Chaos At DOJ In The First Week Of The Trump Administration? Blame Barack Obama.

For 12 of the past 16 years the ranks of DOJ Attorneys have been stuffed full of liberal progressives -- time to go.

From Politico:

“It’s got to be among the most demoralizing moments in the history of the Department of Justice,” said one former DOJ career official. “It is a flat-out purge of individuals who this administration must view either of suspect loyalty or have worked on matters they just did not like. … We are in the early phases of what to me is just looking like a wholesale politically inspired demolition of the Department of Justice in key places.”

Cry me a river.

I joined the Department of Justice in July 1992.

That means I worked through the election of Bill Clinton in 1992 and the change in party control at DOJ from the GOP to the Democrats.

I worked through the election of George W. Bush in 2000 and the change in party control at DOJ from the Democrats to the GOP.

I worked through the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and the change in party control at DOJ from GOP to the Democrats.

Only the last one — Bush to Obama — was dramatic in any fashion. During Bush 43’s second term, the Democrats began their assault on what they claimed was an excessive numbers of conservative DOJ attorneys, marked by membership in the Federalist Society. This followed the attacks that were made following Bush’s nomination of Alberto Gonzalez to be Attorney General during his second term.

After Obama’s win in 2008, the flow of progressive liberal attorneys into DOJ was a steady and non-stop. Every opening was filled with recent law school graduates. Prior to coming into DOJ these attorneys almost uniformly had stops at places like National Lawyers Guild, NARAL, Emily’s List, Sierra Club, Common Cause, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Southern Poverty Law Center, etc.

It was widely known inside DOJ that starting after January 2009 that if an applicant did not have some “social justice” work experience on his/her job application, the chances of getting hired into an open position were almost zero. This happened slowly at first because there needed to be open positions into which to hire these folks. But in the aftermath of most intense parts of the Iraq War there was a surge in the anti-war sentiment in academia and on college campuses, and that sentiment followed college graduates as then went to law schools. The law school graduates who began graduating during the early years of the Obama Administration became the foot-soldiers of the progressive social justice warrior army who quickly took over pretty much the entirety of DOJ hiring starting in around 2010.

By that time, veterans of DOJ who had come into the office on both sides of 9/11, and were known to be something other than committed progressives, began to be “urged” towards the exits. The process didn’t cause me any heartburn — I stayed longer than I ever imagined I would and after 21 years of service I was content with what I had accomplished and there were other professional challenges to tackle.

But I know that my office in Hawaii was empty for only 2 days. My replacement was lined up waiting for me to leave — a young female attorney who had graduated from Yale Law School four years earlier, did a judicial clerkship, spent one year at a progressive non-profit legal foundation, and then two years in the DOJ Honors Program at Main Justice where she sat waiting for a position to open in the the Hawaii U.S. Attorney’s Office — which turned out to be my position.

She had never tried a case, had little actual courtroom experience, and was gone from the office less than two years later.

But that was how the ranks of AUSA’s and Main Justice Trial attorneys were stocked from 2010 until — well, now. There was a pause during the first termof President Trump, but as a general rule an interim U.S. Attorney does not have the authority to fill full-time AUSA positions with new hires from outside DOJ. Since Pres. Trump came into office in 2017 without a fully-realized Administration or candidates for every Presidential appointment, new hires in DOJ from 2017 to 2020 did not have the same impact on the overall work force as was caused by Obama’s eight years of stuffing DOJ with “True Believers.” It sometimes took a year or more for a Presidentially appointed U.S. Attorney to be named during the first Trump term.

We are now 15 years past the start of that Obama-era hiring frenzy that turned DOJ a department full of social justice warrior zealots.

I have no information on what exactly is taking place inside DOJ now. There are two likely points of significant internal activity in terms of personnel moves — Main Justice and the U.S. Attorneys Office for the District of Columbia.

The sections at Main Justice seeing changes are rumored to be the National Security Division and the Public Integrity Section of the Criminal Division. Those would have been the two locations where most of the anti-Trump lawfare over the past 8 years originated prior to the appointment of Jack Smith as Special Counsel.

The Politico story linked above mentions that the demand for a return to an in-office five-days-a-week work schedule is also causing turmoil. I don’t even know how to react to this development other than to simply laugh out loud. Being told to come into the office every day is causing hardship?? What kind of job expectations do these snow-flakes have? In my first office as an prosecutor, the courtrooms were located two floors above the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the same courthouse. Prosecutors went back and forth to Court up the stairs every day. While videoconference appearances weren’t possible then, the suggestion that courtroom prosecutors shouldn’t be required to work in a location close to the courtrooms is almost comical.

Some flexible work arrangements put into place during the pandemic are nearly five years old, and rolling them back has complicated the lives of many employees, especially those with young children.

When we moved to Hawaii, my oldest was 2 years old. He went to the federal building with me everyday because there was a preschool in the building. Over the course of the next 11 years, four additional children happened along. I left DOJ when my youngest twin daughters were approaching one year old.

The idea that children complicate the lives of prosecutors working for DOJ and are thus an excuse for special working conditions — are you kidding me? Welcome to the real world. Now get your butt to the office if you want to keep the job.

The story also addresses the issue of January 6 prosecutors and the fact that there were hundreds of Assistant U.S. Attorneys brought from across the country to staff the cases since the volume was greater than the U.S. Attorney for D.C. could manage. The story notes that the sheer numbers in that regard mean “they all can’t be fired” — most do not deserve to be fired — there is certainly a meaningful way for new management to review the work done and make a determination whether continued employment in the same capacity is warranted. It might not be next week or next month, but where the work of individual prosecutors is found to have exceeded what could be called “doing justice” that prosecutor could pay for that with their job.

“Fairness” and “justice” are the North Stars of public prosecutors, not winning. Some — not all — either never realized that in their zealotry or they lost track of it somewhere along the way. I saw many examples and, with the benefit of my 21 years doing the same job in a very different way, I would sign the termination paperwork for many based on my experiences.

Let them go chasing social justice objectives that are at the center of their worldview. But they aren’t entitled to do it in the name of the United States Department of Justice.