In February, when Attorney General Pam Bondi took over the Justice Department, she immediately informed its 10,000-odd lawyers that they would have to “zealously” advocate for the United States. What she actually meant was that, under her watch, the department would have to zealously advocate for Donald Trump. DOJ lawyers, she said in her February 5 memo, are required to “aggressively” enforce civil and criminal laws and “vigorously” defend all “presidential policies and actions.” While those lawyers have a certain amount of discretion in their duties, Bondi warned that it “does not include latitude to substitute personal political views or judgments for those that prevailed in the election.”
In past Democratic and Republican administrations alike, DOJ lawyers had the informal right to decline to affix their names to the signature block at the end of a court filing—the lawyerly equivalent of a screenwriter changing his credit to Alan Smithee when he disagrees with the studio’s choices. They could also decline to participate in some cases on conscience grounds.
Bondi ended that practice, treating it as an anti-constitutional act. DOJ lawyers who “refuse to advance good-faith arguments by declining to appear in court or sign briefs,” she claimed, undermine the constitutional order and deprive Trump “of the benefit of his lawyers.” Any DOJ attorneys who sought such exemptions “will be subject to discipline and potentially termination.”
This year, in response to Bondi’s dictates, hundreds of lawyers have left the department. Erez Reuveni was not one of them—at least, not at first. Reuveni began his tenure at the Justice Department in 2010 as a trial attorney, and across three presidencies worked his way up through the Office of Immigration Litigation. He was not a political appointee; he was a civil servant expected to represent the United States in court regardless of the president’s party or ideology, and he did.
Then something happened that made it untenable to go on. In March, a federal immigration agent detained Kilmar Abrego Garcia—who had entered the United States without authorization after fleeing El Salvador when he was 16 years old—outside a Home Depot in Hyattsville, Maryland. Three days later, a U.S. government flight sent him and dozens of other men to the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, a Salvadoran-run prison where he would be held indefinitely.
Federal officials later learned that Abrego Garcia had been deported in error: An immigration judge had barred his removal in 2019, and the Department of Homeland Security had given him a work permit. Though Trump administration officials would later claim that Abrego Garcia had ties to international gangs, they have provided little evidence to support the allegations.
When Abrego Garcia’s lawyers challenged his continued detention in CECOT in U.S. federal courts, it was Reuveni who represented the United States. By this point, he was the acting deputy director of his office, giving him the discretion to do so. He later told Congress that he “took the case on personally so that more junior attorneys would not have to work on such a high-profile and sensitive matter.” During a hearing in April, he conceded to a federal judge that Abrego Garcia’s removal had been in error.
That admission was not remarkable in and of itself. Lawyers are supposed to notify courts of their mistakes when they happen, as part of their duty of candor. But widespread news coverage of Reuveni’s contrition prompted a wave of blowback against him, both from within the department and from the White House. Reuveni refused to add his name to the signature block of a court filing on the case that would claim for the first time—and without sufficient evidence or legal backing, in his view—that Abrego Garcia had “terrorist” connections.
The next day, Reuveni was placed on leave, and he was fired from the department a few days thereafter. Bondi told The New York Times in a statement that DOJ lawyers would “face consequences” if they did not “zealously advocate on behalf of the United States.” For many people, this might be where the story ends. But Reuveni went further. In late June, he filed a formal whistleblower complaint with the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he told the full story from his point of view.
The government’s errors were not inadvertent, Reuveni explained, but part of a willful effort to mislead federal judges and defy their orders while carrying out deportations. In one notable exchange, he described how Emil Bove, a top DOJ official who was recently confirmed to a lifetime seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, told other department lawyers that they would need to consider telling the courts “fuck you” if they stood in the way of deportations.
This is not a story of a hardened pro-Biden leftist or an embittered never-Trump conservative fighting the administration from within as part of some “deep state,” as Trumpworld loves to imagine. Reuveni did not set out to oppose Trump’s policies in general or even in the specifics; he sought merely to do his job honorably. Only when the administration broke the law did he speak up. Bondi, in seeking to destroy the DOJ’s independence, drew no distinction between “the president” and “the United States” in court. As Reuveni’s actions showed, it may be the most important distinction to make for the next four years.
The post The Attorney Who Refused to Help Trump Break the Law appeared first on New Republic.
