• United States

October 13, 2025, 6:00 AM View Comments ()

In his second administration, U.S. President Donald Trump has succeeded in turning an institution of legal justice into his own personal weapon. A fragile wall was constructed to separate the Department of Justice (DOJ) from the political interests of the Oval Office in the aftermath of Watergate in 1974. In a matter of months, Trump has shattered that wall, using a legal team at his disposal to go after domestic opponents and conduct political investigations.

The most recent shocking example of how far the president is willing to go occurred last week when New York attorney general Letitia James was indicted for mortgage fraud. James is the latest person to be targeted by Trump’s DOJ. Trump has been venting about James ever since she won a civil fraud case against him and his family business.

The news comes just weeks after U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, concluded that there was insufficient evidence to move forward with indictments of former FBI Director James Comey, who along with James has been another one of the people at the very top of Trump’s list of enemies due to his role in investigating possible connections between the 2016 Republican presidential campaign and Russia. Under pressure from the president to resign—in late September, Trump told reporters, “Yeah, I want him out”—Seibert stepped down from his position. Trump replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, a 36-year-old former insurance lawyer from Florida with no prosecutorial experience.

Keeping up the pressure, Trump sent out a message on social media directed at Attorney General Pam Bondi, stating in clear language: “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!” Days later, Halligan brought the case to a grand jury in Virginia, which then indicted Comey.

Trump has also fired DOJ prosecutors who were connected to cases against him, and he has attempted to pressure law firms who handled parts of the investigations into signing punitive agreements at the risk of losing security clearances. Top FBI agents have been let go and said that it was done for no reason other than they had antagonized Trump and his supporters. Most recently, FBI Director Kash Patel reportedly fired an agent who refused to arrest Comey and escort him in a “perp walk” in front of reporters.

Well before the end of Trump 2.0, conditions will be worse than they were at the end of Watergate, given that the current attacks are taking place in broad daylight and with the imprimatur of House and Senate Republicans. The new DOJ will be incapable of upholding the Constitution irrespective of who is president.

Unless Congress acts soon, the Department of Justice will be irreparably damaged.

Established in 1870, the Department of Justice had a problematic history long before President Richard Nixon sat in the Oval Office.

President Woodrow Wilson’s final attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, conducted the “Palmer raids” from 1919 to 1921 as part of that era’s Red Scare, which targeted socialists and communists. Thousands of people were imprisoned without due process. A smaller number of people were deported.

Attorney General Harry Daugherty, who had previously served as a campaign manager for President Warren Harding, was forced to resign in 1924 after he was implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal, which revolved around the secretary of interior accepting bribes from oil interests. Between 1961 and late 1964, President John F. Kennedy’s brother, Robert, served as the attorney general and authorized FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to conduct wiretapping operations into civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

But nobody corrupted the independence of DOJ as thoroughly as Nixon. During his tenure from 1969 to 1972, Attorney General John Mitchell—who had been Nixon’s campaign manager—expanded illegal wiretap and sabotage operations into the anti-war movement. He also investigated and leaked negative information about the president’s political opponents. Mitchell worked to prevent the New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

He resigned on Feb. 15, 1972, to head the Committee to Reelect the President (unofficially abbreviated as CREEP), the group that was in charge of the break-in of the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate complex. In 1975, Mitchell was convicted for his role in the scandal, serving 19 months in prison. Richard Kleindienst, who replaced Mitchell and upheld his hard line against domestic anti-war protesters, was involved in the cover-up. He resigned on April 30, 1973.

During the Saturday Night Massacre in October 1973, Nixon wanted his new attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was demanding that the president release recordings of White House telephone and Oval Office conversations. When Richardson and then-Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned rather than carrying out the order, Nixon found someone else—Solicitor General Robert Bork—to do the job.

Finally, as heard on the “smoking gun” tape from 1972 once the Supreme Court forced the recording’s release, Nixon and Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman wanted to have the CIA stop the FBI from conducting its investigation into the entire matter.

As a result of the Watergate scandal—which culminated with Nixon announcing his resignation on Aug. 8, 1974—Americans finally came to recognize how dangerous it was for the DOJ to be a mere extension of the presidency. Under an imperial president, the strategies of intimidation, harassment, and the abuse of power could be triumphant.

“People began thinking that the Justice Department was just like all the rest, and couldn’t be trusted to do what was decent and honorable and right,” admitted Richard Thornburgh, who later served as one of President Ronald Reagan’s attorneys general, in 1977.

During the years that followed, a series of attorneys general pursued reforms that attempted to ensure the integrity of the agency. President Gerald Ford’s second attorney general Edward Levi, for instance, set up the Office of Professional Responsibility to monitor activities within the DOJ. Levi also imposed new limits on FBI activities.

Under President Jimmy Carter, Attorney General Griffin Bell announced that most communications about cases had to go through his office or his two top aides. In September 1978, Bell assembled DOJ lawyers in the great hall of their building to articulate three key principles that he insisted would guide the agency moving forward.

First, there had to be guidelines to prevent them from allowing political considerations to drive their work. Transparency would be vital. Outside of policy initiatives, communication had to be severely restricted. Second, DOJ had to strive to protect its public image as a neutral government body. Finally, the attorney general had to maintain a staff of honest and principled lawyers who could be committed to these values.

“I believe that our primary mission is to serve the Government as professionals,” he told the lawyers gathered before him, “to exercise our independent judgment and to do our duty as we see it. But the partisan activities of some Attorneys General in this century, combined with the unfortunate legacy of Watergate, have given rise to an understandable public concern that some decisions at Justice may be the products of favor, or pressure, or politics.” The changes, Bell told the press, would be essential to “restoring and maintaining public confidence in the Department of Justice.”

Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, who took over the position in 1979, incorporated these principles into internal DOJ rulebooks. Future Attorney General Merrick Garland—who was a special assistant to Civiletti, according to the Atlantic’s Franklin Foer—“sat by Civiletti’s side as he continued the work of reforming the Justice Department: writing new rules and procedures to prevent another president from ever abusing the institution. They were preserving the rule of law by bubble-wrapping it in norms, so that it would be thoroughly insulated from political pressure.”

Congress also enacted important reforms in the 1970s. In 1976, the House and Senate passed legislation that restricted the FBI director to a single 10-year term for. The goal was to prevent another leader from retaining power for as long as Hoover (who served for almost 48 years) while simultaneously ensuring that they would have sufficient autonomy from the president.

Two years later, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which created a FISA court that was responsible for approving surveillance operations on U.S. citizens. That same year, Congress enacted the Ethics in Government Act, which established an independent counsel to investigate wrongdoing in the executive branch. Once appointed by the attorney general, the law made it very difficult for anyone, including the president, to encroach on the work of the special counsel.

While Democrats and Republicans allowed the law establishing the Office of the Independent Prosecutor to expire in 1999—frustrated about lacking any kind of control of these prosecutors, who became fodder in the intensifying partisan battles of the era—the rest of the reforms that insulated DOJ worked fairly well. While there were examples when the lines between presidential politics and legal justice became blurred, overall, the division stood the test of time.

Even when Trump strained these barriers in his first term, there were enough so-called adults in the room to push back against his efforts.

In 2025, Trump has been much more successful accomplishing his goal. As part of his broader effort to assert total control over the executive branch—fulfilling the vision that proponents of the “unitary executive theory” have been championing since the 1980s—Trump is systematically destroying any remaining independence within DOJ.

With a president who doesn’t abide by guardrails—and is surrounded by staff eager to test the constitutional limits of executive authority—this has become dangerous state of affairs for the nation. The lessons of Watergate, entrenched in the reforms of the 1970s, have been picked apart. As a result, the Department of Justice, which the nation relies on to uphold law and order, has been folded into the full authority of the president, who can do what he pleases with this important agency.

In dismantling the independence of the Department of Justice, Trump has rewritten the boundaries of executive power, and in doing so has eroded the strength of the rule of law within the democracy.