Listen Up Young Lawyers! Stay Away From The Department of Justice!
For many years young lawyers joined the Department of Justice through the Attorney General’s Honors Program. The Program attracted top students from law schools around the country. It was highly selective.
I had friends who joined the Program. All went on to distinguished careers.
The Program is still in existence but the standards of the Department have been debased. Now the Department is known for lawyers who have been fired or quit. Candidly, the Department has become a cesspool of retribution against the president’s perceived enemies including Department lawyers employed by the previous administration to investigate Trump, his supporters or people he likes.
The legal and factual validity of cases under investigation by the Department during the previous administration plays virtually no role in the current Department management’s condemnation of virtually all of them.
The selection by presidents-elect of an Attorney General has run the gamut from highly substantive to crassly political. And neither party has a monopoly on either kind of appointment.
President Ford appointed former dean of University of Chicago law school and president of the University Edward H. Levi. No finer person has led the Department. and he was appointed by a Republican. President Nixon’s appointment of John Mitchell, his former campaign manager, led to Mitchell’s criminal conviction for Watergate crimes and a jail term of nineteen months.
The curious and historical gavotte between the White House and the Department is caused by the fact that the Department is supposed to be independent and not controlled by the White House. Even so, Presidents of both parties detested the Department’s independence and they showed it. President Clinton couldn’t stand Attorney General Janet Reno. In his first term Trump detested Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
All that distance between the White House and the Department is dead and buried under Trump 2. Trump has solved the problem by assuring that the Department is essentially part of the White House. The current acting Attorney General represented the president in his New York hush-money criminal case.
This foul stew is what young lawyers entering the Attorney General’s Honors Program will be fed. Stay away!