department of justice

Trump admin's desperate scramble to replace fleeing staff will boomerang: expert

In its desperation to replace fleeing prosecutors and defectors, President Donald Trump’s DOJ is now loosening hiring requirements for federal prosecutors. Trump’s DOJ says new applicants no longer need have any attorney experience to get a job. They can be fresh out of college, and CNN Chief Legal Affairs Correspondent Paula Reid says Americans can probably expect predictable results.

“They have redesigned this agency to try to pursue MAGA priorities and in some cases, pursue the president's adversaries. And they've lost a lot of people in the process,” said Reid. “Some people have objected and walked out. Some people have been fired …”

Reid said the DOJ is undeniably having trouble managing its own caseload, with judges complaining about agency lawyers not meeting deadlines, as well as the shoddy quality of their work.

“That’s something you don't hear about with federal prosecutors. These are supposed to be the best of the best, which is part of why most offices have a rule that you need at least three years of experience before you can apply for a role,” said Reid, adding that new students fresh from school are not generally prepared for the workload or the court’s unforgiving requirements.

“The [Minnesota Civil Division] office has been inundated with these habeas petitions from folks who have been detained by ICE, a ton of work, a lot of criticism from judges,” said Reid. “As a recovering lawyer myself, that's a really sophisticated kind of situation to find yourself in with no legal or no courtroom experience. … But, again, this whole strategy at DOJ [is because] they want to remake this in Trump's image. But that has consequences.”

One CNN anchor pointed out that courts judges in Minnesota and Chicago are already dismissing DOJ cases because cases were brought too quickly or they weren't able to meet deadlines and requirements, and wondered if decreasing the level of prosecutors’ experience would make matters even worse.

“I talked to a lot of officials inside DOJ last year [during the firings]. I said, ‘are you confident you're going to be able to restock your lawyers here?’ And some of them said, ‘look, we only need a third of the number of lawyers we had before. I'll find people who will do it faster,” recalled Reid. “I think there was a lack of appreciation or respect for federal prosecutors federal workers in general.”

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Former DOJ prosecutor cheers investigation of Trump DOJ 'charlatan'

Former DOJ prosecutor cheers investigation of Trump ‘charlatan’ US attorney

Outgoing "weaponization" chief and Donald Trump appointee Ed Martin is facing an ethics investigation, and former prosecutor Elie Honig says it couldn’t happen to a better person.

“Any time you give enormous prosecutorial power to a charlatan, to a person like Ed Martin—who had zero prior prosecutorial experience before he took this job and came into an office with an explicit political agenda—you’re going to wind up in trouble,” Honig told CNN anchor Jake Tapper.

Martin, a Department of Justice employee, is facing ethics charges after he sent a Feb. 2025 letter to the Georgetown University Law Center alleging that a whistleblower reported them for teaching "diversity, equity, and inclusion." Before law center officials even responded to his letter, however, he said he would impose sanctions on Georgetown by telling his staff not to hire any students from the school.

A Tuesday filing shows Disciplinary Counsel Hamilton "Phil" Fox III of the D.C. Bar alleged on Friday that while working for the federal government, Martin violated the First and Fifth Amendments with his letter, and that “Martin knew or should have known" this at the time.

"Acting in his official capacity and speaking on behalf of the government, he used coercion to punish or suppress a disfavored viewpoint, the teaching and promotion of DEI," the court filing says. "He demanded that Georgetown Law relinquish its free speech and religious rights in order to obtain a benefit, employment opportunities for its students."

If the D.C. Bar determined Martin did indeed blatantly violate the Constitution is could suspend or cancel his law license.

“During his time as U.S. attorney, Martin made various wildly inappropriate public statements,” said Honig, a former assistant United States Attorney and director of the New Jersey Division of Criminal Justice. “He launched various explicitly political investigations and now … he's facing ethics charges over that letter to Georgetown law school, where he [threatened] to punish their students … and I may cut off their funding.”

“So now he will have to face an ongoing proceeding where he may lose his bar license. And for the first time, Jake, Ed Martin seems to be facing some level of accountability.”

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Judge tears apart Trump prosecutors for omitting crucial info

CNN reports a federal judge tore into the Justice Department on Friday for failing to inform him of a law that could have undermined a federal search warrant. The law that government lawyers omitted applied to protections granted to journalists to protect them from government searches and seizures.

The Privacy Protection Act of 1980 is designed to protect journalists and newsrooms from government searches and seizures of a reporter’s work product materials unless the reporter is personally the subject of a criminal investigation or prosecution. But CNN reports federal lawyers failed to cite it.

“How could you miss it? How could you think it doesn’t apply?” Magistrate Judge William Porter asked a DOJ lawyer at a hearing in Alexandria, Virginia. At the time, Trump’s attorneys were requesting permission to raid a Washington Post reporter’s home.

“I find it hard to be that in any way this law did not apply,” Porter sniped later during discussion before refusing to approve the warrant for materials from reporter Hannah Natanson. “… I find it hard to be that in any way this law did not apply.”

In a seeming plea for mercy, Justice Department attorney Christian Dibblee argued that the decision to omit the pertinent info was made by department superiors

“That’s minimizing it!” Porter snapped.

Dibblee said he understood the judge’s “frustration.”

CNN reports that federal agents raided Natanson’s home last month and seized a phone, two computers and a Garmin watch. Porter temporarily blocked investigators from examining the devices after Natanson and the Post sued in an effort to get them back.

“Dibblee and DOJ attorney Gordon Kromberg tried to tell Porter on Friday that the department didn’t believe the law was applicable in this case, with Dibblee at one point saying it’s not the kind of ‘adverse authority’ that lawyers are typically required to raise with a court when making requests for such warrants,” CNN reported.

“You don’t think you have an obligation to say that?” Porter replied eventually. “I’m a little frustrated with how the process went down.”

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Trump admin confesses to a stunning 'mix of incompetence and malice'

Slate reports that on Jan. 26, U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz not only prohibited Homeland security agents from illegally moving a detainee out of state but also demanded President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice attorneys pen a list of all the violations they committed while defying his orders.

Under the argument of seeking to craft a “remedy” against further Homeland Security insubordination, Farbiarz demanded a thorough act of self “investigation” to pinpoint where DOJ’s chain of command broke. In a rarely recorded act of law 101, the judge also requested DOJ lawyers “enumerate each instance” where the department had “violated an order issued by a judge of this district” since Dec. 5.

Last Friday, associate deputy attorney general delivered the goods.

Slate reporter Dahlia Lithwick said Fox admitted the department had “violated at least 56 court orders since December alone, all related to the Trump administration’s unlawful policy mandating the indefinite detention of noncitizens legally entitled to a bond hearing.”

The confession, first reported by Politico’s Kyle Cheney even accompanied a letter declaring that department representatives “regret deeply all violations” while insisting all were “unintentional and immediately rectified once we learned of them.”

“This story illustrates the mix of incompetence and malice that is defining the administration’s mass detention campaign,” said Slate court reporter Mark Joseph Stern, describing a government that arrested an individual with no criminal record or order of removal. It then hustled him to Texas, where his lawyers had to go find him and serve a writ of habeas corpus to return both him and is property.

“The government did neither. It released him in Texas, not Minnesota, and withheld all of his property, including his driver’s license and other identification paperwork. So he was just dumped and abandoned. His lawyers had to go … and tell her that her order had been flagrantly violated, which is when she scheduled the hearing,” said Stern.

Homeland security had yet to return his identification cards long after the detainee made it back home, forcing an attorney to hold the JAG lawyer in civil contempt until the cards were returned, with the $500 daily sanction against federal attorneys.

“What will it take to make ICE comply with the law? The answer is dragging JAGs into your courtroom and holding them in contempt,” said Stern.

Lithwick commented that the DOJ has lost so many employees under Trump that “the caseload is impossible.”

“Nobody can do this volume of work. If you are a government lawyer thinking, Step aside … because I can do this better next time, just know you’re being set up to pay $500 a day for the privilege,” said Lithwick said.

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Trump's 'knee-slapping buffoonish failures' are hiding something

New Republic columnist Greg Sargent says a grand jury may have laughed President Donald Trump’s prosecutors out of court, but the details of the prosecutions suggest horrific abuses of power that carry no humor whatsoever.

“Donald Trump’s efforts to jail his Democratic enemies have thus far mostly been marked by ham-fisted, buffoonish failure,” said Sargent, speaking on the politicized DOJ’s war on Sen. Adam Schiff, (D-Calif.), former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and six Democratic lawmakers who produced a video that made Trump angry, which courts and juries have derailed.

“Yet … a dynamic has kicked in that is oddly helpful to [Trump],” said Sargent. “Thanks to the knee-slapping, comic-relief-inducing nature of these failures, the authoritarian abuses underlying them risk being seen as less threatening than they actually are. That could potentially disarm us for the next round, which will surely come.”

Trump’s prosecutors failed to convince a single member of a jury to indict the lawmakers, but how the indictment came together is one of the most frighting things about it, Sargent said.

“Here’s what happened: After the FBI communicated with the Democratic lawmakers, prosecutors in [the office of Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington,] reached out to them to follow up,” said Sargent. “[When defense] attorney Preet Bharara directly asked prosecutors what statute the Democrats had allegedly violated to prompt the criminal inquiry, according to sources familiar with these discussions. The prosecutors could not name any statute, the sources told me.”

“What is the theory of criminal liability?” was the question Bharara’s office demanded. And according to one source speaking with Sargent, “no answer was forthcoming.”

“[Pirro’s] prosecutors had failed to name any violated statute, yet they forged ahead with the effort to indict anyway,” said Sargent.

This suggests prosecutors didn’t think a criminal prosecution was warranted or doubted there was probable cause to think the Democrats had committed a crime. This, in turn, suggests “something or other prompted the rush to indict, perhaps a word from on high that — let’s go way out on a limb here — had little to do with facts and law,” Sargent said.

“Bloomberg reports that Pirro brought in two outsiders to prosecute the case against the Democrats, one of whom is a dance photographer who worked for Pirro decades ago,” said Sargent. “Together they have very little DOJ experience, suggesting they may have been tapped to carry out cases that career prosecutors might be reluctant to attempt — special projects, as it were, for the benefit of the Audience of One.”

“It seems at least to suggest that the prosecutors were not the ones calling the shots, and that what they thought they were doing got run over by their bosses,” Georgetown law professor Stephen Vladeck told Sargent. “DOJ’s credibility depends on public faith that prosecutions are brought when the law justifies it, not when the political leadership of the administration demands it.”

“The stakes here remain extraordinarily high,” warned Sargent. “… It’s easy to get seduced by the Keystone Kops vibe to all this. But these Keystone Kops continue to wield the enormous power of the federal criminal justice bureaucracy, and they have tethered it to the chaotic whims of a Mad King who thinks that being a Democrat who criticizes him is a prosecutable crime.”

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'Petty and vindictive': GOP senators blast Trump over failed retribution attempt

Semafor reports that Senate Republicans are lining up to scold the Trump administration for trying and failing to indict six congressional Democrats over a video.

Even Republican senators who criticized the Democrats' video, which urged military members to disobey unlawful orders, made known that Trump’s politicized Justice Department set a poor precedent and brought a weak case.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) described the video as ‘terrible, terrible judgment,” but he quickly added that “trying to indict them for it was not a good idea.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) likewise, told Semafor in an interview that: “I would not have brought it were I the president,” as did Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the Judiciary Committee chairman, who told Semafor that “our law enforcement people ought to be spending their time on making our community safe and going after real law-breakers.”

Other Republicans warned that Trump’s politicized case could “open the door” to similar politicized attempts to police congressional speech on Republicans.

“It’s very chilling, right? As a member of Congress, we have the Speech and Debate Clause. Not only as a member, but it’s a First Amendment right of speech here,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). “We should not have an administration pursuing what I think is just kind of a petty and vindictive path against members of the other party.”

Trump’s DOJ failed to secure any indictments against Sens. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), in addition to four House Democrats. Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck noted on Bluesky that Trump’s prosecutors failed to convince any jurors to indict their targets, despite the relative ease of convincing a grand jury to do so.

“It's one thing to get a ‘no true bill.’ It's quite another to get *shut out* in the grand jury,” said Vladeck.

“I’m not surprised that the grand jury declined to indict them,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) told Semafor. “I don’t think they should have [tried to indict them]. I spoke out about that very early on.”

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Prospective attorneys laugh off 'politicized' questionnaires as DOJ crumbles

If Department of Justice leaders are wondering why their offices are hollowing out from within, the New York Times suggests they need look no further than their recruitment ads.

“Chad Mizelle, a former chief of staff to Attorney General Pam Bondi, hung an online help wanted sign for federal prosecutors last weekend that perhaps explained why so many valuable Justice Department staff members have left, and why so few candidates want in,” the Times reports.

“If you are a lawyer, are interested in being an AUSA, and support President Trump and anti-crime agenda, DM me,” posted Mizelle, who the Times describes as “a fierce Trump supporter who remains close with Justice Department leaders and senior officials in the West Wing.”

But here’s the problem, according to the Times: Assistant U.S. attorneys are not traditionally asked to “prove political or ideological fealty” in the application process.

Mizelle told the Post that: “The president is entitled to prosecutors who will actually pursue his agenda.” But reactions under his X post from litigators proffered a different opinion.

“The first prosecution I would bring: a 34-time convicted felon and sex offender, currently stealing money from the government and running an extortion racket,” wrote attorney Jason P. Gottlieb beneath Mizelle’s X post.

“That is not the job of a prosecutor ‘support President Trump,’” said another commenter claiming to be an attorney. “So why are you following me? The answer is ‘no.’ I uphold the duty I was sworn to do and that is to the Constitution and not any president.”

“Lmao things must be going great because the Trump administration is hiring lawyers via Twitter,” said another critic claiming to be a New York litigator.

But Mizelle’s post reflects “the prevailing sentiment inside the department — that Mr. Trump has the right to hire only those willing to execute his agenda. It also highlighted the dynamic that appears to be contributing to the very staffing shortages Mr. Mizelle tried to address,” the Times said. Applications for vacant slots in U.S. attorneys’ offices, which were once staunchly apolitical questionnaires, now often include requirements to weigh in on Trump’s policies.

“How would you help advance the president’s executive orders and policy priorities in this role?” read one of the queries on an application for a job in the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota, whose ranks have drastically thinned after the killing of two protesters in Minneapolis triggered a prosecutor stampede for exits.

“Identify one or two relevant executive orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired,” reads another.

And while DOJ officials pursue their politically aligned attorneys — who pledge to be nonbiased as part of their legal license — department prosecutors are still quitting at a frantic pace in offices across the nation, pushing the DOJ further to collapse.

The Times reports “About a dozen prosecutors have quit in recent weeks” after top department officials meddled in their investigations, and civil division lawyers are buckling “under a barrage of emergency petitions filed by newly detained immigrants seeking to be released from custody,” according to people familiar with the matter.

The situation even prompted one attorney on loan from the Department of Homeland Security to recently tell a Minneapolis judge in open court: “The system sucks. This job sucks.”

“She was quickly plucked from her post. But her sentiment simply reflected the reality of the situation, and has been openly acknowledged by Trump appointees,” the Times reports.

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Federal grand jury keeps rejecting Trump's Justice Department

U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro is no stranger to losing grand jury cases, but now that federal agents have moved into Chicago, prosecutors there are being blocked from prosecutions, too.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported Wednesday that a federal grand jury has turned down another case connected to the so-called "Midway Blitz."

The first time it happened in November, a magistrate judge said that until recently, he'd only ever heard of a grand jury rejecting a prosecution once in the "early part of this century." Now it's happened three times in the past few months.

Nathan Griffin, who is a manager of the Lake View comedy club, the Laugh Factory, was accused of assaulting a U.S. Border Patrol agent who was involved in the operation. He was accused of trying to shut a car door when the agent was getting out of the car.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Snell confirmed his loss, but blamed it on U.S. Magistrate Judge Keri Holleb Hotaling, saying that she urged them to vote "no bill." During the Wednesday hearing, she dismissed the charges against Griffin "without prejudice." It means that prosecutors could continue to go after the man, but Snell said he was backing down.

While grand juries have cleared three people, at least 13 defendants have had charges against them dropped that are connected to the "Operation Midway Blitz" efforts.

Thus far, prosecutors have not secured a single conviction of individuals arrested for charges connected to "Midway Blitz," the report said.

Read the full report here.

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'Expect a brawl': Legal expert points out 4 weaknesses in Trump DOJ's Bolton indictment

President Donald Trump's Department of Justice on Thursday indicted former National Security Advisor John Bolton on 18 felony counts. And while Bolton's charging document is meatier than the recent indictments against two of Trump's other political opponents, one prominent legal expert poked several major holes in the DOJ's case.

On Thursday, attorney and former U.S. Ambassador Norm Eisen told an MSNBC panel that while the finer details of Bolton's indictment remain unclear due to them pertaining to classified documents, there are three major weaknesses in the DOJ's case against the former Trump administration official. He said the main argument Bolton's legal team will likely bring up is Trump's "revenge motive."

"Even if these [charges] are valid, that still gives rise to a vindictive prosecution," Eisen said, adding that "Donald Trump's own conduct was more serious" in his own classified documents case.

Eisen also pointed out that Bolton's prosecution was part of a "pattern," noting that both former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) were both indicted after Trump explicitly demanded it.

"This isn't an isolated revenge prosecution: It's the latest in a series," he said.

The former U.S. ambassador's third point was that the indictment is based on Bolton's diary entries, rather than direct transmission of sensitive intelligence. He noted that multiple presidents and presidential advisors have all kept private diaries, and that those diaries are "not the same thing as having documents with classified markings."

"As far as we can tell from this indictment, none of those were found in the house," Eisen said. "The fact that the Biden administration apparently investigated this and passed on the case, that's another reason to question what's going on here."

Eisen concluded that there was still a problem of Bolton being indicted by an "independent counsel." He acknowledged that while more than one DOJ prosecutor signed Bolton's charging documents (compared to Trump's interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia being the only one to sign indictments for Comey and James), the level of independence "should be investigated because of all of those badges of suspicion."

"It must be said: Bolton's very capable Abbe Lowell — one of the toughest fighters in the legal game — has denied the validity of this indictment," Eisen said. "So expect a brawl."


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Trump DOJ's 'partisan' posturing 'likely to significantly harm' its own cases: experts

Legal observers are warning that the Trump administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) is undermining its own criminal and civil cases through overt political posturing — a strategy one journalist argues is aimed less at securing convictions and more at causing pain and consternation among liberals

An article published by Democracy Docket's Jim Saksa Friday noted that the behavior of Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, who has adopted the mantra “FAFO” (short for “F—— Around and Find Out”) and repeatedly used her official and personal social accounts to issue provocative statements about ongoing or potential litigation.

"The Trump administration’s desire to own the libs online is already leading to own goals in serious criminal matters," the article said.

Dhillon has reposted and commented on litigation involving parental rights, accused judicial decisions of being a “lawless attack,” and described federal prosecutors like Jack Smith as “deranged, partisan zealots.”

In one letter to Portland’s police chief, which she also posted on the social platform X, Dhillon warned that the city’s response to protests “may be based on viewpoint discrimination.” The posturing has drawn concern from legal ethics and prosecution observers, many of whom see it as a serious liability for the DOJ.

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former DOJ voting rights section trial attorney, told the outlet: “As a former government lawyer who litigated many cases, I can’t imagine how that helps the government’s case."

Becker argued that extrajudicial statements may “indicate that the justification that [the DOJ is] giving for enforcing law is merely pretextual, isn’t supported, and it actually serves some kind of partisan purpose that would greatly undermine the DOJ’s entitlement to relief.”

He added: “It is, at best, not going to hurt the government. It cannot help and it’s likely to significantly harm the government and its prosecution of these cases.”

Christy Lopez, a former Civil Rights Division attorney and professor at Georgetown Law, called Dhillon’s public commentary “highly unusual" in comments to Democracy Docket.

“I have no recollection of even private conversations with Civil Rights Division leadership that were remotely as partisan, or that alleged unsupported criminal conspiracy theories,” Lopez said, per the piece.

She warned that when a law enforcement agency publicly prejudges people perceived as opponents, it “undermines confidence in the integrity and fair‑handedness of that law enforcement [organization] — across the board.”

Further criticism centers on how Dhillon’s remarks, and those of other Trump‑aligned DOJ officials, could be invoked by defense attorneys to erode the so‑called presumption of regularity that protects prosecutorial decisions.

In several ongoing cases, judges have already cited extrajudicial statements when considering motions to dismiss, threatened sanctions, or ordered additional scrutiny on the government’s conduct.

The article noted that by turning prosecutions into theater, the administration risks sabotaging its own legal strategies.

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Trump DOJ erases report showing far-right violence outpaces 'all other types of terrorism'

404 Media reports the Department of Justice has taken down a study showing white supremacist and far-right violence outpaces “all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States.

The DOJ website hosted the study, conducted by the National Institute of Justice, until September 12, 2025.

In its place is the message: “The Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs is currently reviewing its websites and materials in accordance with recent Executive Orders and related guidance. During this review, some pages and publications will be unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”

READ MORE: 'Increasingly senile wackjob': Expert says Trump too broken to destroy democracy on his own

The report What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism revealed “Militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States. In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”

The document reports “far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists,” since 1990, “including 227 events that took more than 520 lives.”

In this same period, the report claimed, “far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.”

“We don’t know why the study about far-right extremist violence was removed recently,” writes 404 Media reporter Emanuel Maiberg, “but it comes immediately after the assassination of conservative personality Charlie Kirk, accusations from the administration that the left is responsible for most of the political violence in the country, and a renewed commitment from the administration to crack down on the ‘radical left.’”

READ MORE: 'Something is wrong': MAGA pundits say Trump is 'lying to us' about Charlie Kirk shooting

The DOJ did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.

Read the 404 Media report at this link.

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