Will Justice Department and FBI officials prosecute Trump’s rivals? – NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth

Since entering the 2024 race, Donald Trump has called for criminal prosecution of at least 16 rival politicians and 15 law enforcement, military and intelligence officials — according to an NBC News analysis of his public comments — not to mention workers at two federal public health agencies, two tech billionaires, Google and any lawyers, campaign donors and political operatives who engage in what the former president called “unscrupulous behavior” in the election.

A separate recent review of National Public Radio found that Trump had issued threats of prosecution more than 100 times.

But could Trump really carry out prosecutions of such unprecedented scale and scope? And if so, how would it work?

To understand how that might play out, NBC News interviewed several current and former Justice Department and FBI officials, as well as legal experts.

All agreed that what Trump is proposing would overturn 50 years of post-Watergate rules that dictate that federal prosecutors do not receive orders from the president on criminal investigations. These rules were designed to prevent a repeat of the abuses of Richard Nixon, who improperly used the Justice Department to punish his political enemies.

But there are ways around the railings, current and former officials said, making it possible for Trump to turn the department into a tool to exact revenge on his political opponents.

“A corrupt U.S. attorney with a corrupt prosecutor can do enormous damage,” said Joyce Vance, who served as the U.S. attorney in Alabama and is an NBC News legal analyst.

A new president is appointing about 300 senior Justice Department officials, including U.S. attorneys who lead offices across the country. All 300 must be confirmed by the Senate, but several former Justice Department officials have said they fear Trump will not install partisans willing to fulfill his request.

Usually US attorneys relies on lower-level career prosecutors to do critical behind-the-scenes investigation. I can’t be easy fired according to current directives. But those who resist going along with the investigations would face enormous pressure. Some may resign.

In situations where there has been resistance, Trump could appoint a special counsel to conduct the prosecutions he requests.

“My fear is that what will happen is that good people will resign,” said Barbara McQuade, a former federal prosecutor and NBC News legal analyst. “Who do I replace them with? People who will agree to illegal orders.”

One of Trump’s most sweeping proposals, known as Schedule F, calls for reclassifying roughly 50,000 career civil servants in the federal government so they can be hired, promoted and fired by Trump and his inner circle.

Even if Trump did not take such a drastic step, officials and experts said, the likely outcome of the uprising would be an even more extreme version of the chaos, division and protracted legal battles that marked his first term. That would slow down the work of the Justice Department, which conducts criminal prosecutions nationwide and oversees the FBI; Anti-Drug Administration; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; all federal prisons; and several other federal law enforcement agencies.

“It’s a recipe for shutting down all the indisputably essential national security work that needs to be done by the DOJ and the FBI,” warned a former Justice Department official who asked not to be named, citing fear of retaliation.

A former U.S. attorney who asked not to be named added that a version of that chaos is already playing out in Trump’s transition team, where hardline Trump supporters are calling for unprecedented use of the Justice Department and the FBI , and more mainstream Republicans oppose such issues. steps.

“Within Trump’s transition planning,” the former U.S. attorney said, “there is a battle between the normals and the weirdos.”

A centerpiece of the second Trump administration

Both Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, have said the Justice Department will be the focus of a second Trump administration. Campaigning in Georgia on Oct. 11, Vance said the attorney general will be more important than his own role as vice president.

“The most important person in government, I think, after the president this cycle is going to be the attorney general,” said Vance, who called the current Justice Department “the most corrupt” in U.S. history and said Trump would have to ” clean house” there.

Current and former Justice Department officials have strongly rejected Vance’s claims of corruption, citing Justice Department prosecutions of Biden against prominent Democrats, including Hunter Biden, Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, and New York Mayor Eric Adams. Democrats said they believed Trump would seek to appoint an attorney general to drop pending federal cases against him — for his alleged role in the storming of the U.S. Capitol and the mishandling of classified documents — brought by special counsel Jack Smith.

A draft list of a dozen people Trump could nominate as attorney general included U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, ABC News recently reported. Cannon threw out the classified documents file against Trump, a decision that was heavily criticized by legal experts and praised by Trump. He called Cannon a “brilliant woman” and dismissed the allegations as “a case of fraud”.

Another name on the list of potential attorneys general was Jeffrey Clark, a mid-level Justice Department official who supported Trump’s false claims of 2020 election fraud. Days before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Trump’s attempt to install Clark as acting attorney general failed when the entire senior leadership of the Justice Department threatened to resign, citing fears that public trust in neutrality department would be irrevocably affected.

Another option that Trump’s more hard-line legal advisers have discussed is to appoint a series of acting attorneys general who would not need Senate confirmation. Under current federal lawan acting attorney general can serve 210 days at a time.

Mike Davis, a Republican lawyer and former senior member of the Senate, said in an appearance on conservative influencer Benny Johnson’s show that he would lead a “three-week reign of terror” as Trump’s acting attorney general and then be pardoned by Trump, Politico reported.

Davis vowed to impeach Joe Biden, pardon defendants Jan. 6 — “especially my hero, the man with the horn” — fire “deep state” employees, detain people in the “DC gulag” and begin deporting millions of immigrants and putting “children in cages”.

Trump publicly praised Davis. At a rally this month, greeted Davis “tough as hell” and said “we want him in a very big capacity” in a second administration.

It takes a small number of loyalists

Vance, the former Alabama U.S. attorney, said it would not be difficult for Trump to find 93 people — whose only qualification would be loyalty to him — to serve as U.S. attorneys or top federal prosecutors in states from the whole country. .

“You can bring them in from outside — they don’t have to live in the district or the state,” Vance said. “Trump could easily name his most loyal and malleable people.”

She added that placing allies in top positions in the Justice Department would be enough for Trump to carry out his prosecutions. “You don’t have to corrupt the entire office to do a prosecution,” she said. “All you have to do is hire three or four people, find some FBI, Secret Service people who want to play ball.”

Stephen Gillers, a professor of legal ethics at NYU Law School, said it “sads me to say” but “there is no doubt” that Trump will be able to find lawyers willing to carry out his wishes within the Justice Department.

Gillers praised the bar for disbarring several lawyers involved in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results, such as Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, for making false statements in court. But he doesn’t think that would be enough of a deterrent.

“You’re dealing with 1.3 million U.S. attorneys,” Gillers said. “No doubt he will find 1,000 to support his goals and seek to achieve them.”

Gillers argued that the Justice Department was different from other federal agencies because of its role in instilling confidence that the American legal system is fair.

“The administration of justice is different from the administration of agriculture,” he said. “The administration of law should not be corrupted by politics.”

Gillers harshly criticized the Supreme Court’s recent immunity ruling, which said all actions by the president involving the Justice Department are “absolutely immune” from prosecution. For the first time in American history, he said, a president can order an attorney general to prosecute his political enemies without fear of being prosecuted for abuse of power.

“The opinion is arrogant to the detriment of the Constitution,” Gillers said. “These five people have rewritten the meaning of the separation of powers in a democratic system, and that is repugnant.”

Trump would also have the power to appoint a special counsel who could theoretically conduct investigations into alleged corruption sweeping the country, legal experts said.

Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, noted that if the prosecution’s evidence was extremely weak, a jury could acquit a defendant regardless of jurisdiction.

Somin argued that federal criminal prosecutions, even if they lead to acquittals, can take years and severely damage a person’s professional reputation and ability to get a job.

“For many people, just being charged and prosecuted is a serious burden,” he said.

Justice Department officials have risen to the occasion and defied presidential overreach in the past. During the Watergate scandal, the attorney general and deputy attorney general resigned when Nixon asked them to fire special counsel Archibald Cox in what became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.”

And the election-denying Clark episode, in which a group of senior Justice Department officials — all Republicans — blocked his appointment as acting attorney general by threatening to resign offers some hope for department veterans .

But former Justice Department and FBI officials said it was hard to imagine that U.S. law enforcement would not be severely hampered by what could come in a second Trump administration.

“Let’s say you have the numbers. You go in and you hit a good portion of the workforce,” said the former Justice Department official. “I don’t care who you put in – it’s no longer a functioning institution.”

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