We look at why legal experts are concerned.
Donald Trump says Kamala Harris should be prosecuted for the Biden administration’s border policies. He wants President Biden to be prosecuted for corruption, Nancy Pelosi for her husband’s stock trades and Google for its search results about Trump and Harris. His list of targets for investigation also includes state prosecutors, judges and former officials from the F.B.I. and other parts of the Justice Department.
If Trump wins, he can use the Justice Department, including the F.B.I., to seek revenge against his political enemies — even if, as in the cases above, there is little or no evidence of a crime. Doing so would go far beyond anything Trump pursued in his first term.
There are multiple safeguards in the American legal system. They largely held when Trump was president. Will they hold again if he has a second term? We posed that question to 50 former top officials from the Justice Department and the White House Counsel’s Office, along with a few retired judges and nonpartisan career D.O.J. lawyers. The former officials, evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, have served seven presidents.
Most of them are freaked out about Trump’s potential impact on the Justice Department, as we wrote today in a story for The New York Times Magazine.
Here’s what they told us.
Forty-two of the 50 former officials said it was very likely or likely that a second Trump term would pose a significant threat to the norm of keeping criminal enforcement free of White House influence, a policy that has been in place since the Watergate scandal.
Thirty-nine of 50 said it was likely or very likely that Trump, if elected, would order the Justice Department to investigate a political adversary. (Six more said it was possible.) This, too, is something presidents don’t do.
The respondents were more split on how the Justice Department would respond. Twenty-seven of the 50 said it was very likely or likely that career prosecutors at the D.O.J. would follow orders and pursue the case. Thirteen said it was possible. Nine said it was unlikely or very unlikely.
Not everyone was panicked. A handful of respondents rejected our survey’s premise, saying we had unfairly or unnecessarily focused on Trump. The survey was an example of “mainstream media bias,” one Reagan-appointed official said, “that permits liberal prosecutors to violate norms for the rule of law with limited oversight in the court of public opinion.” Other former officials said the department’s career professionals would keep Trump in check.
But several Republican appointees, along with Democratic ones, warned that an extremist president in general, and Trump in particular, was the biggest threat they saw to the rule of law. “There is every reason to believe that Donald Trump would seek to use criminal enforcement and the F.B.I. as leverage for his personal and political ends in a second term,” said Peter Keisler, a founder of the conservative Federalist Society who was an acting attorney general for President George W. Bush, capturing a common sentiment we heard.
