Amid worry about Trump, Garland calls for career Justice Dept. staff to stay.
An unusually high number of Justice Department lawyers are exploring jobs elsewhere since Donald Trump’s reelection, according to interviews.
How Merrick Garland’s DOJ is gearing up for a 2nd Trump administration.1/2WTF???
Perry SteinDecember 2, 2024 at 5:00
Attorney General Merrick Garland and top Justice Department officials are encouraging career staffers to remain in their jobs through the next administration, stressing that institutional knowledge is important as a new leaders take hold, according to people familiar with those conversations.
The weeks since President-elect Donald Trump’s victory have been filled with uncertainty and tumult for many of the more than 100,000 individuals who work at the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, according to people familiar with the situation, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss information that has not been made public.
As top officials inside the Justice Department have led meetings about transition protocols, Trump and his allies have continued their vows to fire career staffers and seek retribution on those they consider their political enemies.
Trump’s initial announcement that he would nominate as attorney general former congressman Matt Gaetz (R-Florida), an outspoken loyalist with limited legal experience, was met with angst and shock throughout the department, the people familiar with internal conversations said.
Gaetz’s abrupt withdrawal from consideration amid sex-trafficking allegations — and the subsequent nomination of former Florida attorney general and Trump loyalist Pam Bondi — brought some relief, those people said, tinged with uncertainty over whether Trump would erase existing firewalls between the White House and the Justice Department’s criminal investigations. (There's no firewalls idiots, the DOJ reports to the president, just like Garland did every dirty job of Bidan.)
Then, on Saturday night, Trump announced that he wanted to replace FBI director Christopher Wray with Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist who has dismissed the bureau’s investigations around Trump as political and has vowed to dismantle the FBI. Bureau directors are supposed to serve 10-year terms that span presidential administrations, so Trump would have to fire Wray — or Wray could quit — for a Patel nomination to go forward.
Trump presidential transition
Trump has announced earlier in November that his personal defense lawyers, who represented him in his criminal cases, would be nominated for top Justice Department jobs. While some people interviewed said that those lawyers’ relevant job qualifications for the jobs were reassuring — two are former prosecutors — they were also concerned aboutwhether Trump would expect the would-be officials to act like his personal counsel. (He has WH council assholes and you know it.)
Nearly a dozen current and former Justice Department employees interviewed for this story in recent weeks — ranging from political appointees to career staffers —said there’s not yet a mass exodus bursting from agency headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue NW.They said the transition so far appears to be operating as it would during any administration change and there’s been little mention of Trump and his nominees in the transition meetings.
=Many career employees worked for Justice during the first Trump administrationand are waiting to see who is appointed to head different divisions before deciding how to proceed.
“Now, for myself, I may be coming to the end of my tenure at the Justice Department, but I know that all of you will continue,” Garland said in a mid-November speech to staffers at the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York.
“You will continue in the department’s mission, what has always been its mission: to uphold the rule of law, to keep our country safe and to protect civil rights. You — the career lawyers of this district, the career lawyers of all the U.S. attorney’s offices, the career lawyers of the Justice Department as a whole — you are the institutional backbone of this department.”
The people interviewed for this article saidthe private legal market couldn’t swallow up a huge number of departing Justice Department staffers, adding that most prosecutors, FBI agents and other career staffers would rather stay put and do work that they believe serves the public good.
https://archive.is/Wycwi
A lot of pussies at the DOJ