'Bloodbath': Legal expert predicts 'mass exodus of very good lawyers' at DOJ

25 April

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland on February 20, 2025 (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

When now-President Donald Trump defeated then-Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024, employees of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) knew the agency would be in for a major shakeup. And that's exactly what happened.

Former U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and ex-FBI Director Christopher Wray are gone, and far-right Trump loyalists are now in charge: Pam Bondi as attorney general and conspiracy theorist Kash Patel leading the FBI.

On Thursday afternoon, April 24, MSNBC's José Díaz-Balart discussed DOJ shakeups with someone who once worked there — former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade — and NBC News legal correspondent Ken Dilanian.

Dilanian was blunt, telling Díaz-Balart and McQuade, "One of the Justice Department lawyers I spoke to called what's happening a complete bloodbath. The Trump Administration is changing the basic mission of the (DOJ) Civil Rights Division, the way it's operated since it was founded in 1957, to help uphold the voting rights of African-Americans. And this is happening in two main ways. One, the DOJ has pushed out nearly all the career civil servants in management positions. These are people with decades of experience who have served under Democratic and Republican presidents, including in Trump's first term. Many of them were reassigned to jobs unrelated to their expertise."

Dilanian continued, "And second, the department's leader issued a series of memos last week that essentially abandoned the division's longstanding priorities of enforcing laws prohibiting discrimination against minority groups — and instead, the memo says the division will now seek to enforce President Trump's executive orders, many of which focus on, frankly, protecting white Christians."

When Díaz-Balart noted that this radical restructuring of the DOJ goes way beyond actions taken during the first Trump Administration, he got no argument from McQuade.

McQuade told Díaz-Balart and Dilanian, "I think the thing that's most distressing is that the Civil Rights Division has long been regarded as the crown jewel of the Department of Justice — a place where the Justice Department works to achieve the promise of America. And instead, it seems that now, this shift has been made to try to send America back to a time before we worked to achieve racial equality in this country."

Díaz-Balart noted that McQuade worked on civil rights cases during her years at the DOJ.

"I think that number one, we're seeing some of the most experienced career lawyers in the division being reassigned to lesser responsibilities or leaving on their own because this isn't the kind of work they signed up for," McQuade told Díaz-Balart and Dilanian. "So, I think we're going to see a mass exodus of the kinds of very good lawyers that we've come to know at the Civil Rights Division, and I worry about who they'll be replaced with. The assistant attorney general for civil rights clearly has a very different agenda, and one could expect that she will hire replacements in that mold, and then, those people will be in that division for decades to come."

The former federal prosecutor added, "So this could be the kind of thing that cannot simply be unwound with a new election."

Watch the full video below or at this link.

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