READ: Whistleblowers say Dept of Justice becoming rotten hellhole

Insiders paint a portrait of how Trump’s second-term DOJ has turned into a ministry of fear -- and personal favors for the president's friends.

I probably shouldn’t be writing you this opinion essay this morning. After all, I’m currently under federal investigation by the Trump administration for the crime of saying out loud what many inside government now whisper in private. And it’s generally considered unwise (impolite, even) to poke the bear while the bear is pawing through your life. But, alas, I suffer from what my friends describe as a clinical allergy to corruption and autocrats.

So I’m going to tell you something plainly, at the risk of inviting further scrutiny from the regime now probing me: I will not censor myself.

I know what speaking out means — I certainly don’t want further discomfort for my family, and believe me, this whole experience has been “uncomfortable” for us, to say the least — but I don’t care to cater to the dictates of bullies. Never have. Never will. What would gratify them more than anything is my silence. And they will not get it.

That’s why this morning I went on something of a harangue on our latest DEFIANCE Radio broadcast, which included an interview with my friend and former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci. (Click the image below to listen to today’s broadcast, or read on for details.) After I spoke with Anthony, I spelled out why insiders believe the Justice Department under Donald Trump has become a rotten hellhole.

That’s the unmistakable sensation running through the new, devastating New York Times investigation drawn from interviews with roughly sixty current and former Justice Department officials. Taken together, their accounts form the most detailed portrait yet of the internal ruin of the Department of Justice under Donald Trump’s second term and the corrosive culture now metastasizing inside the nation’s top law-enforcement agency. You can’t read the piece without the word “rotten” continuing to spring to mind.

As the investigative piece recounts, the rot began right away on Day One. Trump walked into the DOJ and installed his own personal defense lawyers in the top leadership posts. Minutes later, he wiped away the convictions of 1,600 January 6 rioters, the largest mass pardon in American history. Just those two acts told us what we needed to know. Loyalty would be rewarded and the law would be wielded to protect the leader, not the nation.

From there, the descent was steep. Career prosecutors involved in January 6, the classified-documents case, and other Trump investigations were fired en masse. The new attorney general, Pam Bondi, issued a flurry of orders requiring DOJ lawyers to “zealously defend” Trump’s agenda, even apparently where the arguments were unconstitutional, unethical, or plainly unhinged. Corruption cases were dismantled. The DOJ’s own corruption watchdog, the once-feared Public Integrity Section, collapsed from thirty-eight lawyers to two. Two people, it goes without saying, cannot guard a republic.

As winter turned to spring, the changes became darker and more baroque. A Trump loyalist with no prosecutorial experience was installed as the U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., where he fired fifteen more January 6 prosecutors and purged senior leadership. Trump and Elon Musk jointly launched a federal workforce purge that targeted career prosecutors in DOJ, while pressuring DOJ lawyers to lie to judges when the scheme was challenged in court. Some refused and resigned; others refused and were fired. Meanwhile, the department launched predatory, politically pre-cooked “investigations” of universities for alleged antisemitism, complete with billion-dollar penalties for noncompliant institutions.

By summer, the weaponization of justice turned openly vengeful. Trump issued executive orders punishing law firms that had represented Democrats or Trump’s opponents, stripping them of federal contracts and even access to federal courthouses. The Civil Rights Division was handed to a loyalist who began dismissing racial-discrimination cases and instructing career lawyers to rewrite their own filings, as if they had previously been engaged in illegitimate work. One of the department’s most respected pardon attorneys was fired and physically escorted out of the building because she refused to restore gun rights to Mel Gibson at Trump’s personal request.

Then wreckage spread outward. A Maryland father was wrongfully deported to a violent Salvadoran prison; voting-rights lawyers were ordered to implement Trump’s unconstitutional voter-ID order and secure voter rolls for cross-matching with immigration files; FBI field offices were ordered to devote one-third of their time to immigration enforcement, hollowing out national-security and violent-crime units.

By fall, the guardrails were basically gone. Trump pardoned white-collar criminals with such frequency that defense attorneys began advising clients to simply “wait for a pardon.” Dozens more prosecutors tied to the Jack Smith investigations were fired. U.S. attorneys were pressured to indict Trump’s enemies — including James Comey, Letitia James, and John Bolton — and when career lawyers refused, they were replaced by Trump loyalists who marched cases before grand juries anyway.

And then came the punchline that would feel too ridiculous even for a banana republic. Trump demanded $230 million from the U.S. Treasury as “compensation” for having been prosecuted during his first term. The officials deciding whether he receives the money are, of course, his own appointees.

It’s really hard for me to exaggerate the gravity of this transformation. What was once the Department of Justice is now, in the words of one former Civil Rights Division lawyer, “Trump’s personal law firm.” The rule of law has been replaced with a hierarchy of favors and political vendettas. The justice system has become one in which outcomes no longer depend on statutes or case law, but one man’s whims.

The picture the Times painted is only a snippet of the whole story, and this week it continued to get more grim.

News outlets reported that the FBI director’s girlfriend, a 27-year-old country singer, is receiving round-the-clock FBI SWAT protection from tactical agents who would normally be responding to hostage crises and mass shootings. Does it feel normal that agents trained to rescue kidnapped children are now reportedly standing outside Nashville honky-tonks because the FBI director’s romantic life requires it? Meanwhile, prominent Trump critics who’ve been targeted for assassination by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps have had their government security details stripped.

The story itself stands as a metaphor for the whole of DOJ, i.e. enemies face danger; friends receive protection.

Meanwhile, inside the so-called Weaponization Working Group (the Orwellian name given to Trump’s internal DOJ strike force) whistleblowers now allege that its leader, Ed Martin, has been concealing and destroying records of his official duties. Martin is the same Trump ally who threatened to prosecute critics, sent intimidation letters to members of Congress, and failed Senate confirmation after a disastrous stint as acting U.S. attorney. Allegations that he is conducting government business on encrypted apps and deleting messages evoke the paranoia and corruption of a mafia family.

In the face of all this, it would be easy to assume the story ends in despair. But there was a flicker of democratic defiance. Yesterday a federal judge blasted the administration in the James Comey case for appearing to use “fundamental misstatements of the law” to secure a seemingly bogus indictment of the former FBI director, not to mention potentially engaging in misconduct by seemingly withholding the full record of the grand jury deliberations from the court and deceiving members of the grand jury about the evidence and the law.

Judges are not rolling over like corporate CEOs and elected leaders asking the president to pay their belly. Some judges are standing up, despite knowing that the Trump Justice Department as asked its lawyers ominously to submit a list of judges considered “problematic.” They’re literally putting together a figurative hit list of judges that are standing in the way of the administrations agenda. So it’s not insignificant that some of them are pushing back so forcefully.

What’s more, the Times story itself about the descent of the Justice Department was only possible because close to sixty people who served in the building were willing to speak out. I don’t know about you, but that’s inspiring to me. Just a few months ago, most of those folks would have been terrified to break ranks and call out this revenge-fueled administration. But like I keep saying, over and over, there is strength in numbers, and many of these lawyers have banded together to do the right thing and to tell us the truth about what’s happening.

The thread running through the major Trump regime stories this week has two intertwined fibers. One tells the story of an administration engaging in one of the gravest and most expansive abuses of power we’ve ever seen via a hijacked and virtually unrecognizable Justice Department. The other tells the story of the people who have the power to expose that glaring corruption: the insiders themselves.

Tomorrow night (Wednesday at 5pm ET) we will be focusing on the role whistleblowers have played — and will continue to play — on fighting back against the trend lines of fascism running through our government. I hope you’ll tune in. You can visit DEFIANCE.org, our YouTube channel, or watch on Substack.

There’s little doubt the Department of Justice is in crisis. The republic is, too. But in the small acts of defiance, we’re starting to see internal whistleblowers and even a few brave Republicans show us the faint outline of the nation we still might be, if we are defiant enough to demand it. In that, you can take heart.

Your friend, in defiance,

P.S. WHAT’S HAPPENING ON DEFIANCE NEWS

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