'Poisoned the well': Trump hurt by 'unavoidable problem' he created at DOJ

President Donald Trump is finding out the hard way what happens when a chief executive destroys the government's credibility.

The president installed loyalists at the top of his cabinet-level agencies, especially at the Department of Justice, where his former impeachment lawyer Pam Bondi serves as attorney general and his former criminal defense lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove serve as her deputies, and former federal prosecutor Daniel Richman published a column in the New York Times saying their close ties to Trump has created major problems for himself.

"Numerous federal judges have raised concerns, to put it mildly, about the Trump administration’s readiness to put political expediency and presidential will above professionalism and adherence to the rule of law," Richman wrote. "If a Trump Justice Department lawyer appears before a court and either doesn’t know an answer because the political bosses have withheld it, or, worse, is not fully candid or even lies, she becomes just another lawyer, and a sleazy one at that. The government’s case suffers accordingly, as it should."

That credibility crisis has settled over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, which Bondi and Kash Patel and Dan Bongino – the MAGA mouthpieces who now lead the FBI – had promoted before abruptly telling the public to move along. Richman said the president created the problem by installing those officials in the first place.

"No one is fooled by the lack of any official’s name on the written statement," Richman said. "It comes from Ms. Bondi’s Justice Department and Mr. Patel’s F.B.I. — organizations whose lawyers and agents have seen colleagues pushed out for the mere suspicion of insufficient loyalty. How can these institutions show that they are not simply protecting the president?"

Bondi sent Blanche into a Florida prison to speak to Epstein's accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, who's appealing her 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking children, and Trump has floated the possibility of a pardon for his former friend in exchange for identifying others involved in the sex crimes – in which many suspect the president himself may be implicated.

"Say she is willing to speak about a wide range of new matters, maybe involving the president," Richman said. "What confidence should we have that Trump Justice Department officials will push her hard to be truthful and candid? Or that they will report back everything she said?"

"The answer to the last set of questions is probably 'none,'" Richman added.

Blanche could enhance his credibility by including career Justice Department lawyers or FBI agents in his Maxwell interviews, but the public still might not trust testimony from a convicted criminal who has a strong motivation to lie to the president's former criminal defense lawyer about matters that could damage him politically.

"The Trump Justice Department needs someone with the credibility to tell the general public, 'yes, there is some material that for legal reasons we cannot share, but really there’s nothing to see here,'" Richman wrote. "There will always be conspiracy theorists who would never believe the government. Many other Americans expect and want the truth from this Justice Department."

"The unavoidable problem for the Trump administration is how it has poisoned the well it now wants to draw from," he added.