Former federal prosecutor Harry Litman said Monday that employees at the Justice Department are “really afraid” of what a second Trump term will mean for the department.
“We have a really demoralized career staff, people putting their resumes on the street, people being really afraid of what Trump’s entry will mean for the storied DOJ function of doing justice without fear or favor,” Litman, who served as a deputy assistant general from 1993 to 1998, told CBS’s Ed O’Keefe.
“This is the worst crisis I’ve ever seen in DOJ history,” he added in remarks highlighted by Mediaite.
Litman’s comments come on the heels of remarks made by former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, who was tapped by President-elect Trump to run the DOJ, calling for an investigation of prosecutors who “weaponized” the legal system against Trump.
“The Department of Justice — the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated because the deep state, last term for President Trump, they were hiding in the shadows,” Bondi said at the time, during an interview on Fox News. “But now they have a spotlight on them, and they can all be investigated.”
Asked by O’Keefe earlier if DOJ employees will just accept Trump’s changes as a “we just gotta do what the rules say,” kind of situation, Litman pushed back.
“This is not a “Them’s the rules as usual” kind of situation,” he replied. “You know, it’s not simply these cases falling apart, but the assertion of the power just from the president to make them fall apart and other things that are contemplated for the DOJ.”
The remarks follow the Washington Post’s report that Trump plans to fire “the entire team that worked with special counsel Jack Smith to pursue two federal prosecutions against the former president.” The news came days before Smith and Judge Tanya Chutkan moved to dismiss Trump’s federal election interference and classified documents cases.
The president-elect also plans to create investigative teams within the DOJ to look for evidence of fraud in battleground states that could have impacted that 2020 election, according to The Post.
