For Donald Trump, the resignations are the point
When Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney-general, set off an avalanche of resignations in the Department of Justice (DoJ) by demanding this month that prosecutors suspend their corruption case against New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, he said he was worried it would keep Mr Adams from devoting his “full attention” to Donald Trump’s priorities of fighting illegal immigration and crime. If that was Mr Bove’s concern, his move backfired. Four of Mr Adams’s eight deputy mayors, including the one in charge of public safety, have since resigned. New York’s governor is weighing whether to dismiss the mayor. Mr Bove’s order has proved at least as big a distraction as the prosecution ever was.
And yet Mr Bove’s order has served the larger purposes of Mr Trump, whom he once represented as a criminal defence attorney. For Richard Nixon, it was a disaster when his attorney-general, Elliot Richardson, resigned rather than carry out an order he believed to be unethical, to fire the special prosecutor investigating Watergate. Richardson’s resignation marked the beginning of the end of Nixon’s presidency. But if historians choose to note the present upheaval at the Department of Justice, they are likely to view it as just the end of the beginning of Mr Trump’s new administration, as the episode that made clear he would encounter no serious political opposition to his project to re-engineer the Department of Justice as a mechanism for achieving his objectives. The resignations, of eight prosecutors so far, rid him of lawyers who might resist other directives and opened slots for loyalists while signalling, and reinforcing, his dominance of his party.
What has changed since the time of Watergate? Not the law. Then as now, the Supreme Court recognised that the president had “unrestricted power” to remove top officials, and that the executive branch had “exclusive authority and absolute discretion” to decide what cases to prosecute. What has changed, profoundly, is America’s political culture.
At least two of the prosecutors who resigned were, like Richardson, Republicans with admirable records of public service. Danielle Sassoon, the acting US attorney for the Southern District of New York, was first to make a dignified, principled exit, after dismantling Mr Bove’s arguments and writing she could not “in good faith defend” his position. A member of the Federalist Society, Ms Sassoon had clerked for conservative luminaries, including Justice Antonin Scalia. Next to resign was another prosecutor on the case, Hagan Scotten, a former clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts and a Special Forces veteran who was awarded two Bronze stars. While noting he was no critic of the Trump administration, Mr Scotten wrote to Mr Bove, “No system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives.”
Richardson supported Nixon and hoped to be president himself someday. But firing the prosecutor meant violating his moral code. In their last meeting in the Oval Office, Nixon tried to leverage Richardson’s sense of duty, saying it was a shame he would not put the public interest first. Richardson replied, “I can only say that I believe my resignation is in the public interest.” Enough Republicans, including in Congress, saw Richardson’s act as honourable to precipitate a crisis for Nixon. Today, Republicans who criticised President Joe Biden as “weaponising” the DoJ regard any suggestion that Mr Trump is doing just that as dishonourable. It’s not that integrity no longer matters; it’s that their definition of integrity has changed, from fidelity to principles to fidelity to leaders. “Your oath to uphold the Constitution does not permit you to substitute your policy judgment for that of the President or senior leadership of the Justice Department,” Mr Bove wrote in accepting Ms Sassoon‘s resignation. Denying any bargain with Mr Adams, Mr Bove accused her of pursuing a “politically motivated prosecution” and said the Justice Department would investigate her.
Philip Lacovara, who was the counsel to the Watergate special prosecutor, says he and others in the office were inclined to follow Richardson out the door. But Robert Bork, the DoJ official who ultimately carried out Nixon’s order, assured him that their investigation into Watergate would continue. “By contrast, Trump’s AG and Deputy AG have made it impossible to continue to investigate or prosecute anyone who has done a deal with Trump for protection,” he wrote in an email. “Moreover, a feckless Congress is cowering before Trump and offering no protection for the rule of law.” He added, “The current depredations are far worse than anything that we had to address during the Watergate affair.”
First kill all the lawyers
On February 18th, the top criminal prosecutor in the US attorney’s office in Washington, DC also quit, apparently also over a directive from Mr Bove, this time to freeze spending authorised under Mr Biden. Dispensing with such lawyers is vital to Mr Trump’s project. In remarks revealed by the investigative news outlet ProPublica, Russell Vought, Mr Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, once lamented how, when he served in the same role during Mr Trump’s first term, government lawyers would say “you can’t do that” because it was against the law. “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral,” Mr Vought said.
Mr Vought appears to regard this as necessary because of a “Marxist takeover” of the government. It is a curious inversion, or projection: Vladimir Lenin rejected the idea of an apolitical civil service, and the Bolsheviks built a one-party state that prized loyalty over merit and individual scruples. Over the long haul, this approach is not likely to work out for America, either. ■
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