Legal scholar details 'extreme level of corruption' at Trump DOJ

16 October

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a ballroom dinner in the East Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 15, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

After keeping a low profile during the first eight months of Donald Trump's second administration, former U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) special counsel Jack Smith broke his silence and discussed his two criminal cases against the now-president: the Mar-a-Lago/classified documents case, and the January 6, 2021 election interference case. Smith revealed that in the documents case, he had even more damning evidence against Trump than was reported in 2023 and 2024 and summarized it in a full report. But that report remains unpublished, and now that Trump loyalist Pam Bondi is U.S. attorney general, the Trump-era DOJ will — in the words of The New Republic's Greg Sargent — "keep it completely covered up."

During an appearance on The New Republic's "Daily Blast" podcast posted on October 16, legal scholar and Constitutional Law Center fellow Matthew Seligman addressed what host Sargent describes as an "extreme level of corruption of DOJ to serve Trump's political demands." That corruption, Sargent lamented, also includes "highly dubious" prosecutions of Trump's foes being carried out by Trump loyalist and interim U.S. attorney Lindsey Halligan in DOJ's Eastern District of Virginia.

Seligman said of Smith's unpublished report, "What it contains, we don't fully know — although we know the broad outlines. One of the things that's remarkable about Donald Trump's crimes is that he has committed them virtually out in the open. The thing that might be added to what we've seen in public already is just more direct evidence of his state of mind…. As to whether we're ever going to see this, that's a hard question to answer. In the short term, the answer is almost certainly not."

If a Democrat wins the 2028 presidential election and Democrats regain "the keys to the Justice Department," Seligman added, Smith's unpublished report might see the light of day in 2029.

Seligman lamented that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) will continue to prioritize loyalty to Trump, and he said of Halligan's prosecutions, "It's horrible."

Seligman told Sargent, "Number two, does someone like Lindsey Halligan ever face consequences? And the answer is yes. And she very likely will, at some point, face disbarment proceedings. The caveat there is that she's from Florida, and I don't know how much the Florida Bar is going to try to hold Trump’s lawyers to account — but at least elsewhere in the country, we’ve seen Rudy Giuliani get disbarred. We've seen Kenneth Chesebro have his legal license suspended. We've seen John Eastman, who I testified against on behalf of the California Bar, be subject to attorney discipline — he's been disbarred pending appeals."

Listen to the full New Republic podcast at this link and read the transcript here.

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