The Dismantling of Our Department of Justice

What Happens When Our Guardrails Fail?

In the past few weeks, we Americans have been given a rare window into the internal collapse of one of our most important democratic institutions: the Department of Justice. More than sixty former DOJ attorneys — many with decades of nonpartisan service — have stepped forward to describe what has happened inside the department during President Trump’s second term. Their accounts, published this week in The New York Times, are careful, documented, and chilling. They reveal a DOJ reshaped not by policy disagreements, but by the systematic dismantling of professional standards, ethical norms, and constitutional boundaries.

As someone who spent over thirty years in policing, I’ve worked through periods of political turmoil and public anger. I’ve seen institutions stressed, stretched, and tested. But nothing in my experience compares to the scope of what these attorneys describe. From Day One, the DOJ was placed under the control of the president’s personal lawyers, and the message was clear: loyalty to the president mattered more than loyalty to the law. Within hours, nearly 1,600 January 6 rioters — including hundreds who assaulted police officers — were pardoned or had their sentences commuted. It was a signal to the nation, and to DOJ staff, that facts, evidence, and the rule of law were no longer the standard.

What followed was an unprecedented purge. Career prosecutors were fired or forced out for simply doing their jobs. Corruption cases were dismissed for political reasons. Public integrity units were hollowed out. National-security investigations were abandoned so FBI agents could be reassigned to conduct immigration roundups. Attorneys were pressured to sign filings they believed were false or unsupported by law. Some who refused were escorted out of their offices by security. One senior DOJ official described the department bluntly: “It’s become Trump’s personal law firm.”

The accounts go on. The Civil Rights Division was gutted. Investigations into discriminatory policing were withdrawn and their factual findings erased from the record. Voting-rights attorneys were ordered to pursue claims of fraud with no evidence behind them. The office responsible for prosecuting foreign bribery — a bedrock of American credibility abroad — was effectively shut down. Even the DOJ’s own ethics chief was fired after reminding Trump-appointed leaders of basic rules on accepting gifts.

If you care about policing in a free society, this story matters. Good policing cannot exist without an independent Department of Justice. Constitutional policing rests on a simple idea: the law applies equally to all, including the powerful. When prosecutors can be fired for following facts, when investigations rise or fall based on political loyalty, and when pardons are handed out to allies as rewards, the justice system becomes a weapon — not a safeguard.

And here is the deeper tragedy: much of this institutional wreckage was preventable. Today, David Leonhardt interviewed conservative legal thinker Sarah Isgur about what a post-Trump conservatism might look like. She argues — correctly, in my view — that no president should wield the kind of unilateral, unchecked authority that both parties have allowed to accumulate. Her call for a smaller, more constitutionally grounded presidency is worth reading in full.

What the dismantling of the DOJ makes plain is this: our democratic guardrails are only as strong as the people entrusted to uphold them. When the culture of an institution is attacked from within, rules alone cannot save it. It depends on people — people willing to say “no,” people willing to resign, people willing to tell the truth afterward so the public understands what really happened.

America has weathered storms before. But we do not survive them by pretending they are normal. We survive them by insisting on better — better leadership, better institutions, and a better, more principled understanding of what justice requires.

The Department of Justice has been knocked to its knees. Whether it stands up again depends on whether the American people recognize what has been lost — and demand its restoration.