The Justice Department has been stripped of more than 94% of its lawyers tasked with fighting government corruption since President Donald Trump took office in January, according to several ex-DOJ employees.
“To me, it just screams that public corruption cases are no longer a priority of DOJ,” said Andrew Tessman, former assistant U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. and the Southern District of West Virginia, who left the agency this month. He was speaking with NOTUS in a report published Monday.
“I cannot understand why we would want to restrict that section.”
According to the ex-DOJ employees, some of whom spoke with NOTUS on the condition of anonymity, the DOJ had 36 attorneys who were tasked to investigate corrupt law enforcement and government officials when Trump took office. Today, that number has been whittled down to two.
“In a stripped-down office, the consulting function becomes nominal, if it exists at all,” said Michael Romano, who spent more than 17 years working at the DOJ as a prosecutor, and was among those 36 attorneys investigating government and law enforcement corruption cases.
“It sort of exists on paper so the government can say it exists and claim to be complying with the law. But if you want people to provide legitimate oversight, guidance and expertise, you can’t do that with a team of two. In reality, the advising function becomes a box-checking exercise.”
Trump’s DOJ has also reversed a relevant section of its “Justice Manual” – a comprehensive policy manual that lays out the agency’s internal rules, principles and procedures – specifically, the section detailing campaign finance law and corruption violations. It now states that the section is being “revised,” and that it is temporarily “suspended while revisions are ongoing.”
When pressed by NOTUS, a DOJ spokesperson did not respond to direct questions about the stripping down of the agency’s team tasked with investigating government and law enforcement corruption, only giving the outlet a generic response that the agency “takes public corruption seriously.”
