The Jeffrey Epstein mess at the Department of Justice calls to mind Herman Wouk’s World War II novel “The Caine Mutiny.” The paranoid Captain Queeg — later portrayed by Humphrey Bogart on film — turns his ship upside-down in a manic search for a stolen quart of strawberries. Queeg orders fruitless cabin searches and crew interrogations until, finally relieved of duty, he mutters, “Ahh, but the strawberries, that’s where I had them. They laughed at me, but they were only trying to protect some fellow officers.”
Hundreds of employees at the Justice Department and the FBI conducted a similarly obsessive search, this time for Epstein’s mythical “client list” for sex-trafficking. The searchers combed through offices, cabinets, closets and hard drives, reviewing over 100,000 pages of documents. The effort consumed law enforcement resources but yielded nothing. Captain Queeg would have been proud.
The frantic search left the Justice Department with no choice but to contradict Attorney General Pam Bondi’s earlier claim that the client list was “sitting on my desk,” and admit that it possesses no such list. (Bondi has walked her claim back.)
To appease Trump’s enraged MAGA base, the department announced the diversion of even more crime-fighting resources to another pointless quest for missing strawberries — a “strike force” to investigate baseless allegations of a “treasonous conspiracy” by former President Barack Obama and his intelligence officials arising from Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election.
Welcome to the dumbing down of the Department of Justice, where the smartest and most experienced prosecutors are resigning or being dismissed; partisan, substandard lawyers are replacing them; and the department’s mission is reshaped to serve the president’s political and vengeance agenda — and to investigate bizarre conspiracy theories.
Ten experienced, high-quality federal prosecutors left the department over its decision to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in an apparent quid quo pro for his support for Trump’s immigration crackdown. Over two-thirds of the attorneys in the department’s Civil Rights Division have left because its mission has been twisted from enforcing civil rights to enforcing Trump’s executive orders. Trump aides forced out most of the lawyers in the Public Integrity Section because prosecuting corrupt Washington officials evidently is less important than deporting undocumented immigrants who work hard, pay taxes and have committed no crimes.
Who is filling the vacuum? Start with Ed Martin Jr., a Missouri lawyer and conservative activist with no prosecutorial experience, who is the subject of pending disciplinary proceedings and who had once been found in contempt for failing to obey a court order. Trump nominated him to be U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, but he proved too extreme even for Republican senators. Trump had to withdraw his nomination, but Martin was then installed in multiple high-ranking Justice Department roles that bypass Senate confirmation.
Then there’s Alina Habba, whom Trump appointed to be the interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, despite her lack of any prosecutorial experience. She previously worked as one of Trump’s own private lawyers. Habba publicly vowed to “turn New Jersey red,” promising to abandon partiality in favoring Republicans in enforcing the law. When her interim term expired, New Jersey’s federal judges, exercising their statutory mandate, appointed a highly respected career prosecutor, Desiree Leigh Grace, to succeed her. Bondi promptly fired Grace from that position and reinstalled Habba.
For historical perspective on the Justice Department’s decline, look to 1973, when Attorney General Elliot Richardson resigned in the public interest rather than carry out an order from President Richard Nixon to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal, something Richardson had promised at his Senate confirmation hearing not to do.
Looking for integrity and moral courage like that in today’s Justice Department is as futile as, well, Captain Queeg’s hunt for the missing strawberries.
Gregory J. Wallance was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations and a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team, which convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. He is the author of “Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia.”