Trump took her to the 'breaking point': Former DOJ prosecutor speaks out

US President Donald Trump looks on during a campaign rally for Republican US Senate candidate Ken Paxton at Freeman Coliseum in San Antonio, Texas, US, October 7, 2026.

Former Justice Department lawyer Sarah Wilson spent years working for the federal government and representing agency clients, in both Democratic and Republican administrations. But she said the second Trump administration took her to the point where she could no longer do her job.

“We realized something different was going on here,” Wilson told Bloomberg Law, describing revamped agencies where politicized department heads and outright hacks were making legal decisions that should be left to actual lawyers.

“It was a scary time,” said Wilson. “… We went from being seen as the starting point for any discussions on how a case was going to being the last person to know about some of these decisions being made in our case.”

Normally when a court order comes in the attorneys study it and decide what it requires their government agency client to do. Department of Justice attorneys are going to have to show up in court and defend the choices made, after all, so lawyers first have to hash out if the order can be complied with without some form of tweaking. And sometimes, she said, the honest answer is ‘no.’

“There are definitely orders that come down from trial court judges that simply aren't possible. Or maybe we could comply — but there's a good reason we shouldn't have to,” said Wilson. “We have to figure out why we have to file a motion and alert the court that there's an impossibility here, that we might have to ask the court to lift some of the requirements so that it can actually be carried out [in accord with the Constitution].”

That's how it used to work, but under the second Trump Administration the administration barred career lawyers from analyzing that paperwork.

“At some point we were told we were not allowed to advise clients on decisions on how to comply with court orders, for example, or decisions that were going to have to be made at a much higher level,” said Wilson.

“Wait. You were told you couldn't advise [agency] clients?” demanded Bloomberg host Matthew Schwartz.

“Yeah. I mean never in my career has a lawyer’s access to the client been limited in that way. It wasn’t in every case, … but then it happened over and over again,” Wilson answered.

Another former attorney that Schwartz spoke to described instructions deliberately limiting what lawyers could tell their agency clients. The instructions came in writing, according to the unnamed source. For example, a senior Trump political appointee of the Justice Department’s Civil Division ordered lawyers handling high profile immigration cases to send the agency heads the judge's order, only without analysis on how to comply. Agency politicians, according to the source, was expected to figure things out on their own. This later became standard practice, reports the source — which might explain the Trump administration’s repeated failure to adhere to judicial orders, and probably plenty of bungled legal submissions.

“Just to be clear attorneys’ advise their clients,” argued Schwartz flatly. “It’s one of the main things an attorney does. The American Bar Association Model Rule No. 2.1 puts it plainly: A lawyer's job, it says, is to ‘exercise independent professional judgment and render candid advice.’

“I felt like this wasn't the job we signed up for,” said Wilson. “And to be villainizing us and make it seem like we were not part of the team but we were somehow antagonistic to the team, and that our legal advice, our legal knowledge was somehow adversely affecting the department. It was a really hard thing to hear.”

The result, said Schwartz, is that departments like Homeland Security have violated more court orders than other agencies have violated in their entire existence.

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