How independent is the Justice Department now?

Even before the 2024 election, former federal legal officials were concerned about the potential politicization of the Department of Justice during a second Trump administration. But the recent indictments of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James after direct pressure from the president have crossed a red line, said journalist Emily Bazelon.

“I think crisis is a completely justified word to use,” said Bazelon, a Yale Law School graduate and New York Times Magazine staff writer. “What’s happening now is just an utter dismantling of all the norms and rules that were enacted after Watergate to try to have some separation between the White House’s political aspirations and the Justice Department.”

Bazelon was on campus Monday for the Francis Biddle Memorial Lecture, titled “Has Independence Ended for the Justice Department?” The Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School detailed the reaction within the DOJ and in the wider Washington legal community to White House moves to press for prosecutions of individuals considered Trump’s political enemies.

The department has for decades been assured prosecutorial independence in the wake of the public and congressional backlash against President Richard Nixon’s attempts to use the agency to impede the investigation into the Watergate scandal, she said.

“Presidents have been very careful, for their own political benefit, to separate themselves and to respect these norms and rules that have governed this sort of distancing [between the White House and the DOJ],” said Bazelon. “President Trump just sees it differently, and not entirely, but for the most part, he’s pretty much allowed to do that, at least until the courts stop him, and that, as probably many of you know, just hasn’t happened yet.”

The sense of crisis has been felt within the department, where about 4,000 of the agency’s more than 115,000 employees have resigned and more than 200 have been fired, Bazelon said. There is widespread concern among employees in Washington and at many U.S. attorneys’ offices around the nation about the perceived erosion of the department’s independence.

That view is shared by others in the nation’s legal establishment. In a recent statement, the American Bar Association expressed its concern over “the use of federal prosecutorial power for apparent partisan ends,” calling it “an affront to the rule of law.”

The latest indictments emerged after a social media post on Sept. 20 in which Trump demanded that U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi prosecute Comey and James.

Both had been involved in separate investigations of Trump. James, the New York attorney general, led a successful civil fraud investigation against the Trump Organization. Comey investigated Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections and the potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

James was indicted on charges she made false claims on a mortgage application, and Comey was accused of lying to Congress and obstructing a congressional proceeding. Both have denied the charges.

Apprehension over Trump’s likely politicization of the Justice Department was high during his first term, said Bazelon, who surveyed 50 former federal legal officials in October 2024. A year later, she conducted another survey with 49 of the original participants, plus an additional one. Half of the participants were Democratic appointees and the other half Republican, but all were alarmed, she said.

“Their level of alarm at this point is basically off the charts, and I ran the survey before the indictments of James Comey and Letitia James started to come down,” said Bazelon. “And when we asked the question, ‘Do you think President Trump is using the Justice Department as a tool of retribution and reward?’ all 50 people said, ‘Yes.’

“People who were very high up in the George W. Bush administration are freaked out,” she said. “People who served in the first Trump administration, mostly off the record, are very freaked out.”

During the survey, participants also remarked on Congress’ lack of response to political interference in the Justice Department. Almost all noted the Supreme Court also has done little or nothing to push back. This stands in contrast to lower court judges, who have ruled against the administration in several cases, only to see their decisions rejected by the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority.

The departure of Erik Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, who resigned after he declined to pursue criminal charges against James due to lack of evidence, is a warning sign that politically driven prosecutions will continue, said Bazelon.

“Erik Siebert is gone, and Lindsey Halligan, the current person acting as U.S. attorney in Virginia, is an insurance lawyer who has never prosecuted a case before,” said Bazelon. “That is, since Watergate, an unprecedented set of actions happening, and it doesn’t really look like there’s an end in sight to it.”