The dozen or so high-ranking Department of Justice attorneys who were reassigned to the DOJ's Sanctuary Cities Enforcement working group have all quit, the Washington Post is reporting on Saturday.
According to the report from Post’s Perry Stein, a the time of the reassignment they were told to either accept the move or resign and, as of this week, the last attorney who accepted the move has now quit.
The report notes that those who accepted the move soon realized it had no function other than to sideline them with the hope that they would give up and leave the DOJ.
As the Post’s Stein wrote, “Six months later, all of those attorneys have left DOJ for good, the last one packing up this week. And five people familiar with the working group say they got the impression that the task force was designed to do nothing but frustrate and eventually force out lawyers the administration felt it could replace with people more loyal to the president.”
The report notes that little legal work was being done with career attorneys assigned to “...do Google-type searches and other menial research on those [sanctuary] policies — and were told there was no need to communicate with the lawyers who were actually filing high-profile lawsuits against such jurisdictions as Los Angeles, New York and Denver.”
Bonnie Robin-Vergeer, the former chief of the Civil Rights Division’s appellate section quit after six weeks, telling the Post, “The assignment was a sham. We did very little.”
The report noes the move was made before Attorney General Pam Bondi took over allowing her to "skirt federal guidelines that require a 120-day moratorium on certain staff reassignments after new, Senate-confirmed agency leaders start their appointments."
According to Stacey Young, president and founder of Justice Connection, the move was also done in such a way as to avoid scrutiny and scandal.
“The administration identified seasoned and proven leaders they wanted out of the way — officials they probably believed would stymie their political goals, or simply insist on following the law and upholding institutional norms,” Young explained before elaborating, “Firing them outright likely would’ve resulted in lawsuits and fanfare they wanted to avoid. So they hatched a more devious plan: Send them to a rubber room where they’d resign immediately, or wither and then give up.”
You can read more here.
