In a lengthy 1,200-plus word tweet, an advisor to President-elect Donald Trump's transition team gave an ominous warning to Department of Justice (DOJ) employees: Either fully submit to Trump, or lose your job.
On Wednesday, Mark Paoletta — who is a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America (one of the partner organizations supporting Project 2025) — cautioned "career DOJ lawyers" against quietly sabotaging Trump's agenda., telling them to "leave or be fired" if they disagreed with Trump's values and policies. He wrote that "once the duly elected President makes a decision, it is the job of civil servants to carry out that decision to the best of their abilities whether they personally agree with it or not."
"I hope DOJ attorneys will embrace their responsibility to implement President Trump’s agenda. That is their constitutional duty," he continued. "If the president wants to deport illegal aliens, secure the border, ban race-based 'affirmative action' and DEI [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programming], investigate antisemitism, halt Big Tech censorship, grant pardons and commutations to Jan 6th defendants, he has every right to expect that these perfectly lawful policies are implemented, and it is absolutely unacceptable for career employees to seek to thwart this policy agenda."
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Politico legal correspondent Josh Gerstein quote-tweeted Paoletta's post on X, noting that it was "another salvo" against "expected 'resistance' from DOJ career attorneys." He then pointed out that he spoke to many longtime DOJ employees for a story earlier this week, who expressed alarm about what may happen to them in Trump's second term.
"Everyone I’ve talked to, mostly lawyers, are losing their minds," one unnamed DOJ lawyer told Gerstein in his report published on Sunday. "The fear is that career leadership and career employees everywhere are either going to leave or they’re going to be driven out."
As Gerstein reported, the DOJ has roughly 115,000 employees, many of whom hamstrung Trump's attempts to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election. And Attorney General Merrick Garland's DOJ is prosecuting the President-elect in two different federal cases, which are both likely to be scuttled after he enters the White House. DOJ trial attorney Stacey Young, who works in the agency's Civil Rights Division, told Politico that there's a greater concern among her colleagues beyond just their jobs. She opined that the non-partisan administration of justice will be endangered by Trump packing the agency full of his supporters.
"Many federal employees are terrified that we’ll be replaced with partisan loyalists — not just because our jobs are on the line, but because we know that our democracy and country depend on a government supported by a merit-based, apolitical civil service," she said.
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Some DOJ employees are particularly worried about the prospect of being sacked simply due to their past work on the investigations handled by special counsels Robert Mueller and Jack Smith. Trump has yet to name his pick for attorney general, but it's likely that whoever he chooses to head the DOJ will immediately dismiss all ongoing investigations concerning the president-elect. And some longtime DOJ employees may choose to not stick around for the upheaval that will follow once the new attorney general is confirmed.
"“It is absolutely a part of the calculus,” one former senior DOJ official told Politico. “If you have one of these type of extreme candidates … you will see a significant amount of career staff say, ‘I don’t want to be a part of this. This is antithetical to who this department is. I think that will absolutely inform whether or not a good chunk of career staff — whether people stay or go.”
Click here to read Paoletta's full tweet, and click here to read Gerstein's report.
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