There Are No Serious People In the Trump Justice Department
The nation’s top law enforcement agency is now a law firm that serves only the president’s personal interests, and bills its time to you and me.
The Trump Justice Department has reportedly opened a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the Elle magazine writer who won a $5 million judgment against President Donald Trump in 2023 after a jury found him liable for sexually abusing Carroll in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. That judgment should not be confused with the $83.3 million judgment against Trump that Carroll won a year later, after a different jury found that Trump had defamed Carroll by continuing to call her a liar and her account of the assault a hoax.
Apparently, it has not been enough for Trump to spend his second term commandeering the criminal legal system to harass the likes of Letita James, Tim Walz, Jerome Powell, Mark Kelly, Adam Schiff, Lisa Cook, John Bolton, John Brennan, and anyone else who has at any point in recent history made him, personally, feel upset. Now, he is also using it to retaliate against one of the few people who has ever forced him to face meaningful legal consequences for his actions, and who managed to do it twice.
All of these developments—an elderly megalomaniac tasking the nation’s top law enforcement agency with settling a decade’s worth of his accumulated grievances—are of course bad. But the reporting on the Carroll investigation is also rich with little details about just how much of a joke the Justice Department has become over the last 16 months. Under Trump, what used to be among the legal profession’s most prestigious careers is now a résumé line for which DOJ lawyers will be sheepishly apologizing in job interviews for decades to come.
For starters, the Carroll investigation has reportedly been assigned to Andrew Boutros, the Chicago-area federal prosecutor whose office recently made headlines for engaging in egregious misconduct in the case against the Broadview Six, who were indicted on federal conspiracy charges for protesting outside an ICE facility last year. To make matters worse, lawyers in Boutros’s office then strategically redacted transcripts from the grand jury proceedings to hide their misconduct from the presiding judge, April Perry.
After reviewing the full transcripts, Perry said she had “never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior” contained therein, and that Boutros’s office had “broken” her trust, which, as a lawyer, are generally not things you want a judge to say to you. As a result of these mistakes (?), Boutros was forced to drop all charges against the defendants earlier this month.
In a functioning legal system, a prosecutor who fucked up this many things this badly would have been fired already. In the American legal system, he is simply getting assigned to go after a different person whom Trump is eager to see punished.
On Thursday, Boutros issued a statement in which he asserted that “the Chicago U.S. Attorney’s Office” has never “opened” an investigation of Carroll. Savvy readers will note that this language carefully avoids making any assertions about steps short of “opening an investigation” that his office may have taken, or about investigations that may have been “opened” by offices other than his. More generally, it is very funny to issue an indignant denial of a story that multiple outlets have independently reported when you might be the least credible lawyer in America at this particular moment.
The Carroll investigation is hardly the first time that a criminal probe of someone Trump considers a political enemy has ended up in the hands of a prosecutor who, even in Trump-adjusted terms, stands out for their ethical flexibility. According to The New York Times, the Justice Department assigned its case against former CIA director John Brennan to a U.S. attorney in Florida specifically because officials viewed that U.S. attorney as “more willing to pursue a case viewed as questionable by other offices.”
Last year, over the course of just four months as the interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., noted stolen-election conspiracy theorist Ed Martin was such an unabashed Trump hatchet man that even some Republican senators couldn’t get behind the effort to confirm him. Fortunately for Trump, Martin’s permanent replacement, the former daytime television personality Jeanine Pirro, picked up right where he left off.
Not long ago, working as a federal prosecutor was a gig that law students began planning for years in advance. Now, under the watchful eye of the conservative legal movement’s least employable doofuses, the Justice Department is functioning as a law firm that serves only the president’s personal interests while billing its time to you and me. One day, beleaguered junior associates might have the privilege of defending a $1.8 billion slush fund for literal January 6 rioters; the next, they might be begging the Supreme Court to let the DOJ litigate Trump’s appeal of the Carroll verdict—sorry, I should be more specific, the second Carroll verdict—because he really, really doesn’t want to pay what he owes her.
If you are an ambitious young lawyer and you think you might want to work for the Justice Department someday, my advice is to sit tight for a while. The federal government will always be there. But it won’t always be this embarrassing to represent the person in charge of it.
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I suppose these people have plans for their careers after their DOJ escapades…big law firms are going to be looking for some good lawyers who have DOJ experience! Opps, my bad, I thought this was a satire post!?!🫣🤷🏾🥴
They're very serious ... about all the wrong things.