I want to begin with a tale of scandals past. On June 27, 2016, with Hillary Clinton in the thick of her presidential contest against Donald Trump, her husband met briefly with Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Their planes were parked close together at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, and Bill Clinton took the opportunity to talk to Lynch.
Lynch said the conversation was innocuous, mainly about their families and their travels, but Republicans were outraged. Hillary Clinton was at the time under F.B.I. investigation into her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state during President Barack Obama’s first term.
Although Bill Clinton had no formal authority over Lynch, the concern was obvious: Was a former president attempting to influence the investigation of his wife?
Even some Democrats expressed concern. “I do think that this meeting sends the wrong signal,” said Chris Coons, a Democratic senator from Delaware, “and I don’t think it sends the right signal. I think she should have steered clear, even of a brief, casual, social meeting with the former president.”
Looking back now, in 2025, I have two thoughts.
First, Senator Coons was right — the meeting never should have happened.
Second, how quaint — if anything like that happened today, it wouldn’t even register.
Simply put, Donald Trump has changed the stakes. The problem with his Department of Justice isn’t with an appearance of impropriety, but rather with a direct frontal assault on the integrity of the department. He is rapidly transforming it into a primarily political institution, where all other missions are subordinate to Trump’s whims — and to Trump’s quest for vengeance.
The Department of Justice is an uneasy fit in the executive branch. The reason is easy to explain. While some people describe the attorney general as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, I dissent. That distinction belongs to the man who can fire her the instant she fails to follow his directions. The president is ultimately in charge of federal law enforcement, and the attorney general is his employee.
As a result, there is always a danger of politicized justice. The combination of the president’s authority over the attorney general and his pardon power (a vestige of royal authority that sneaked into our Constitution) means that an unscrupulous president can create a two-tiered system of justice. He can provide pardons for his friends and allies and pursue his enemies with abandon.
An American president has the actual power to bring to life the saying, “For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.” This isn’t a new observation, and it’s certainly not a new observation about this presidency, but it’s worth remembering every single time the president pursues his vengeance.
These constitutional concerns are not theoretical. As the Nixon administration (among others) demonstrated, an “imperial presidency” courts corruption and abuse. To counter this temptation, the Department of Justice, acting under presidents of both parties, has created a series of rules and procedures designed to ensure fairness and impartiality.
Presidents of different parties have different enforcement priorities — one president may want to crack down more on drugs, another on gun crime — but the priorities aren’t supposed to be partisan. In other words, there isn’t one standard for Democratic drug dealers and another for Republican ones, or one standard for Republicans who commit gun crimes and another for Democrats.
There are other standards — among them, the Department of Justice (and the F.B.I. is part of the D.O.J.) typically doesn’t publicly announce when a person is under investigation. It also takes steps to protect the identities of people who might be relevant to a criminal case, but are not charged in the case.
This is why indictments often refer to people as “Individual 1” or “Individual 2” rather than use their names. If they’re not charged, they don’t have any real opportunity to defend their conduct, and “guilty by association” isn’t a legal or moral standard that justifies potentially destroying a person’s public reputation.
In addition, statutes and regulations protect both prosecutors and F.B.I. agents from arbitrary or partisan dismissal. These laws enable the creation of a cohort of professional law enforcement officers whose terms of service can extend across multiple administrations — building a degree of professionalism and expertise that would be impossible to maintain in a truly partisan, to-the-victor-belongs-the-spoils-based Justice Department.
Donald Trump has blown through all of this. From the first days of his second term, that much was clear. He granted clemency even to the most violent rioters on Jan. 6, including people found guilty of seditious conspiracy.
At the same time, he launched a purge against dozens of prosecutors who investigated and prosecuted the Jan. 6 rioters.
The Justice Department dropped its charges against the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, because the case was getting in the way of Adams’s enforcement of Trump’s immigration priorities. The judge in the case said it “smacks of a bargain,” one so transparently in violation of Justice Department standards and practices that it prompted the resignations of multiple prosecutors.
(There have been so many scandals since the Adams incident that it feels like ancient history — as if it happened during the First Continental Congress, and not mere months ago).
Trump’s bias has extended not just to people who’ve shown individual loyalty to Trump, but also to favored and disfavored constituencies. Earlier this summer, his Justice Department sought an astonishingly light sentence for a Louisville police officer convicted of a civil rights violation after he fired wildly into an apartment on the night Breonna Taylor was killed.
At the same time, it has relentlessly pursued migrants, deporting hundreds to a brutal El Salvadoran prison without due process. Sadly, that incident was but the tip of an iceberg of brutality aimed at people who are suspected of being illegal immigrants.
And it all keeps escalating. I have no way of knowing whether John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, is guilty of a crime, but I do know that when Kash Patel, the director of the F.B.I., tweets triumphantly amid reports of a search of Bolton’s home that “NO ONE is above the law” and when the vice president of the United States confirms that Bolton is under investigation, they are breaking through the standards designed to remind us that every American is innocent until proven guilty.
Nor do I know whether Senator Adam Schiff of California, Attorney General Letitia James of New York, or Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, are guilty of mortgage fraud, but the public accusation — in the absence of any adjudication — is yet another grave breach of the standards that preserve the presumption of innocence.
And when the president fired Cook on the basis of an unproven allegation, he not only violated the standards that preserve our system of justice, he may have violated the law as well. The president has to show “cause” before he fires a Federal Reserve governor, and an accusation of impropriety is not the same as the legal proof of improper conduct.
The very effort to use a Trump administration official, Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, to engage in targeted examinations of the financial records of prominent Democrats is yet another application of Trump’s relentless thirst for vengeance. It is certainly fine — even laudable — to police real accusations of suspected mortgage fraud. It is a gross abuse of justice to single out Democrats for special attention in this way.
On Wednesday, in fact, Trump made another reckless criminal accusation, declaring on Truth Social that George Soros and his son should be charged under “RICO,” the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. RICO is a statute typically deployed to combat organized crime.
But this is what authoritarian regimes do. They don’t simply declare that they’re prosecuting political opponents, they go ahead and do it — through trumped-up charges or selective prosecution.
Throughout Trump’s presidencies, I’ve always tried to double-check my instincts. Even when I’m virtually certain that Trump or members of his administration have abused their power, I want to hear from Trump’s defenders and from thoughtful outside observers.
The message from Trump’s defenders is clear — that this administration didn’t start any of this. They look at the indictments against Trump and claim that the Department of Justice was “weaponized” well before his presidency, and that the media refuses to acknowledge this truth. They’re all for partisan prosecutions when prosecutors target Trump.
It’s important to acknowledge that they do have a point, if a limited one. Not all of the legal proceedings against Trump have equal merit. A New York appeals court just tossed out the $500 million fraud judgment against Trump (while upholding the underlying fraud finding). The New York state criminal prosecution against Trump was based on a dubious legal theory (criticized across the political spectrum) that was designed to transform misdemeanor bookkeeping violations into felonies.
But Jack Smith’s prosecutions — the only Department of Justice prosecutions against Trump — were quite solid. They were cases that would have been brought against virtually anyone else in similar positions of trust. The only thing that made them truly notable was the identity of the defendant, then a former president of the United States.
The underlying legal theories were sound, and the facts were damning. In those cases, the miscarriage of justice was the fact that Trump never stood trial. He should have faced a jury of his peers.
And what about the thoughts of experienced, outside observers? You may have noticed that I’ve quoted Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor, a number of times in this newsletter. He’s a conservative and a former assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush administration. I quote him because he’s experienced, sober-minded and not prone to sensationalism.
This month he spoke at a conference on “Liberalism in the 21st Century,” and his words were clear — and jarring. Ben Wittes, the editor in chief of Lawfare, an indispensable legal website, asked the panelists to react to his “general impression,” which is that “the magnitude of the changes in the Justice Department is breathtaking, and it is very hard to overstate how impactful the last seven months have been.”
“An atomic bomb dropped on the department,” Goldsmith said. He continued:
There are tens of thousands of lawyers in the massive executive branch, spread out, whose job is to ascertain the massive array of laws that are supposed to govern executive branch behavior. And you can be cynical about this system, but it always worked, including with the Justice Department, in keeping the White House and the senior executive agencies more or less within the law, with some exceptions. And this administration has systematically and ruthlessly and successfully eliminated, with one exception, all internal legal resistance.
It is simply not acceptable to offer an opinion contrary to the one that the president, who is not a lawyer, wants to push. It’s really an extraordinary thing.
We are watching Donald Trump break the Department of Justice right before our eyes. It was never a perfect institution. It has violated its own standards many times over many decades.
But the answer to the Justice Department’s flaws is to reaffirm its commitment to justice and fairness, not to destroy its standards and abandon any pretense of impartiality.
If we learn anything from this miserable era of American politics, I hope we learn that complying with the Constitution is necessary — but not sufficient — if we want to preserve our Republic. Constitutional powers are subject to abuse, and Trump is abusing both his pardon power and his authority over the Department of Justice to transform the executive branch into an instrument of vengeance.
Even worse, the Supreme Court is poorly positioned to check the president’s abuses. His pardon power over federal crimes is absolute. While the court can check individual constitutional violations, the president remains in control of the Department of Justice until his term ends.
The atomic bomb has detonated, and only the American people can ultimately pick up the pieces and repair our Republic. But until a decisive number of Americans reject the man and his movement, he will continue to wreck American justice, and not even the Constitution can stand in his way.
Some other things I did
On Sunday, I wrote about a very difficult topic — life or death decisions in the face of immense suffering. Should we potentially discard embryos because they might have a birth defect or other health condition? Should suffering adults end their lives through euthanasia?
I received an enormous amount of reader mail, both for and against my position. I read heartfelt (and heartbreaking) messages from people on all sides of our disputes about euthanasia or I.V.F. Thank you for all the messages you send, and I do read them all, even if I can’t respond to them all. I’d love to hear from you about this issue as well:
I fully recognize that many, if not most, readers don’t share my view that each embryo — and each unborn child with Down syndrome — is a human life worthy of protection under the law. But I would ask you to put aside thoughts of the law for just a moment and think carefully about the culture we’re creating, from the beginning to the end of life.
What happens when we make a transition from understanding that suffering is an inevitable part of the human condition, one that rallies people to love and care for the people they love (or even to love and care for people they don’t know), to it being somebody’s fault — perhaps it’s the parents who wrongly brought you into this world or your own fault for hanging on too long?
It is understandable and deeply human to want to bring all aspects of our health as much into our control as possible. Terminally ill patients often face horrifying levels of pain. We should try to treat that pain as best we can. Vulnerability is terrifying, but it is also inescapable. In our quest for health and fitness, we are fighting a delaying action. There is no earthly victory over decay and death.
More:
Yet our value is defined by our humanity, not our productivity, and when we live in close community, vulnerability and suffering pull us together. It can trigger a feeling of love and care so powerful and painful that it changes us forever. It softens us. It humbles us. It awakens awareness of the needs of other people.
I’ve never seen this more clearly than when my wife was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer in 2023. I watched how caring for their mother changed my kids. I grew in love and admiration for friends who rallied to our side. I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we were not alone.
If cherishing the suffering can make a nation kind, then discarding the suffering makes it cruel. It can breed a sense of contempt — why should we care for this hopeless cause? — and when our sense of control is shattered by our inevitable frailty, it can breed panic and fear.
Who will care for me as I walk this difficult path?
David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
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