Doc7505
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- Feb 16, 2016
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Many in government are worried about Trump’s return. At DOJ, they’re terrified.
Trump blames DOJ for much of his torment over the past four years. Lawyers there fear what’s next.
10 Nov 2024 ~~ By Josh GersteinA collective sense of dread has taken hold at the Department of Justice, which drew Donald Trump’s rage like no other part of the federal government during his campaign.
Some career attorneys at DOJ are already considering heading for the exits rather than sticking around to find out whether threats from Trump and his allies are real or campaign bluster. Those threats range from mass firings of “deep state” lawyers to expelling special counsel Jack Smith from the country.
“Everyone I’ve talked to, mostly lawyers, are losing their minds,” said one DOJ attorney, who like most of the people interviewed for this article was granted anonymity to speak freely about colleagues and avoid retribution from the president-elect and his allies. “The fear is that career leadership and career employees everywhere are either going to leave or they’re going to be driven out.” While alarm over Trump’s return is widespread throughout the federal bureaucracy, it is perhaps most acute at the Justice Department, which was at the center of many of the major controversies of his first term.
Most of the department’s 115,000 employees were around for those controversies. Critics believed the Trump White House meddled in some of the department’s high-profile prosecutions. Both of Trump’s attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and William Barr, eventually lost the president’s confidence. And his first term ended with a stunning showdown between Trump and nearly all of his DOJ appointees as they resisted his attempts to cling to power.
But department veterans say those events pale in comparison to what they expect when Trump gets a second chance to try to remake the DOJ in his vision. They also know Trump’s anger at the department has only deepened in the past four years as it launched two unprecedented criminal prosecutions against him.
“Many federal employees are terrified that we’ll be replaced with partisan loyalists — not just because our jobs are on the line, but because we know that our democracy and country depend on a government supported by a merit-based, apolitical civil service,” said Stacey Young, a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division who won an award from Barr in 2020 and is president and co-founder of the DOJ Gender Equality Network.
It all adds up to a feeling of trepidation for many of the department’s rank and file.
“We’ve all seen this movie before and it’s going to be worse,” said one former DOJ official who served under Trump and several of his predecessors. “It will be worse. It’s just a question of how much worse it’s going to be.”
Commentary:
Machevelli wrote:
"If an injury has to be done to a man, it should be so severe that his vengeance need not to be feared".
The FBI, DOJ, DHS and IRS allowed Obama to turn them into the Ne-Marxist Democrat secret police and mob lawyers. They spent years getting dirt on Trump in case he ran for office, and the last eight years failing to bring him down. The entire DNC machine, Hillary's influence, Biden and Obama, cannot cover for them anymore.
Instead of being terrified, they should think about lawyering up and turning state's evidence.
It's not shocking that Politico is expressing the fears of Federal Employees that used their positions to push their political ideologiies in weaponizing their positions on others.
A prime example is the FEMA agent that refused to help families in Florida that had Trump signs on their lawn.
You have to wonder if that happened in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia?
It's not just employees of FEMA that are fearful, every Federal agency will now be scrutinized and if necessarry purged of the politically biased and DEI employees that have been plced there by Obama and Biden.
They have nothing to fear of if they’ve done nothing wrong.
I'd venture to say that shredders and Bleach-Bit programs in DC are running full blast 24/7, contributing to global warming, since it was confirmed that Trump won the presidential election.
