In the weeks since President Trump’s inauguration, there’s been a purge of staff, with both firings and resignations. Mr. Trump, who in his inaugural address said the scales of justice would be rebalanced, has said his administration is cleaning up a Justice Department corrupted by politics. Former acting attorney general under President George W. Bush, Peter Keisler, sees it differently.
“I don’t think anyone who’s been watching the last four weeks could say they are taking politics out of the law enforcement process,” he said. “Quite the contrary. They are engaging in the very politicization and weaponization that they claim to be trying to eliminate.”
During her confirmation hearing, Attorney General Pam Bondi, President Trump’s new leader of the Justice Department, said she had no plans to politicize the office.
Trump’s history with the Justice Department
Mr. Trump was the subject of Justice Department investigations in recent years during the Biden administration.
Mr. Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi, who declined a 60 Minutes request for an interview, launched a review to scrutinize those in the Justice Department who were involved in prosecutions of Mr. Trump, including his indictment in the 2020 election case, and his indictment related to allegations he hid classified documents in his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Those cases were dropped after Mr. Trump won the 2024 election. The prosecution was brought by Jack Smith, who resigned as special counsel before Mr. Trump returned to the White House.
After consultation with the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Smith said that “the department’s position is that the Constitution requires that this case be dismissed before the defendant is inaugurated.”
The Justice Department during Trump’s second term
One of Mr. Trump’s first actions after returning to the White House was the pardon of about 1,500 people in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. The pardon proclamation called the January 6 prosecutions, “a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years and begins a process of national reconciliation.”
Not long after the ink was dry, letters of termination hit the Justice Department. The letters rewrote history, and echoed the words of the president, calling the Jan. 6 cases “a grave national injustice.”
Sara Levine and Sean Brennan were federal prosecutors on the Justice Department’s biggest investigation — the attack on the Capitol — until they were fired by the Trump administration on Jan. 31. They had both been hired about a year and a half ago to prosecute cases from the riot.
60 Minutes
While fear has silenced many in the department, Levine and Brennan chose to speak up.
“The Justice Department is under attack. They’re coming after the people that want to uphold the laws that exist. And that should be terrifying to everyone,” Levine said.
Keisler, who served as acting attorney general in 2007 under then-President George Bush, said the pardons send a message.
“It says that you can commit some very serious crimes, but if you do so as an identifiable supporter of the president’s agenda and political interests, you may be able to get off,” Keisler said. “And I think it was designed to send that message.”
That message also hit the FBI when Mr. Trump’s acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, demanded the names of FBI personnel who had tracked down the Capitol rioters in 50 states. He also directed the firing of eight of the FBI’s senior career executives.
“I do not believe that the current leadership of the Justice Department can trust these FBI employees to assist in implementing the President’s agenda faithfully,” Bove, who declined an interview with 60 Minutes, wrote of the FBI executives last month.
Keisler said it is not the job of the FBI to implement the president’s agenda.
“Both the FBI and the larger Justice Department, of which it’s a part of, owe their duty to the law,” Keisler said.
Do presidents always clean house?
What’s happening now isn’t business as usual with a new president in the White House, Keisler said.
“This is really unprecedented and it’s important to understand why,” Keisler said. “Political appointees get removed and replaced by presidents all the time. This is the top layer of leadership. But beneath them in the core of the government are the civil servants. These are people who have developed expertise over often decades of experience working across administrations of both parties. And whose jobs are protected by civil service laws that have been on the books since the late 19th century.”
60 Minutes
Keisler was a Republican until Mr. Trump’s first term, when he switched to independent.
“Well, it’s true that I’ve never voted for Donald Trump. My concern about the use of law enforcement to achieve political ends, that’s among the reasons I’ve never voted for President Trump. But at the end of the day, people can support whatever candidate they want. I would hope that nearly everybody would agree as a basic matter that our criminal justice system shouldn’t be used as a tool of politics to reward friends and punish personal enemies.”
Is the Justice Department being used to reward people?
The appearance of “rewarding friends” has triggered the biggest rupture so far. It involves a bribery indictment against New York City Mayor Eric Adams — a charge Adams denies. Though he’s a Democrat, Adams agreed to help Trump’s deportation effort. This month, Bove ordered New York prosecutors to drop the bribery prosecution of Adams, in part, so that Adams could “devote full attention” to “illegal immigration and violent crime.”
“The directive to drop the charges against Mayor Adams was one of the most nakedly political documents out of the Justice Department I’ve ever seen,” Keisler said. “If Mayor Adams had instead been an opponent of the president’s immigration agenda, then he would’ve been prosecuted. But because he says he wants to help advance the president’s immigration agenda, he doesn’t get prosecuted.”
Bove’s order triggered resignations. Danielle Sassoon, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, resigned. She refused to sign a motion to dismiss the case because it was, in her words, for “no other reason than to influence Adams’s mayoral decision-making.”
Bove shot back, writing, “you have also strained, unsuccessfully, to suggest that some kind of quid pro quo arises from my directive. This is false.”
But a second Manhattan prosecutor, Hagan Scotten, also quit, telling Bove in a letter he would have to find someone who is “enough of a fool, or enough of a coward” to sign the motion. When Bove ordered prosecutors in Washington to sign the motion, six more resigned, bringing the total number of resignations to eight.
“[The resignations are] a flashing red light. Nobody gives up these jobs easily,” Keisler said. “But people have resigned because they are being otherwise commanded to perform unethical acts that they think are contrary to their responsibilities.”
This past week, Bove explained his motion to dismiss to a federal judge. There is no decision yet.
Is the justice system in trouble?
Keisler believes the justice system is in trouble.
“I think when you have a major political corruption prosecution dismissed because somebody has agreed to become a political ally of the president, you know, that tripwire has already been tripped,” he said.
For Levine, the fired prosecutor, the U.S. is “teetering on the edge.”
Speaking up was not an easy decision for Levine or her fellow fired prosecutor, Brennan. But in the end, they believe silence may be the greatest threat to justice.
“I don’t think I could live with myself if I didn’t at least try to help people understand why what we’ve seen happening in the Department of Justice over the past few weeks is so critical and why it not only puts all Americans individually at risk,” Brennan said. “It really puts our constitutional governmental structure at risk.”
