How is Trump Changing the Justice Department?

0:00I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday Story, where we go deep on one big topic. A few months ago, Donald Trump made the short trip down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to the Justice Department. It's rare for a president to speak at the Justice Department. In fact, Trump's visit was only the fifth by a president this century. Historically, presidents have kept their distance. That's been the norm for decades. Respected by Republicans and Democrats alike, that the department should be free from political interference. President Trump has made clear he has a very different idea about that relationship.

0:42And in his speech that day, he lashed out at those who have worked in the building in recent years. Our predecessors turned this Department of Justice into the Department of Injustice. But I stand before you today to declare that those days are over and they are never going to come back. As for Attorney General Pam Bondi, she said this when introducing the president that same morning. We all work for the greatest president in the history of our country. We are so proud to work at the directive of Donald Trump. This is just one moment of several in the past six months that signaled what many legal observers see as a major shift in the relationship between the White House and the Justice Department under this administration.

1:33Reporter Ryan Lucas has been following the turbulence and the changes underway at the agency, and we'll talk about what he's been seeing right after the break.

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3:15Hi, Ryan. Hi, thanks for having me. So before we dig into what's happening now at the Department of Justice, what was Trump's relationship with the agency in his first administration? And what makes this moment different? Well, his relationship with the department in his first administration was, generally speaking, pretty rocky. He frequently lashed out at the Justice Department leaders, leaders of the FBI. A lot of that was tied, of course, to the fact that the Russia investigation was going on, looking into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. And that's something that frequently clearly got under Trump's skin.

3:53At the same time, he often talked about wanting to investigate his rivals. He didn't make a lot of headway on that, in part because in his first administration, his two attorney generals were largely establishment figures, kind of institutionalists. And I'm talking here about his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who was a longtime senator from Alabama. And then William Barr, who was a Republican establishment attorney, had served as attorney general under George H.W. Bush as well. Now, we have a very different set of leaders at the Justice Department this go around. The common thread for all of them is that they have all served as personal attorneys at one point or another for Trump.

4:32Pam Bondi is the attorney general, of course, as the leader of the department. Republicans talk a lot about her experience as a local prosecutor and a state prosecutor. But she and her top lieutenants and the top figures in the department are seen as loyalists because of the fact that they have worked as personal attorneys for the president. And like the president, they argue that the Justice Department was weaponized in recent years, particularly under the Biden administration, against Trump specifically and also more generally against conservatives. And they have vowed to end what they see as the weaponization of the department.

5:07And this is something that Bondi talked about in her confirmation hearing. I will fight every day to restore confidence and integrity to the Department of Justice and each of its components. The partisanship, the weaponization will be gone. America will have one tier of justice for all. So what do supporters of the administration say about these changes? Because they argue that the DOJ was biased in the past. Are they saying now that the department is not acting in a biased way and there's no weaponization at this point? So look, I think it's important to say that every administration comes in with its own priorities.

5:52It's going to focus its energy and its resources on those things. We've seen new administration come in and focus on civil rights. In this administration, the new team at the Justice Department has come in. They said their enforcement priorities are violent crime, cartels, and yes, ending what they see as the weaponization of the department. I spoke with Cully Stimson about this. He's a former federal prosecutor. He's now with the Conservative Heritage Foundation. And he says, yes, the department was going after conservatives, in his view, under the Biden administration. I don't think it's even disputable, frankly.

6:29The question going forward is, how do you right the ship and how do you focus on actual crimes based on actual evidence and try to depoliticize prosecutions? But look, critics that I have spoken with, including department veterans who have worked across Republican administrations, Democratic administrations, they very much push back on that. They say that despite all of this talk that we hear from Bondi and her top lieutenants about ending the purported weaponization of the department, they say that Bondi, in fact, herself is weaponizing the department and that political considerations in many instances are driving the decision making.

7:10I mean, to that point, it seems like a key moment so far for the new Trump DOJ was his handling of the case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. He was facing federal charges. Now he's not. What happened there? Right. So Adams was indicted on corruption charges in Manhattan. That was back in September. Fights the charges after Trump wins office. Adams goes and visits Trump, which is something that legal observers looked at and thought that Adams was trying to get in Trump's good graces, then in February, so after Trump's in office, the Justice Department leadership orders the U.S. attorney in Manhattan to drop the case against Adams.

7:53The DOJ says, in essence, that this isn't based on the evidence in the case, but instead that it interferes in part with Adams' ability to help Trump out with immigration enforcement. So they want his help enforcing the administration's immigration agenda. Now, the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, who has a conservative legal pedigree, had clerked for former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, she refuses. She says, essentially, there's no good reason to drop this case. She resigns. The Trump Justice Department then reassigns the case to what's known as the public integrity section here in Washington.

8:28The leader and his deputy of that section also refuse to drop the case. They resign. The following morning, it was Valentine's Day, the then number two official in the department gets on a call with the remaining members of the public integrity section and says to them, look, you've got one hour to get two people to sign the court papers to dismiss this case. One of the attorneys in the section at the time was Ryan Crosswell. I talked to him about this. There was essentially three options. Sign it, resign, or be fired. Crosswell told me that the lawyers in the public integrity section then got together to talk it over.

9:03We discussed it in the room, discussed the options, and one of our attorneys did sign the motion. Had you ever faced a situation like that before in your 10 years at the department? Absolutely not. Now, Crosswell took a couple of days after this, took the weekend, came back to the department the next week and resigned, decided that he didn't want to work in the department anymore. But as he put it, this case and the way that it was handled raised a fundamental question, which is basically if the Justice Department is going to drop charges against somebody who gives in to a political demand from the administration, is this also the kind of Justice Department that will bring charges against somebody who won't submit to a political demand?

9:49And that was a fundamental question for him. In the end, there were roughly around 10 prosecutors who resigned because of how the Justice Department handled this. The federal judge ultimately did dismiss the case, but he had some sharp words for the Justice Department's decision to do so. He said in his ruling that, quote, everything here smacks of a bargain, dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions. And for Justice Department observers, that was a big problem. From your reporting, this was one of the first, but it's not the only example of the Trump administration weaponizing the department, right?

10:29Right. It's not. It's certainly one of the highest profile just because of the scale of the resignations that we saw. But no, it is definitely not the only example. This DOJ leadership has fired prosecutors who worked on special counsel Jack Smith's team and the investigations into Trump himself. They've pushed out department attorneys who prosecuted January 6 rioters. They forced out senior FBI officials. They've dropped cases against the president's political allies. And the president himself has directed the department to investigate former officials from his first administration who had been critical of him to investigate ActBlue, which is a Democratic fundraising outfit.

11:09And most recently, there are reports that the department is investigating former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan. And I talked to Liz Oyer about the department's actions under the Trump administration. She's a former pardon attorney at the department. And she told me that in her view, the department is being transformed right now, as she put it, into Trump's personal law firm. The attorney general has made it clear that directions are coming from the very top from the president and she is there to do his bidding. That means pursuing enemies of the president. That means doing favors for friends of the president.

11:45The Department of Justice is essentially whatever the president wants it to be right now. Now, Oyer worked at the Justice Department briefly under this administration. She was fired in March, hours after she had declined to restore gun rights to the actor Mel Gibson. Mel Gibson is a very prominent supporter of the president. Oyer said that she declined to give Gibson his gun rights back in essence because he had a domestic violence conviction. So she had safety concerns and she has since filed suit over her firing saying that it was unlawful. But she points to the Gibson episode as an example of the department's career staff, its experts being kind of pushed aside, ignored their advice, not being taken into consideration.

12:27And that instead, she says, political considerations are in many instances driving decisions. She also said something that I've heard from other department veterans about what they say appears to be, in their view, a broader shift at the department under Trump 2.0. Typically, it's been the view of the department that the goal isn't always winning. It's to do justice. In this administration, it seems to have shifted to winning at all costs and winning is defined as implementing the president's political agenda. Yeah. One division where this shift has been especially visible is the Civil Rights Division, the division often described as the crown jewel of the department.

13:16A look at how the Trump administration is steering it to a new mission, one that critics say prioritizes its allies and targets its enemies. We'll be right back. This message comes from Schwab. At Schwab, how you invest is your choice, not theirs. That's why when it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices. You can invest and trade on your own. Plus, get advice and more comprehensive wealth solutions to help meet your unique needs. With award-winning service, low costs, and transparent advice, you can manage your wealth your way at Schwab. Visit schwab.com to learn more. This message comes from Allianz Travel Insurance.

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14:38Motion for life. More at MichelinMan.com slash Y hyphen Michelin slash innovation. We're back with NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucas. One of the department's big jobs is protecting civil rights. What has that traditionally looked like? So the Civil Rights Division, which you noted is often described as the crown jewel of the department, it was established during the Eisenhower administration. So in the 1950s at a time of the civil rights movement, when there was the push in the country to end racial segregation. segregation. And so for the past basically 70 years, the division has worked to or tried to protect the constitutional rights of all Americans to combat discrimination across all facets of life in the U.S.

15:30And, you know, I'm thinking here of things from like voting and housing to employment, education, policing, disability rights. You know, it hasn't always been perfect, but it's part of a process that supporters say is trying to make the country more fair and more equal. But there's been a pretty big shift underway now on this. Like, what does the Trump DOJ say it's doing on the civil rights front? So it's interesting. The new head of the civil rights division is Harmeet Dillon. She's a conservative attorney from California, a very vocal Trump supporter. She actually chaired, in 2020 a group called Lawyers for Trump that challenged the election results.

16:11So that gives you a bit of a sense of her background and where she's coming from. Here's how she described her vision for the Civil Rights Division when she spoke at a recent conservative Federalist Society event. The usual approach under Republican administrations, many of you will be familiar with this, has been just try to slow things down. There really hasn't been a focus on turning the around and driving it in the opposite direction. And that's my vision of the DOJ civil rights. And look, there are Republicans on the Hill who very much agree with Dylan's vision here and what she's done so far.

16:49And she has gotten right to work on, as she put it, trying to turn that train around. She's issued mission statements for the division that push Trump's priorities. They redirect resources from enforcing civil rights law to enforcing the president's executive orders. I'm talking here about things like protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation, keeping men out of women's sports, eradicating anti-Christian bias and combating anti-Semitism. They've also stopped some things that were being done previously. The division has dropped investigations, withdrawn statements of interest or amicus briefs in dozens of cases.

17:25Some of those were related to voting rights, alleged racial discrimination in housing, civil actions against anti-abortion activists. One of the most notable instances of things that they stopped is they backed away from federal cases against police departments accused of civil rights violations. And that includes against police departments in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was murdered, and then in Louisville, where, of course, we had the police killing of Breonna Taylor. So when you turn the train around on civil rights, does that mean less focus on protecting the rights of minorities or marginalized groups and more on preventing discrimination of white people, because that's part of the argument, is it not?

18:15So I think the way Dylan has talked about this is that, as she's put it, the Civil Rights Division has pursued a woke ideology agenda, so to speak, viewing things through a diversity, equity inclusion sort of lens. And she's talked about, as she's put it, the division persecuting police departments, going after anti-abortion protesters who have violated federal law, though it has to be said. So she's basically saying that the Civil Rights Division has in the past used civil rights laws to protect only certain groups in this country and that she's going to use the division to protect, as she puts it, all groups.

18:50That's her view. There are certainly people who have a very different perspective on what she wants to do with the division. I've spoken with a lot of current and former attorneys in the department who say that the division under her leadership is in essence setting aside the traditional mission of enforcing civil rights laws. And instead it's being turned into an enforcement arm of the administration of the president's political agenda. And the civil rights laws are being used to go after the very groups that those laws are actually meant to protect. So for example, the division has opened an investigation into the city of Chicago for, on the basis of possible race-based discrimination, because the city's mayor, in a speech at a church, basically talked up the number of Black officials that he has in his administration.

19:37And the division said, wait a minute, this seems like you could have race-based discrimination in your hiring. So to get to your question, what critics would say is that Dillon is turning the Civil Rights Division on its head. So you've been talking to some current and former DOJ officials. What is the feeling like right now at the division? There's a lot of frustration about the changes that are being imposed. Some of the people I spoke with, you know, say they were here for Trump 1, and they say that Trump 2 is very, very different. During the first Trump administration, they felt that they could still do good work protecting people's constitutional rights across the country by enforcing civil rights laws.

20:23They feel, a lot of them, the ones who I spoke to, many of them, feel that they just can't do that anymore under this administration. And so what we've seen is a mass exodus of attorneys from the civil rights division, some 70%, some more than 250 people have left, and that is just a huge, huge number. One of the former officials who I spoke to is Stacey Young. She worked in the Civil Rights Division, and she says that this shift in the division and its work is going to have ripple effects that are going to be felt across the country. The division right now is being decimated. The head of the division and the Justice Department have decided that the division is going to enforce laws only with respect to favored communities of people.

21:14So in terms of favored communities, one thing that observers point to is, for example, the task force that the Justice Department has set up to combat supposed anti-Christian bias. But Young thinks that the direction that the division is being taken in now is going to have long-lasting effects on the lives of regular Americans, particularly folks who are experiencing discrimination of some sort. So that chilling effect the Civil Rights Division has always had at making sure that institutions, that entities don't discriminate, that's no longer going to be there. So what's the bigger picture here?

21:52Like, what's the long-term impact of these changes? So that's a big question. I think what I would say to you is, if you take all the stuff that we've talked about, and then on top of that, you add the fact that the president has gone after private law firms to try to punish them because he doesn't like the clients they represent or the causes that they represent. You look at the administration's attacks on judges who have ruled against some of the administration's actions. You look at, as we've talked about, the firing of career nonpolitical attorneys at the Justice Department and FBI officials because they worked on cases that the president doesn't like.

22:29and in talking to law professors and legal observers and veterans of the department, both Republican and Democratic administrations, what I'm hearing is that all of these things for them raise fundamental questions about the state of rule of law in the U.S. The idea that laws are supposed to be applied in a consistent, predictable way, that they apply to everybody equally, including to the government itself. And look, if there is no rule of law, the people who are in power decide who the law applies to, how it applies. It doesn't necessarily apply to the folks who are in power or their friends.

23:08They can do what they want, but people who aren't in power can be punished for breaking the law, for not even breaking the law. There's no due process. You don't have equal protection under the law. So what I'm hearing from the people that I talk to increasingly our concerns about that, questions about that, fundamental questions about the state of rule of law and what that means for the United States going forward and what kind of country we're going to live in. Ryan, thank you so much for bringing us your reporting and for all the work you do. Thank you. That was Ryan Lucas, NPR's Justice Department correspondent.

23:46This episode was produced by Ariana Lee, Andrew Mambo, and Andrew Cerulnik. It was edited by Jenny Schmidt with help from Anna Yukoninov and Krishnathay Kulamore. It was fact-checked by Greta Pittenger and engineered by Kwasi Lee. The rest of the Sunday Story team includes Justine Yan and Liana Simstrom. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Aisha Roscoe. Up first is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.

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