With ouster, US Justice Department independence teeters as Trump exerts control

WASHINGTON – The ouster on Sept 19 of the federal prosecutor who failed to charge two of US President Donald Trump’s most-reviled adversaries was a huge blow to the Justice Department’s teetering tradition of independence, showing how far Mr Trump has gone in exerting personal control over the institution.

The way in which the prosecutor, Mr Erik Siebert, was abruptly forced from his post atop the US attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia deepened troubling questions that have arisen in recent months about the politicisation of the Justice Department’s supposedly self-governing satellite offices.

But it also raised a blunter and more immediate issue: Which of the nation’s US attorneys might be next?

Beyond their efforts to push out Mr Siebert, whose inquiries into Ms Letitia James, New York’s attorney-general, and Mr James Comey, the former FBI director, effectively fizzled out, administration officials have also ramped up pressure against Ms Kelly Hayes, the US attorney in Maryland, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Ms Hayes, a career prosecutor who has spent more than a decade in that office, is leading inquiries into two other vocal critics of Mr Trump: Senator Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, who has been accused of mortgage fraud by Mr Trump’s allies; and Mr John Bolton, Mr Trump’s former national security adviser, who is facing scrutiny over allegations of mishandling classified information.

Recently, Ms Hayes told associates that she was under no illusions of the pressure she would face if she refused to bring a case she believed to be unsupported by evidence, as Mr Siebert did, according to people with knowledge of those conversations.

And while she signed off in August on asking for a warrant to search Mr Bolton’s home in Bethesda, Maryland, she has indicated that she would not bring charges against Mr Schiff unless her team discovered evidence to support them.

Mr Trump’s campaign against US attorneys, who oversee offices in 93 federal districts across the country, is an extension, even an escalation, of the early purge that his top political appointees carried out at Justice Department headquarters and the FBI against those who worked on the criminal cases brought against him before he returned to power.

Given that these prosecutors’ offices are where federal cases are filed on a day-to-day basis, the move strikes at the nuts-and-bolts foundations of the criminal justice system. It seems intended to create a frictionless path for prosecutions of those who have run afoul of Mr Trump, and perhaps to provide the White House with a tool it could use to set aside or slow cases it would like to see disappear.

White House interference in the work of US attorneys was once considered such a taboo that former attorney-general Alberto Gonzales, who served under former president George W. Bush, resigned in scandal after the Justice Department fired nine US attorneys in 2006 for what were perceived to be political reasons.

But Mr Trump’s reaction to Mr Siebert’s ouster could not have been more different.

Several people, including Attorney-General Pam Bondi and Mr Todd Blanche, the Deputy Attorney-General and the President’s former defence lawyer, lobbied hard to keep Mr Siebert in place, arguing that he had been an efficient and cooperative partner on immigration and crime enforcement in Washington’s southern suburbs.

But Mr Trump responded to repeated entreaties by saying, “I don’t care,” according to a person with knowledge of the matter. His position seemed to be that he had been warned several times during his first term about firing US attorneys, given that it could have put him in jeopardy, and he ended up being investigated after leaving office anyhow, the person said.

While US attorneys are appointed by, and serve at the pleasure of, the President, they like to think of themselves as having some measure of professional autonomy, said Ms Barbara McQuade, a former US attorney in Detroit who teaches at the University of Michigan Law School.

That sense of independence largely arises from measures put in place in the 1970s, after the Watergate scandal, dictating that partisan politics should never play a role in a prosecutor’s decision-making process.

“US attorneys pride themselves on saying that we act without fear or favour,” Ms McQuade said. “But if you see other US attorneys getting fired for failing to comply with orders from the White House, well, that could lead to fear. And if you are letting someone off the hook for political reasons, well, that is favour. Both are inappropriate.”

Mr Siebert will be replaced by Ms Mary Cleary, a conservative lawyer active in Republican politics who has served as a local prosecutor in Culpeper County, Virginia, according to an e-mail she sent staff at the office on Sept 20. Her e-mail did not mention her predecessor or his predicament, saying only that “the Eastern District of Virginia has a distinguished legacy upon which we will build”.

It was unusual enough when Mr Trump, at the start of his term, placed a team of his own personal lawyers, including Mr Blanche, in key positions at the Justice Department.

It was even more unusual, however, that the President ignored the advice of those officials in favour of others who have limited or no experience at all in handling criminal cases: Mr Ed Martin, the self-described captain of the Justice Department’s weaponisation working group, which was created to go after Mr Trump’s enemies, and Mr William Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

Mr Pulte had been pushing Mr Trump for weeks to get rid of Mr Siebert and was joined by Mr Martin in delivering a message intended to prompt a dismissal, according to people familiar with the situation. Mr Siebert, the two men told the President, had for some time been blocking efforts to subject Mr Comey to the punishment he desired.

That message gained new urgency this week after Mr Siebert encountered a significant hurdle in his separate investigation of Mr Comey for allegedly lying in testimony to Congress.

That inquiry – said to be based on testimony that Mr Comey gave to the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2020 – was under additional pressure because it was set to bump up against the statute of limitations within 10 days.

Mr Chris Christie, the erstwhile Trump ally and former governor who once served as US attorney in New Jersey, said that decisions about criminal prosecutions should be made by people with the requisite resume and training, not by those like Mr Pulte, Mr Martin or Mr Trump, for that matter.

“When the decisions are made by someone who has neither the education nor the experience to make those decisions, people immediately jump to the conclusion that they’re being made for reasons that have nothing to do with the law,” Mr Christie said in a brief interview. “And that’s the type of slippery slope that we cannot have our criminal justice system go down.”

A spokesperson for the Justice Department declined to comment. A White House spokesperson did not respond to a message seeking comment. NYTIMES