After President Trump lost the 2020 election, his allies thought about what to do differently if he returned to power. One lesson from his first term, they decided, was that government lawyers, even very conservative Republican political appointees, had frequently raised legal objections to ideas he or his White House advisers put forward.
If they got another shot, they said in campaign-era interviews, they would install much more permissive gatekeepers. Now, a month into a term that has been defined by Mr. Trump’s radical challenges to the basic structure of government, his administration is moving aggressively to curb a critical internal check: independent legal thinking.
His appointees have swiftly cleared the Justice Department’s top ranks of career lawyers, even as Mr. Trump stocked leading posts with his own defense attorneys. His aides sidelined the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, bypassing its traditional role of vetting draft executive orders and giving it no acting chief. Last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi added to the purge by firing the top lawyer at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
This subjugation of lawyers has now extended to the Pentagon. Late last Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the top judge advocates general for the military. As three-star uniformed lawyers, they give independent and nonpolitical advice about the international laws of war and domestic legal constraints Congress has imposed on the armed forces.
Speaking to reporters this week, Mr. Hegseth appeared dismissive of the role of the senior uniformed lawyers, who serve fixed terms in nonpartisan roles and do not normally turn over when a new president takes office. Mr. Hegseth claimed none of them were “well suited” and said he did not want people who “exist to be roadblocks to anything that happens in their spots.”
The ousters and Mr. Hegseth’s explanation have raised alarms among retired JAG officers. They are trained to try to help commanders find lawful ways to achieve their objectives, they say, meaning it is rare for them to say “no” — but sometimes “no” is the only answer.
The rapid dismissal of independent lawyers across the government evokes a line from Shakespeare, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Some, like Justice John Paul Stevens in a 1985 opinion, have interpreted it to mean that “disposing of lawyers is a step in the direction of a totalitarian form of government.”
Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Hegseth was asked about a similar warning by a law professor, who said the administration’s moves could signal preparations to break the law. He called that critique “hyperbole,” insisting that removing the judge advocates general was about finding “fresh blood,” not permitting illegality.
But Mr. Hegseth, a former midlevel Army infantry officer, has long exhibited a hostile view toward military lawyers. He has insulted them in his memoir as “jagoffs,” questioned whether it made sense to obey the Geneva Conventions and blamed them for what he saw as unduly restrictive rules of engagement on the battlefield.
Mr. Hegseth appeared to not have understood that top commanders, not their legal advisers, decide what standards to set. Battling insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, commanders sometimes adopted more restrictive limits on opening fire for a strategic reason: to reduce civilian casualties that fueled anti-American sentiment among local populations.
Specifically, Mr. Hegseth fired Lt. Gen. Joseph B. Berger III of the Army and Lt. Gen. Charles Plummer of the Air Force. The position of their counterpart in the Navy was already vacant because the vice admiral at the time, Christopher French, abruptly retired after Mr. Trump won the election.
Mr. Hegseth, defending the dismissals, also made clear that he sought to impose greater political control in selecting their successors, and that they would hold a lower rank.
In his Fox News interview, he criticized the existing process for picking the senior military lawyers, which is required by law — strongly implying the administration will not follow it in filling their posts.
But Mr. Hegseth misstated the process, claiming that the top judge advocates general have traditionally “been chosen by each other.” In fact, boards of military officers who are mostly not lawyers recommend nominees, according to retired JAGs.
The retired Lt. Gen. Christopher F. Burne, the top Air Force lawyer from 2014 to 2018, said such boards typically feature eight to 12 three- or four-star officers, and only one — the current top judge advocate general who is nearing retirement — is a lawyer.
Mr. Hegseth has also said the next top JAG officers would be only two-star officers, demoting the positions from the three-star ranks they have had since 2008, when Congress elevated them to that level. Lawmakers opted to do so to give the voice of the rule of law greater heft in decision-making at the Pentagon, aiming to bolster the chances that the lawyers would be invited to key meetings and given seats at the table.
The Trump administration’s bulldozing of experienced government lawyers comes as Mr. Trump has been violating statutes enacted by Congress, apparently in the hope that the ensuing deluge of lawsuits will give the Supreme Court opportunities to strike them down and expand his power.
The president has purged board members of independent agencies, inspectors general and civil servants, defying laws constraining such firings. He has also dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development and folded its remnants into the State Department, despite a law that says it shall exist as an independent entity, and refused to spend funds Congress appropriated.
During the 2024 campaign, he and his advisers laid out other radical policies they had in sight. One in particular may be relevant to the curbing of top military lawyers: Mr. Trump repeatedly said he wanted to use the armed forces on domestic soil to fight crime in cities controlled by Democrats, hunt for unauthorized immigrants and put down “riots.”
The Posse Comitatus Act generally makes it a crime to use the military for law enforcement purposes, but the Insurrection Act creates an exception under some circumstances. Still, the prospect of deploying the military against Americans is fraught. Military and law enforcement officials resisted Mr. Trump’s desire to do so during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
Few of the president’s aides better reflect his view of presidential power than Russell T. Vought, who, as in Mr. Trump’s first term, oversees the Office of Management and Budget and is a chief proponent of consolidating White House control in the executive branch. During the interregnum, Mr. Vought led a pro-Trump think tank whose work included establishing a rationale for why it would be lawful to deploy troops on U.S. soil, including to suppress protests that Mr. Trump deems to be riots.
In a 2023 speech, a video of which was obtained by ProPublica, Mr. Vought explained that his think tank was trying to develop alternative and more permissive legal advice for the next president. “Most of the time in the Oval Office we would put forward some, some policy solution, and then we’d have the lawyers come in and say: ‘It’s not legal. You can’t do that. That would overturn this precedent. There’s a state law against that,’” he recalled.
Mr. Vought continued: “We’re trying to build a shadow Office of Legal Counsel so that when a future president says, ‘What legal authorities do I need to shut down the riots?’ we want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do.’”
Mr. Trump has adopted a defiant posture toward the blizzard of lawsuits his actions have already spurred, declaring on social media that “he who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” His bearing dovetails with a concerted effort by his inner circle to advance a sweeping view of presidential power, the so-called unitary executive theory.
Proponents of that ideology want the Supreme Court to reinterpret the Constitution — contrary to a 1935 precedent — to deny Congress the right to pass laws that limit the president’s total control of the executive branch. That would include ending its ability to create independent agencies that the president does not directly control and to impose limits on his ability to summarily fire any executive branch official at will.
In an executive order instructing independent agencies to submit to White House supervision last week, Mr. Trump declared that officials in the executive branch may not think for themselves about what the law means, saying they must accept whatever he or Ms. Bondi says is legal.
“The president and the attorney general’s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties,” the order said.
Emil Bove III, a former criminal defense lawyer to Mr. Trump who is now the acting deputy attorney general, expressed a similar sentiment after he demanded that the U.S. attorney in Manhattan drop corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York. He left open the possibility of later reviving the case.
Mr. Bove said the case prevented Mr. Adams from devoting his “full attention and resources” to accomplishing the president’s immigration objectives. In refusing the order, the interim U.S. attorney, Danielle Sassoon, cast it as an unconstitutional use of prosecutorial power to coerce Mr. Adams into carrying out a particular political agenda.
Accepting Ms. Sassoon’s resignation, Mr. Bove made an extraordinary declaration: She was the one who had violated the Constitution by daring to suggest that she had “discretion to interpret the Constitution in a manner inconsistent with the policies of a democratically elected president and a Senate-confirmed attorney general.”
A similar dispute with judge advocates general played out in the administration of President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, foreshadowing the broader effort now underway in the Trump era.
Politically appointed civilian lawyers in the Bush administration had embraced a broad view of the powers the Constitution purportedly gives the president as commander in chief. Mr. Bush, they said, could lawfully direct the military, when handling wartime detainees, to ignore the Geneva Conventions and domestic laws on matters like military commissions and torturing prisoners.
The top JAGs strongly resisted, leading the Bush team to claim that they were bound to accept the Justice Department’s legal interpretations. The team also cut the uniformed lawyers out of deliberations, then tried to change military rules to subordinate them to the politically appointed civilian general counsels of their services.
In response, Congress passed laws in 2004 that say it is illegal for anyone at the Pentagon to interfere with their ability “to give independent legal advice” to the secretaries and chiefs of staff of their services. Those laws remain on the books.
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