Clark, who he considered installing as acting attorney general in order to persist in efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory? A former senior DOJ official said, “If you have one of these type of extreme candidates … you will see a significant amount of career staff say, ‘I don’t want to be a part of this.' This is antithetical to who this department is. I think that will absolutely inform whether or not a good chunk of career staff — whether people stay or go.” (The New York Times mentions three other AG possibilities: Matthew Whitaker, an aggressive former federal prosecutor who briefly held the post in Trump’s first term, Jay Clayton, a former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman under Trump, and Robert Giuffra Jr., former counsel to the Senate Whitewater committee that investigated President Bill Clinton.)

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A daily report co-sponsored by Arizona State University, Criminal Justice Journalists, and the National Criminal Justice Association

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