Good morning. Today, two of my colleagues look at how Trump may use the Justice Department in a second term. We're also covering Israel, foreign workers and gelato. —David Leonhardt
A tool for revenge
Donald Trump says Kamala Harris should be prosecuted for the Biden administration's border policies. He wants President Biden to be prosecuted for corruption, Nancy Pelosi for her husband's stock trades and Google for its search results about Trump and Harris. His list of targets for investigation also includes state prosecutors, judges and former officials from the F.B.I. and other parts of the Justice Department. If Trump wins, he can use the Justice Department, including the F.B.I., to seek revenge against his political enemies — even if, as in the cases above, there is little or no evidence of a crime. Doing so would go far beyond anything Trump pursued in his first term. There are multiple safeguards in the American legal system. They largely held when Trump was president. Will they hold again if he has a second term? We posed that question to 50 former top officials from the Justice Department and the White House Counsel's Office, along with a few retired judges and nonpartisan career D.O.J. lawyers. The former officials, evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, have served seven presidents. Most of them are freaked out about Trump's potential impact on the Justice Department, as we wrote today in a story for The New York Times Magazine. Sounding an alarmHere's what they told us.
Not everyone was panicked. A handful of respondents rejected our survey's premise, saying we had unfairly or unnecessarily focused on Trump. The survey was an example of "mainstream media bias," one Reagan-appointed official said, "that permits liberal prosecutors to violate norms for the rule of law with limited oversight in the court of public opinion." Other former officials said the department's career professionals would keep Trump in check. But several Republican appointees, along with Democratic ones, warned that an extremist president in general, and Trump in particular, was the biggest threat they saw to the rule of law. "There is every reason to believe that Donald Trump would seek to use criminal enforcement and the F.B.I. as leverage for his personal and political ends in a second term," said Peter Keisler, a founder of the conservative Federalist Society who was an acting attorney general for President George W. Bush, capturing a common sentiment we heard. Imposing his willHow would a politically motivated prosecution unfold? With help from our colleagues, we created this digital feature showing the steps Trump could take to jail his adversaries. Here's how it could start: Justice Department leaders nominated by the president typically set up a task force to investigate a set of allegations. With a handpicked group of F.B.I. agents and prosecutors, Trump's appointees could open an inquiry into, say, Merrick Garland's decision to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Trump. Even if Garland is never indicted or convicted, defending himself will cost him lots of money and hurt his reputation. In some ways, Trump will have successfully punished his enemies just by naming them as targets. It's possible for F.B.I. agents and D.O.J. career lawyers to block a case from going forward by telling their superiors that they don't have enough evidence, resigning, leaking to the press or notifying Congress. But that demands a lot of them. For some, it will be simpler just to follow orders by seeking the desired indictment from a grand jury. Trump could also fire en masse career D.O.J. employees who might stand in the way. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's plan for the next Republican administration, recommends removing civil-service protections from tens of thousands of federal employees who supervise other government workers. Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, but CNN found that at least 140 people who worked in his administration had contributed to the report. "We don't know what will happen," Keisler acknowledged about the implications of Trump's re-election for the rule of law. "But the risk is more concrete, with a higher probability, than in any election in my lifetime." Read our story about why legal experts are worried about a Trump presidency. More on the election
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The breaded, fried chicken tender as we know it was invented 50 years ago. It has, since then, become ubiquitous: a fixture of school lunches, gas stations, stadiums and all-night diners. The tender has become a symbol with fluid meaning, Pete Wells writes, an expression of unadventurous dining or an icon of unpretentious American taste. Read about how the chicken tender conquered America. More on culture
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Thursday, October 3, 2024
The Morning: How Trump could punish his enemies
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