Trump is chasing off lawyers he'll need at some point [View all]

By Ross Douthat / The New York Times

It was easy to predict that a diktat from Donald Trump’s Justice Department would, at some point in his second term, prompt resignations from career prosecutors with conservative legal bona fides. Given Trump’s crude transactionalism and his administration’s determination to reshape the boundaries of executive power, it was always likely that we’d get some version of the conflict now pitting Trump’s acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, against Danielle Sassoon and the other prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.

It is extremely surprising, however, that the conflict would be sought and stoked just weeks into Trump’s four-year term, and for the sake of protecting Eric Adams, a Democratic mayor of a liberal city with just 11 months left in his term of office.

The Trump Department of Justice is picking a fight with its own lawyers, not for some long-standing desire of the president’s heart nor over some important point of constitutional interpretation, but to keep an official of the rival party, with no obvious political future, in office for a very short time. And to the extent that there appears to be any quid pro quo at work, as the Manhattan Institute’s Charles Fain Lehman points out, all the Trump administration is getting from Adams is a promise to enforce existing immigration law — which given his myriad difficulties and limited tenure, is probably not worth very much.

The assumption inside the Trump administration, one supposes, is that it’s better to cull the potentially disloyal lawyers early, or to get them to prove their allegiance upfront, so that you won’t have to worry about dramatic resignations when you come to some much more important battle. Adams isn’t important in his own right; he’s just a useful test of obedience and discipline.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/douthat-trump-is-chasing-off-lawyers-hell-need-at-some-point/