DOJ Tracker: March Update

Welcome back to our Substack series to help you stay informed and engaged in protecting the Justice Department. Each month, we pull highlights from Justice Connection’s DOJ Tracker to offer a more digestible way to keep up with the latest attacks.

Here’s what happened in March.

Diminished NatSec Offices Put Us At Heightened Risk

On Feb. 28, the United States and Israel launched a war against Iran. In the wake of this move, we face a higher risk of terrorism without the robust national security infrastructure we’ve come to rely on over the last 25 years to protect us.

National security and counterintelligence offices across the government have been gutted by this administration’s efforts to root out perceived disloyalty to President Trump. At the Justice Department, that meant prosecutors who disagreed with political appointees or agents who worked on investigations into Trump. FBI Director Patel fired a dozen agents for their connections to the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case hours before the first strikes on Iran were launched. Several of the agents, it turned out, were part of a counterintelligence unit working on Iran-related threats.

Unfortunately, those firings are nothing new. Over the past 13 months, Patel has forced out many senior leaders of the agency’s national security units, including the FBI’s chief of intelligence, the counterintelligence chief in New York, and the head of the Hostage Rescue Team, Brian Driscoll, who for a time led the FBI as acting director. Not all of these officials were fired; some left after being demoted or took early retirement because they saw how politicized the bureau became under Patel. About 300 FBI agents working on national security cases have left since the beginning of Trump’s second term.

“We’ve never seen such a mass exodus of counterterrorism and counterintelligence agents from the FBI — and many of them were forced out,” Justice Connection’s Stacey Young told MS Now. “The needless loss of institutional knowledge and expertise has degraded the bureau at a perilous time, when we’re facing threats from Iran and elsewhere. The president’s political retribution campaign has made us all less safe.”

These staffing deficits aren’t just limited to the law enforcement agencies, either. About half of the National Security Division’s counterintelligence attorneys have left since the beginning of the Trump administration, including about a third of the senior leadership. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia — an office that handles many national security cases and has a reputation for prosecutorial expertise in these cases — was left with a bare bones team after senior career leaders pushed back against then-U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan’s rush to indict James Comey.

The national security agents and attorneys who have left provided more than just expertise. In the national security space, developing relationships with sources and with foreign counterparts is both time consuming and vitally important. Some worry that without those existing trusted relationships, intelligence sharing will slow down, making Americans more vulnerable to attacks.

Here are a few other things you might’ve missed:

• President Trump is continuing to wield the Justice Department as a weapon for foreign policy. In March, news broke that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami, which is run by a Trump loyalist, was on a fishing expedition to find criminal charges to bring against Cuban leaders to aid the president’s goal of regime change. DOJ is also reportedly investigating Colombia’s President, who has clashed with Trump in the past. While President Gustavo Petro is not running for reelection, the New York Times reports any charges DOJ brings against him could influence Colombia’s elections in May.

• Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche rescinded the department’s policy against no-knock warrants in most cases. DOJ later moved to drop the remaining charges against two Louisville, Kentucky, police officers who were involved in drafting the no-knock warrant that led to Breonna Taylor’s killing. Meanwhile, DOJ’s investigation into Alex Pretti’s killing does not include any career attorney who specializes in excessive force cases.

  • Justice Connection in CBS: “The Civil Rights Division still has career attorneys with a deep background in these investigations. Ignoring them and designating attorneys with little if any relevant expertise to run one of the department’s highest-profile civil rights investigations shows DOJ leadership has no intention of pursuing any real accountability.”

• The Wall Street Journal reported that defense lawyers and lobbyists with political connections are going over attorneys’ heads to influence the White House or senior DOJ leadership in antitrust cases. These private sector pressure campaigns have led to the ouster of senior officials, including Antitrust Division head Gail Slater, and friendly settlement terms for companies like Live Nation and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

• Politico Magazine highlighted the emerging recognition that there will need to be a serious and concerted DOJ reconstruction effort after Trump leaves office - and that planning for that period should begin sooner rather than later.

  • “Career DOJ professionals,” Stacey Young explains, “understand DOJ’s structural weaknesses that led to where we are, and they know best how to repair these structural weaknesses so they can never again be exploited by a president who believes he is the law.”