Readers will surely have varying views about whether the Jeffrey Epstein matter should be dominating political discourse. But the Trump administration’s attempt to tamp down the controversy by reviewing its files, interviewing Ghislaine Maxwell and otherwise attempting to show it has nothing to hide brings into sharp relief the damage it has done to the Justice Department and its credibility.
From the start, President Trump appears to have put personal loyalty above all in the leaders he chose for the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And he seems to have succeeded in that regard. Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel — all have shown a North Korean level of fealty to their leader. Ignoring norms of Justice Department independence from the White House, they have jumped to follow his orders. They’ve announced investigations he demanded, seemingly regardless of whether there was support for doing so. They have moved to dismiss the cases that suited his political or personal purposes, regardless of the public interest.
What is truly extraordinary, at least in recent times, has been their readiness to fire or otherwise push out agents and prosecutors, apparently for sins as minor as associating with Mr. Trump’s critics and taking assignments to prosecute Jan. 6 defendants.
Numerous federal judges have raised concerns, to put it mildly, about the Trump administration’s readiness to put political expediency and presidential will above professionalism and adherence to the rule of law. Justice Department lawyers in every administration often find themselves fighting uphill battles in court to advance the president’s political agenda. But even when they don’t have the law squarely on their side, they generally start with a personal and institutional credibility without which their work would be much harder.
If a Trump Justice Department lawyer appears before a court and either doesn’t know an answer because the political bosses have withheld it, or, worse, is not fully candid or even lies, she becomes just another lawyer, and a sleazy one at that. The government’s case suffers accordingly, as it should.
The credibility crisis is not just inside the courtroom. Having supposedly scoured its files on Jeffrey Epstein, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department have told the public that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted” for good and sufficient reasons. No one is fooled by the lack of any official’s name on the written statement. It comes from Ms. Bondi’s Justice Department and Mr. Patel’s F.B.I. — organizations whose lawyers and agents have seen colleagues pushed out for the mere suspicion of insufficient loyalty. How can these institutions show that they are not simply protecting the president?