It was easy to predict that a diktat from Donald Trump’s Justice Department would, at some point in his second term, prompt resignations from career prosecutors with conservative legal bona fides. Given Trump’s crude transactionalism and his administration’s determination to reshape the boundaries of executive power, it was always likely that we’d get some version of the conflict now pitting Trump’s acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove III, against Danielle Sassoon and the other prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.
It is extremely surprising, however, that the conflict would be sought and stoked just weeks into Trump’s four-year term, and for the sake of protecting Eric Adams, a Democratic mayor of a liberal city with just 11 months left in his term of office.
The Trump Department of Justice is picking a fight with its own lawyers, not for some longstanding desire of the president’s heart nor over some important point of constitutional interpretation, but to keep an official of the rival party, with no obvious political future, in office for a very short amount of time. And to the extent that there appears to be any quid pro quo at work, as the Manhattan Institute’s Charles Fain Lehman points out, all the Trump administration is getting from Adams is a promise to enforce existing immigration law — which given his myriad difficulties and limited tenure, is probably not worth very much.
The assumption inside the Trump administration, one supposes, is that it’s better to cull the potentially disloyal lawyers early, or to get them to prove their allegiance upfront, so that you won’t have to worry about dramatic resignations when you come to some much more important battle. Adams isn’t important in his own right; he’s just a useful test of obedience and discipline.
The difficulty with that approach is that long before administrations get to some immense high-stakes clash, it’s likely to have many, many smaller legal battles that it needs to have lawyered effectively. The Trump administration has picked a lot of those battles already, and quite a few of them — over the scope of the president’s control over the bureaucracy, especially — are fights it should be able to win. But only with good arguments and effective counsel, not with a cavalcade of hacks filing its briefs.
Thus the downside of enforcing absolute loyalty early, in a largely pointless battle, is that it signals to competent lawyers both inside and outside the administration that to work for Trump requires immediate subservience, not just cautious, careful service. And that signal tells the talented and principled, exactly the kind of lawyers Trump needs to win Supreme Court cases, that they’re better off sitting this administration out.
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