Trump's DOJ functioned as a cross between The Apprentice and Nazi Germany: Ex-legal staffer

A former Justice Department attorney compared her service under President Donald Trump as somewhere in between Nazi Germany and "The Apprentice."

Erica Newland went to work at the Department of Justice in the summer before the 2016 election, and stayed under Trump because she liked her colleagues and believed she could make a difference -- but soon learned an uncomfortable truth about herself, reported The Atlantic.

“I guess I know what kind [of German bureaucrat] I would have been,” Newland said, imagining how she might have served in the 1930s. “I would have stayed in the Nazi administration initially and then fled.”

She lasted in Trump's government until October 2018, when an anti-Semitic extremist killed 11 worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue, and that same week her colleagues at the Office of Legal Counsel were tasked with justifying Trump's order to refuse all asylum claims at the southern border -- mirroring language the gunman had used against foreign "invaders."

Newland, who is Jewish, recalled an exchange she had with a supervisor who often reminded staffers they worked for the president by saying, "We're just following orders."

“I know that’s what the Nazis said," he once told Newland, "but we’re not Nazis.”

Newland often felt that she and her colleagues were using their legal skills to save the president from his own lies and ignorance of the Constitution, and she recognized something of herself when reading that producers on "The Apprentice" reality show had to edit Trump's decisions to make them seem coherent.

“There was hardly any respect for the other departments of government -- not for the lower courts, not for Congress, and certainly not for the bureaucracy, for professionalism, for facts or the truth,” Newland told The Atlantic. “Corruption is the right word for this. It doesn’t have to be pay-to-play to be corrupt. It’s a departure from the oath.”