Career attorneys and Justice Department staff are said to be rattled by the sea of changes upending the agency in President Donald Trump’s first week in office, as they struggle to adjust to the new reality.
The latest development affecting the department – which Trump spent four years blasting as overly political as it pursued criminal cases against him – came Monday when he fired more than a dozen prosecutors who worked with special counsel Jack Smith on Trump’s charges.
The DOJ has also seen Trump’s acting attorney general order a shake-up of senior personnel across major divisions “and dramatically shifted workplace rules — all in a matter of days,” according to a report in Politico.
But what’s “more disruptive” than the policy changes has been Monday’s purging of attorneys, as well as the moving of veteran national-security prosecutors and a call by a Trump appointee for prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases to turn over their files for an internal review, the report added.
While Trump was expected to transform the DOJ as president – and campaigned on many of the changes he is now seeing through – they were still taken by surprise, according to Politico.
“It feels like a non-violent war. It’s just wild. Everybody’s a sitting duck and these people have no power or control over the situation,” one DOJ career employee told Politico. “People are just in a state of shock and devastated. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen … Nothing that happened during the first Trump administration came anywhere close to this.”
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The publication said that it spoke with more than a dozen current and former DOJ officials, the majority of whom were granted anonymity over fears of "potential retribution."
“It’s got to be among the most demoralizing moments in the history of the Department of Justice,” a former DOJ career official said to Politico. “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.”
For another career staffer, the government-wide directives issued by the administration urging agencies to “identify all employees on probationary periods” have caused panic for DOJ personnel “who’ve been at the agency for less than two years and lack most civil service protections," according to Politico.
“It’s the probation announcement that has people completely terrified,” the career staffer told the publication. “There are a lot of question marks around some of these programmatic shifts, but there are not really question marks with respect to some of these fundamental employment issues.”