Former DOJ attorneys warn agency has been 'decimated' | Courthouse News Service

ATLANTA (CN) — Speaking at an event on Friday, two former attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice said the once-independent and nonpartisan agency had been decimated as the rule of law comes increasingly under attack.

During a conference with the Georgia First Amendment Foundation, former antitrust division attorney Seth Kirschenbaum said that when he worked for the Justice Department in the early ’80s, it was the highest honor of his career. And yet today, he said the country faces a situation where Justice Department lawyers have lied to courts and defied orders.

As a result, a growing number of federal judges have ended a practice called the “presumption of regularity,” the tradition of assuming that representations of fact by Justice Department lawyers to federal judges are accurate, Kirschenbaum said.

In a recent filing, the Justice Department’s lead attorney acknowledged that the Trump administration has violated federal court orders on more than 50 occasions as it’s prosecuted immigration cases in the state of New Jersey.

“The Department of Justice is under extreme pressure, and many veteran prosecutors have been forced out,” Kirschenbaum said. He added that divisions that enforce tax fraud and foreign bribery rules had been “decimated” as the Trump administration weaponizes the agency to seek retribution against perceived enemies with threats and intimidation.

Sara Zdeb, an Emory University School of Law professor and a former deputy assistant attorney general for legislative affairs at the Justice Department, echoed Kirschenbaum’s concerns about an agency that is meant to operate independently.

“Since Watergate, the department has worked really hard and stood up internal policies to restore public trust in the institution and to essentially reintegrate public confidence that the department would enforce law in an even-handed manner,” Zdeb said.

Under the current Trump administration, Zbed said public confidence in the judiciary has been undermined as the president and attorney general have insulted and attacked judges who ruled against their favor.

Last year, the agency sued all 15 judges in the U.S. District of Maryland, as well as the court itself, arguing the their practice of temporarily freezing immigration cases until a judge can review them is an intrusion on the president’s core executive powers.

Zbed said the agency’s overhaul has harmed its “ability to protect civil rights and keep communities safe.” She cited its recent seizure of all the 2020 ballots from Fulton County, where Trump became the first president to face criminal charges, calling it an overreach of the department’s authority.

Edward Lindsey, an attorney who served as a state representative and worked on the Georgia Election Board in 2022, took the time to once again emphasize the fact that Georgia’s elections were safe and secure.

He noted the board faced a lot of the election contests that arose after 2020. “We investigated each and everyone of those issues on the affidavit,” Lindsey said about the Justice Department’s reasoning for needing the ballots.

Lindsey said much of the chaos and irregularities cited around Fulton County’s conduction of the 2020 election is because the “infrastructure was under enormous stress” due to closures from the Covid-19 pandemic at the time and influx of absentee ballots not seen previously.

Any mistakes that were made were confirmed to have not changed the outcome of the election, Lindsey said.

He also dispelled concerns that there is mass voter fraud caused by undocumented immigrants voting.

“Someone voting as a noncitizen is extremely rare,” Lindsey said. “It just doesn’t happen in a systemic fashion.”

As President Trump has recently suggested for the federal overhaul of elections, Lindsey expressed confidence in the states’ ability to run elections as granted under the U.S. constitution.

“The fact they all work independently makes it very hard for any systemic fraud to occur,” Lindsey said.

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