Lawyers with the United States Department of Justice who specialize in issues ranging from national security to the environment to criminal work described the alarm and uncertainty that have rippled across the agency since Donald Trump took office last week, the New York Times reports. For some, the dizzying pace of change has raised concerns about the department’s tradition of independence and its commitment to the rule of law given how rapidly Trump has moved to fire those he views as disloyal. Career prosecutors responsible for investigating the president were abruptly fired. Top officials have been reassigned, including the senior-most career official who often acted as a critical — and neutral — arbiter of ethical matters. Others still have been relegated to areas outside their expertise. “Whatever you’re going to ask, the answer is I have no idea,” one Justice Department veteran said on Tuesday, expressing amazement at the speed of change and speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
The new boss of the immigration office at the Justice Department sent a stern message to the staff this week: Credible reports suggested that some employees had engaged in “abhorrent” misconduct that was “contrary to law. The message from Sirce E. Owen, the acting director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, was issued on Monday. To many of the recipients, it signaled that the dismissals and reassignments that began hours after President Trump took office last week were all but certain to continue.The office, Owen wrote, “has faced multiple allegations of inequitable treatment of its employees over the past four years, including excessively favorable treatment for so-called elites, wildly disparate treatment of components unrelated to each component’s size or operations and — perhaps most distressingly — widely varying disciplinary or corrective measures for similar alleged misconduct.” Another memo, which pledged to recommit to the office’s “core values and the rule of law,” chastised the staff not to “read policies obtusely or ridiculously.” All policies, she wrote, “should be read with a modicum of common sense.”
Comments