Top DOJ official tells department to prepare for war — or resign

A top attorney at President Donald Trump's Justice Department is signalling the department's plan to overhaul the agency in the wake of historic Republican midterm losses, Bloomberg Law reports.

"Justice Department leaders plan to force out additional US attorneys while preparing those who remain for wartime footing after their party’s midterms losses, a top official warned the nation’s chief prosecutors Monday," reported Bloomberg Law's Ben Penn on Tuesday. "In the first meeting for DOJ’s field office leaders since since voters repudiated the Trump agenda at the polls, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh advised US attorneys and their first assistants to consider resigning if they’re not prepared for full-on battle and to obey the administration’s orders, said three people briefed on the call."

Penn added, "His message signaled that incoming Democratic congressional leaders preparing to aggressively investigate DOJ’s conduct won’t deter Attorney General Todd Blanche from pursuing the same top-down agenda over the next two years that has curbed US attorneys’ prior quasi-autonomy and moved their focus closer to the president’s political priorities."

After reviewing other senior department officials who are planning on departing, the Trump administration said it would prioritize prosecutions for fraud against taxpayers and violent crimes above all other issues, Penn reports. Crimes which do not fit into one of those two buckets will be deprioritized. Investigations open for longer than two years will be automatically closed, and two or three assistant US attorneys are being ordered in each of the 93 offices to go over to other districts for high-priority cases.

Upon taking office, Trump has politicized the Justice Department, purging it of officials who were perceived as insufficiently right-wing or inadequately loyal to the administration. Speaking in September, CNN analyst Elie Honig warned that it will take a very long time to rebuild the Justice Department.

“Ordinarily, the first order of business would be restoring DOJ's political independence and restoring DOJ's credibility in the courts, but it doesn't seem that Blanche is super interested in either of those,” Honig told CNN anchor Brianna Keilar. “Those are the two biggest issues facing the department right now — the fact that they have undertaken and are still in the midst of several prosecutions aimed at people, in large part or entirely, because they are political enemies of the president.”

He continued, “That's something we've never seen before. I don't expect [Attorney General Todd] Blanche to change that, because he's been one of the drivers of it.”