A top Justice Department official delivered a gung-ho message to Trump-appointed federal prosecutors around the country on Monday, as they reckoned with the Republican drubbing in the midterm elections: We are now a wartime department, he declared.
The official, Aakash Singh, the principal associate deputy attorney general, exhorted dozens of U.S. attorneys during a teleconference call to step up their pressure on emboldened local officials in Democratic-controlled localities, like Houston, to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, according to three people briefed on the exchange.
But it is hard to double down when you are running low on chips.
The department, which has already seen the exodus of hundreds of career officials who were forced out or left because they disagreed with President Trump’s priorities, faces a daunting new staffing dilemma spurred by the election.
Many career officials who hung on until now, including some who broadly support the department’s current mission, are eyeing the exits to avoid two grim years of partisan combat. They are joined by a second, higher-profile group: senior department officials who have submitted resignations, some after a discreet shove, in a leadership reshuffle over the past week.
Among the departures: Brett Shumate, the head of the department’s civil division; Harmeet Dhillon, the chief of the civil rights unit; and Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney in Miami who oversaw a sprawling inquiry examining the various investigations into Mr. Trump. T. Elliot Gaiser, the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and Jesus A. Osete, a Dhillon aide, have been nominated for federal judgeships.
Patrick Davis, the former head of the department’s legislative affairs office, left before the election — averting the possibility that he would have to confront a torrent of congressional action.
The upheaval is hardly a surprise. Democrats will soon have the power to try to constrain Mr. Trump’s authority to directly control the department for the first time since his victory two years ago. Representative Robert Garcia, the California Democrat who is the top member of the House Oversight Committee, has taunted administration officials to “lawyer up,” promising wide-ranging investigations into Mr. Trump and those in his orbit.
Former officials now at private law firms said they were receiving calls from officials on the inside reporting that morale, already sagging, had gotten much worse since Election Day.
Yet not everyone is quite so glum.
“The departure of some of these lawyers from D.O.J. will no doubt be met with cheers from career prosecutors,” said Barbara McQuade, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan during the Obama administration.
“This has the feel of rats fleeing the sinking ship,” added Ms. McQuade, now a professor at the University of Michigan Law School.
Attorney General Todd Blanche has made clear that he intends to use the Justice Department to fight off any attempts by Congress to investigate administration officials, including Stephen Miller, the new White House chief of staff.
“I’ll tell you what,” Mr. Blanche said in a TV interview in recent days. “Stephen Miller has a lawyer. It’s me. It’s me and the entire Department of Justice.”
In another interview, Mr. Blanche adopted a less confrontational posture and said he would obey the law and comply with any reasonable congressional inquiry, although he did not say how he would make such a determination.
Kiersten Pels, a department spokeswoman, said Mr. Singh’s comments to the U.S. attorneys were not a declaration of political war but rather a reiteration of his determination to pursue law-and-order policies in the face of unwarranted local opposition.
“The ‘wartime’ reference had everything to do with public safety,” she said in an email. “In several districts, newly elected state and local leaders are no longer interested in partnering with federal law enforcement to keep their communities safe.”
The tone of defiance from Mr. Blanche and Mr. Singh is not shared by many of their younger subordinates, who are considering a near-term future that promises more provocations from Mr. Miller, perpetual congressional investigations and the possibility that their association with the Trump administration will crimp their future hiring prospects, according to former officials.
The department’s work force has, as a whole, been stressed by mass departures and the pressure to execute on Mr. Trump’s demands and Mr. Miller’s drive to increase the department’s criminal prosecutions of immigrants.
One example: The acting head of the U.S. attorney’s office for the Western District of Washington acknowledged to a federal judge in recent weeks that he did not have the staffing capacity to represent the government in all the cases in which immigrants legally challenged their detention.
Among the most striking features of the Justice Department under Mr. Blanche is its shrinking, centralized and overworked leadership core.
One former prosecutor who left earlier this year offered a mordant assessment: If the burger chain is called Five Guys, he joked, the Justice Department should be called Four Guys, to reflect its tiny leadership cadre — Mr. Blanche; his top deputy, Trent McCotter; Stanley Woodward Jr., the associate attorney general; and Mr. Singh, a veteran prosecutor responsible for an ever-expanding portfolio of criminal investigations.
Mr. Blanche’s three deputies have run themselves ragged in recent weeks, current officials said, to cope with the workload involving investigations into Mr. Trump’s perceived enemies, litigation over the president’s vanity construction projects and 11th-hour election cases in California and Alaska.
In many instances, they have been forced to personally oversee and sign complex legal filings that would have typically been handled by their subordinates, including the unsuccessful effort to preemptively block certification of the Senate race in Alaska if the Democratic candidate won by a narrow margin.
Ms. Dhillon, whose division had nominal jurisdiction in the matter, was notably absent from the lawsuit. She left soon after.
Mr. Shumate, for his part, has declined to sign on to unspecified litigation over the past several months, souring his relationship with the department’s leadership and some White House officials, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.
(Ms. Dhillon has declined to comment, and Mr. Shumate did not respond to a request for comment.)
It remains to be seen whether the recent shake-up was the product of the political tumult or part of a plan by Mr. Blanche to purge his leadership ranks of officials the White House saw as insufficiently capable of getting the job done — or a combination of both.
Thus far, only Ms. Dhillon has been replaced by an interim appointment.
Mr. Reding Quiñones, who had overseen a centerpiece of Mr. Trump’s retribution campaign, the so-called grand conspiracy inquiry of Obama-era officials, probably would have been ejected even if Republicans had fared better, people familiar with the situation said.
Yet his departure, along with those of others, removes a buffer for an attorney general bombarded with demands, many of them nearly impossible to fulfill, from an impatient White House. And Mr. Blanche will have to contend with the likelihood that many of these successors are unlikely to be confirmed by a Democratic-controlled Senate.
Mr. Blanche and his team will continue to confront the reality that cost his predecessor, Pam Bondi, her job — Mr. Trump’s insistence that he pursue investigations against political adversaries, often despite a lack of evidence and a questionable basis in the law.
Regardless of Mr. Trump’s calls, his revenge campaign has so far been largely unsuccessful. None of his most prized targets are in prison, although they have had to suffer the financial and reputational costs of investigation.
What the White House mostly has to show for these efforts is a remarkable string of losses in court. They include the increasing willingness of grand juries to reject indictments they see as specious, an occurrence that was once very rare, and a growing number of rebukes from judges appointed by both Republican and Democratic presidents.
Their actions have also created a small army of disgruntled department veterans, fired or driven from federal service, and seeking an arena to tell their own stories.
Suddenly, the voters have given them one.
These are likely to be the star witnesses in oversight hearings, revealing what they experienced firsthand to the general public — and seizing the narrative of grievance from Mr. Trump and those he chose to run the Justice Department.
Even as officials said that Mr. Singh was referring narrowly to the recalcitrance of local officials in blue states, there is little doubt that the administration will seek to project the image of an administration still capable of attacking. Before rejoining the administration, Mr. Miller founded a legal defense group that laid the groundwork for the department’s vengeance agenda.
On Monday, Will Scharf, the White House counsel, warned Mr. Garcia against congressional investigations by making the politically provocative but legally questionable claim that the lawmaker could face a criminal investigation for going over the line.
“We are monitoring the abusive and capricious threats that are now proliferating from Democrat legislators,” Mr. Scharf wrote.
The administration’s own frequent threats to Democrats over their public statements have thus far proved unpersuasive. An effort to indict six lawmakers last year, at Mr. Trump’s demand, was tossed out of court by a grand jury in the District of Columbia.
The post A Diminished Justice Dept. Braces for Fresh Fights After Midterm Loss appeared first on New York Times.
