| All postelection sound and fury aside, the third week of January will bring Joe Biden into power as the nation’s forty-sixth president. And from that moment on, Biden’s administration will be plunged into a massive project of civic reclamation, as it digs out from Donald Trump’s unprecedented reign of corruption and lawlessness. The obvious focal point of this effort will be the U.S. Department of Justice, which, under Attorney General William Barr essentially functioned as Trump’s personal law office—overturning the sentence of convicted Trump crony Roger Stone, dropping charges against Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, ginning up an investigation into alleged Obama White House surveillance of the 2016 Trump campaign, even seeking to get defamation charges dismissed against the president, arising from his denial of rape charges from columnist E. Jean Carroll on the laughable grounds that Trump made the offending remarks during the routine performance of his duties. |
| But as New Republic contributor Ankush Khardori—who had worked for decades at the DOJ before resigning during the Trump years—notes, the institutional rot at the Justice Department runs far deeper than the unholy Trump-Barr alliance. Early talk from Team Biden about combating the rampant “politicization” of the department’s agenda is welcome and well intentioned, Khardori writes, but it’s also “oddly sanguine about the breadth and depth of the problems at the department.” Calls for a brisk reversion to acknowledged professional norms at the department “fail to reckon with the distinction between the actions of political appointees and career officials; overestimate the capabilities of the department’s internal mechanisms for accountability; and underestimate the poisonous effect that misconduct can have within a bureaucracy, particularly over a sustained period of time.” Beneath the high-profile derogations of justice engineered on behalf of Trump and his cronies, the department has been failing a host of longer-term law enforcement agendas, and succumbing to bureaucratic inertia and flat-out incompetence in its administrative ranks, Khardori observes: The department’s white-collar criminal enforcement program is in its worst condition in decades. The number of environmental crime prosecutions is lower than it has been in over 20 years. The department’s work on policing reform is a cruel joke—from rolling back Obama-era reforms to the tear-gassing of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park, to the seemingly deliberate efforts to provoke and intimidate protesters by dispatching federal law enforcement to major American cities during the protests sparked by George Floyd’s death over the summer. Covid-19 prosecutions, in line with the cruelly haphazard and dilatory pandemic response of the Trump White House at large, have been likewise slapdash and ideologically driven—as when the department announced plans to investigate nursing home abuses during the Covid-19 lockdown, but only in states with Democratic governors. Reports of consumer and lending fraud arising from the pandemic and the mammoth Covid bailout package, meanwhile, have received virtually no sustained attention from DOJ prosecutors. Once-robust prosecutorial teams in the department’s antitrust and public integrity sections have gone largely dormant, while the Office of Legal Counsel—charged with providing legal advice to the executive branch—has followed Barr’s lead and become overrun with Trump sycophants, who drafted the now notorious opinion that the White House need not have forwarded the whistleblower complaint triggering Trump’s impeachment to Congress at all, and who, once the impeachment inquiry was launched, told White House officials to sandbag Congress’s subpoena requests. It’s no small task, Khardori argues, to start digging out from this record of corruption and incompetence—but there are some obvious starting points. One early order of business is to institute basic canons of professional accountability within the DOJ—thoroughly investigating whistleblower complaints like the long-neglected one, filed by prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky, alleging political pressures in the Roger Stone case. There must also be reckonings for the many mid-level department officials who looked the other way while abuses and corruption spread throughout the DOJ. “If department lawyers kept quiet about misconduct that they witnessed, then they violated their affirmative legal obligations to report misbehavior in real time,” Khardori writes. “There may be good reasons to sympathize with their predicaments, but we cannot simply ignore such missteps, since these duties exist precisely to prevent people from seeing themselves as passive bystanders to inappropriate conduct.” There’s also a great deal of personnel house-cleaning to tend to, Khardori argues—including a deputy to be appointed by Biden’s incoming attorney general to spearhead a department-wide agenda of reform. That agenda, in turn, should take in everything from the department’s recent politicized crusades to the dismal state of the federal government’s corps of inspectors general and to the untended mandates of white-collar crime, consumer fraud, and Covid-19 oversight. It will be a humbling and wrenching undertaking—but it can also be a vital early signal to the rest of the federal bureaucracy that, at long last, there’s a new sheriff in town. —Chris Lehmann, editor |
