Having pushed out FBI Director Christopher Wray yesterday, Donald Trump has unambiguously laid out his grand plan to gut the independence of the Department of Justice with the appointment of Kash Patel as the new director. Patel is a blatant partisan choice.
Patel’s only qualifications for the job are his political rants premised on conspiracy theories, devoid of any facts, about purging the FBI of the “deep state” and his willingness to do whatever Trump asks of him. He is also famous for selling Trump campaign merchandise under the logo “K$H.”
The result will be FBI decisions based on politics, favoritism, and conspiracy theories. If Trump has his way, lady justice’s blindfold will be riddled with holes.
This lack of independence permeates all of Trump’s nominees to run the Department of Justice. His attorney general nominee Pam Bondi campaigned for Trump in 2020, later repeating Trump’s falsehood that the 2020 election was rigged. She also campaigned for him in 2024. As Florida attorney general in 2013, she dropped her office’s investigation into Trump University after receiving a $25,000 campaign contribution from Trump.
Trump’s nominee for deputy attorney general, the No. 2 official in the DOJ, Todd Blanche, is one of Trump’s criminal defense lawyers. Nominated to be his principal associate deputy AG is Trump’s other criminal defense lawyer, Emil Bove. Similarly, Trump’s nominee for solicitor general, DOJ’s No. 3 official, is his criminal appellate lawyer, D. John Sauer, who successfully argued for Trump’s presidential immunity before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The last time a president filled DOJ with political loyalists it did not end well. President Richard Nixon made his campaign manager John Mitchell attorney general, who was succeeded by another individual who worked in the Nixon campaign, Richard Kleindienst. Both attorneys general were convicted of felonies in the Watergate scandal.
As a result, when the Watergate Prosecution Force completed its duties in October 1975, it issued a report that, among other things, recommended that “[t]he attorney general and other Justice Department appointees should be lawyers with their own reputations in the legal profession, and with capacity and willingness to make independent judgments, and with the authority to choose similarly qualified persons for subordinate positions.”
The report also recommended that “[t]he president should not nominate and the Senate should not confirm as attorney general, or as any other appointee in high Department of Justice posts, a person who has served as the president’s campaign manager or in a similar high-level campaign role.”
The reason being that “[a] campaign manager seeks support for his candidate and necessarily incurs obligations to political leaders and other individuals throughout wide geographical areas. Such a person in a high Justice Department position “may take — or appear to take — official action on the basis of those commitments rather than on appropriate legal and policy grounds.”
This passage applies with equal force to every one of Trump’s Justice Department nominees. Although Trump’s criminal defense team was not part of his presidential campaign, their appointments raise the same concerns to act independently of Trump. As a criminal defense lawyer, I know the special bond that develops between the attorney and client, when the client is fighting to stay out of prison.
That bond of loyalty is precisely why Trump nominated his three personal lawyers to the Justice Department. However, as Justice Department officials, their client will be the United States, not the president. As such, when it comes to Trump’s vow for retribution against his enemies, they will be in the uncomfortable position of having to adhere to their oath to the Constitution over their loyalty to Trump.
Replacing Wray with Patel undermines the congressional purpose in making the term of the FBI director 10 years. After the death of long-term FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the 10-year term was designed to remove the FBI director from the politics of successive presidential administrations. Trump’s appointment of Patel creates the stench of politics that Congress sought to prevent.
The only institution that stands between these Trump loyalists and an independent Justice Department is the U.S. Senate. That same Watergate Prosecution Report recommended that “(i)n advising and consenting on presidential nominees, senators should apply to Justice Department appointees standards of character and independence similar to those they apply to nominees for the Supreme Court.” Not one of Trump’s Justice Department nominees would pass that test.
Akerman was formerly an assistant special Watergate prosecutor and an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.
