When President Trump began his second term, he stacked the top ranks of the Justice Department — the country’s chief federal law enforcement officers — with his former private attorneys, no doubt to make sure that they would protect his own personal and political interests rather than the nation’s.
Lately, though, in a less conspicuous way, he’s playing offense as well as defense, naming United States attorneys who will pursue, and even prosecute, his enemies. The Senate will shortly decide whether to confirm three of Mr. Trump’s most astonishing — and chillingly unqualified — selections for these crucial local positions.
The president has long expressed bitterness that his first attorney general, Jefferson Sessions III, recused himself from the investigation of Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia during the 2016 election, after which Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, named Robert S. Mueller III to lead the probe. Determined in his second term to avoid any such displays of independence and integrity by his subordinates, Mr. Trump stocked the Justice Department with former courtiers, including Attorney General Pam Bondi (since fired), Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche (since named acting A.G.) and Solicitor General D. John Sauer (unchanged).
Still, Mr. Trump has been frustrated that revenge-based criminal cases against his enemies — which apparently range from one against James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, for supposed perjury to another against former President Barack Obama for alleged treason — have not come successfully to fruition. That’s where the U.S. attorneys come in.
Because the Senate is still honoring the blue-slip process for U.S. attorneys, giving Democratic senators the ability to block Mr. Trump from installing his choices in their states, the president has been stymied. (For a time, he contrived ways to bypass the Senate to appoint U.S. attorneys in New York, New Jersey and Virginia, but the courts ultimately rejected those gambits.) Nevertheless, Mr. Trump has a free hand in red states, and he’s counting on an ever-compliant Republican majority in the Senate to rubber-stamp his selections.
The senators will shortly decide, for example, whether to confirm Darin Smith as the chief federal prosecutor in Wyoming. Mr. Smith, who is already the acting U.S. attorney, has acknowledged participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, protests at the Capitol to overturn President Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, though he asserted that he never entered the building. He is a failed candidate for Congress and in a brief tenure as a state senator, he co-sponsored bills to eliminate gun-free zones in buildings and ban state employees from assisting in enforcement of federal firearms laws. Primarily an estate planning specialist, he has practiced law for 25 years without trying a single case in federal or state courts.
When President Trump nominated Phillip Williams Jr. to be U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Alabama, Mr. Williams was the president of “Rightside Media,” a podcast and radio network where he hosted a daily, multi-hour talk show with the tagline, “Solid Conservative and Just Plain Right.” On his program, Mr. Williams argued that the Jan. 6 rioters were “hunted down” by federal law enforcement, whom he accused of “prosecutorial abuse, many, many times over.” He compared these prosecutions to “the Salem witch trials on a national scale.” As a lawyer, Mr. Williams has never tried a criminal case.
The Senate will also soon consider the nomination of Dan Bishop to be the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina. Mr. Bishop, who is already acting leader of the office, served in Congress from 2019 to 2025 and voted in 2021 not to certify the presidential election results in two states won by Mr. Biden. As part of Mr. Bishop’s current confirmation process, he answered a question from a Democratic senator about whether “the left” orchestrated the riots on Jan. 6, by saying, in writing, “I have heard credible accounts that black-bloc/Antifa agitators were in the crowd and among the first to vandalize the Capitol building, so I think that leftists participated in and perhaps instigated the mayhem in part.” In his career in private practice, Mr. Bishop estimated that the cases he handled were 97 percent civil and 3 percent criminal.
“Trump’s nominees as U.S. attorneys have been dramatically different in his second term,” Senator Richard Durbin, the Illinois Democrat who is the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told me. “In the first term, the nominees were conservative Republicans. Now they are MAGA loyalists.”
By custom, nominees for U.S. attorney posts do not testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in confirmation hearings, and following perfunctory debates, these three candidates were approved by the committee on party-line votes. Under new procedural rules promulgated by the Republican majority in the Senate, Majority Leader John Thune, the South Dakota Republican, will be able to call for a single vote to approve all three nominees. There is no announced Republican opposition to these U.S. attorney candidates, and none seems likely to materialize.
It’s possible to see U.S. attorneys as just another set of midlevel political appointees with a timer on their jobs, but that understates their importance. Whereas this administration figures whoever wins confirmation in most cabinet departments must first learn to navigate the vast federal bureaucracy in order to turn their policy preferences into concrete action, U.S. attorneys have almost unlimited discretion to launch criminal investigations. At minimum, these prosecutors can upend the lives of individuals and often lead to formal charges.
The consequences of the misuse of this extraordinary power are well illustrated by what’s been happening in South Florida. There, Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney nominated by Mr. Trump last year, has been working feverishly to build some kind of criminal case against John Brennan, the Obama-era head of the C.I.A., whom President Trump has long despised for his role in raising early suspicions about the ties between Russia and Mr. Trump.
I know of no legitimate case against Mr. Brennan — as Mr. Trump’s first Justice Department already demonstrated. At that time, the president ordered up a nearly identical investigation of Mr. Brennan and the origins of the Russia probe, that one led by John Durham, and it came up empty. It appears that the current Florida investigation has also found nothing, since Maria Medetis Long, a career prosecutor in the South Florida U.S. attorney’s office, recently left the investigation, reportedly over her belief there was not enough to make a case.
Mr. Trump’s Justice Department responded by doubling down on the pursuit of Mr. Brennan. The president’s enablers summoned Joseph diGenova, an 81-year-old Reagan-era U.S. attorney in Washington, to replace Ms. Medetis Long and take over the investigation. It’s not clear precisely how Mr. diGenova will direct the probe, but there’s no doubt that his assignment is to produce Mr. Brennan’s scalp. Even if the investigation of Mr. Brennan ends without criminal charges, as it would in a just world, or in an acquittal, which would be a second-best result, the cost to him and his family — in legal fees, harm to his good name and stress — will be enormous.
The power to inflict this kind of hardship gave rise to the most famous description of the power of federal prosecutors, which was made in 1940 by Robert H. Jackson, who was then the attorney general and would go on to be a Supreme Court justice and Nuremberg war-crimes prosecutor.
Addressing the annual conference of U.S. attorneys in the Great Hall of the Justice Department in Washington, Mr. Jackson said, “It would probably be within the range of that exaggeration permitted in Washington to say that assembled in this room is one of the most powerful peace-time forces known to our country. The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty and reputation than any other person in America. His discretion is tremendous.” In an especially resonant passage, Mr. Jackson called out “the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.”
True then, true now.
Source photograph by Michael Burrell, via Getty Images.
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