L’Etat, C’est Trump

There’s no evidence France’s King Louis XIV ever actually said “L’État, c’est moi,” but that succinct summation of the ideology of absolute monarchy endures. (The words were almost certainly put into the mouth of Louis the Great more than a century after the Sun King’s death by a French essayist during the Bourbon Restoration.)

To my knowledge, President Donald Trump has never said, “I am the state,” in English or in French. But the participants in his political project have internalized the idea to a remarkable degree in defense of his approach to justice.

Take Chad Mizelle, the chief of staff at the Department of Justice and a veteran of Trump’s first term in office, who revealed much about Donald Trump’s governing ethic in an interview with Ruth Marcus in The New Yorker last month. 

“You have one client, and you have to represent that one client. If you don’t want to do that, then it’s just not the place for you,” Mizelle told Marcus, who writes that she pressed him on whether that client is the United States or President Trump. “I don’t see a difference between those,” Mizelle replied, adding later, “The President is the executive branch.”

Mizelle may have been merely recapitulating the unitary executive theory, a legal framework in which the power of the executive branch is vested entirely within the office of the president. But he was also expressing a different, and more alarming, view that has seeped into the operation of the Justice Department: Trump himself is the client, and what the client wants takes precedence over the law and the process. This important distinction—that the Justice Department works for the man in the presidency, not the faithful executor of the laws and the Constitution—explains two recent news stories.

The first is the forced resignation of the acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert. Trump nominated Siebert to fill the role permanently back in February, though the backlog of nominations in the Senate had prevented his confirmation. That’s no longer a problem since Siebert resigned last week, not long after Trump told reporters he wanted the attorney “out.”

Siebert’s fireable offense was that he declined to pursue prosecutions against two people high on Trump’s enemies list: New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey. The issue, as reporting from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others indicates, is that Siebert claimed to have had insufficient evidence to pursue mortgage fraud charges against James and was wary about continuing to investigate Comey. To commence a prosecution without sufficient evidence is to violate one of the DOJ’s own longstanding principles of federal prosecution.

But as the president told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday, he is convinced James, whose office successfully sued the Trump Organization for fraud, is “very guilty of something.” The client is Trump, not the United States, so when the client doesn’t get what he wants, he gets a new lawyer. It’s no coincidence that Trump’s new nominee for U.S. attorney is a former member of his personal defense team, Lindsey Halligan.

The second is the Saturday report from veteran investigative journalist Carol Leonnig of MSNBC about Tom Homan, the Trump White House’s “border czar.” Last summer, before the election, Homan was recorded accepting $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents “after indicating he could help the agents — who were posing as business executives — win government contracts in a second Trump administration.” The story cited multiple people familiar with the investigation, along with internal government documents.

The Trump Justice Department apparently closed down the investigation into Homan earlier this year, with administration officials saying repeatedly that there was “no evidence” of any wrongdoing by Homan, who remains in his White House job. And on Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt asserted that the central claim of the story wasn’t true.

“Mr. Homan never took the $50,000,” Leavitt told reporters. “This was another example of the weaponization of the Biden Department of Justice against one of President Trump’s strongest and most vocal supporters in the midst of a presidential campaign.” That went a step further than the administration’s initial statement to MSNBC, which merely claimed there had been no evidence of “illegal activity” but had not denied that Homan accepted the cash.

The one-two punch from the past few days recalls another possibly apocryphal quotation that may or may not have been uttered by either Peru’s Óscar Benavides or Brazil’s Getúlio Vargas, two notable Latin American strongmen of the 20th century: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”

For Trump’s DOJ, these instances are just part of a bigger pattern of blatant disregard for the rules, norms, and processes that govern federal law enforcement and justice. The list is long and includes everything from the unusually large number of firings of prosecutors (often for unclear or suspect reasons) to the department dropping cases against Trump’s political allies while pursuing investigations into people Trump does not like.

And it begins at the top with Trump’s choices for DOJ leadership, many of whom can be considered first and foremost Trump loyalists: Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and former Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove (now a federal judge) were all once members of Trump’s personal defense team. Kash Patel, meanwhile, was a prominent member of Trump’s inner ring and a MAGA celebrity in his own right before he was tapped to lead the FBI.

There are other appointees whose professed loyalty is to the president and his movement, not necessarily the Constitution. Ed Martin, a failed Republican politician from Missouri, used his several months as the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia to antagonize universities, medical journals, and even Wikipedia. When it was clear his nomination could not make it through the Senate, Trump withdrew Martin (substituting former Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro) and instead installed him elsewhere at DOJ. 

Martin now heads both the office that assists the president in issuing pardons and clemency as well as a novel working group to stop “weaponization” of federal law enforcement. If there were any remaining sense that Martin might approach those jobs with professionalism and without favor to Trump’s political allies, that went out the window in May when he tweeted “No MAGA left behind!” in celebration of a pardon for a pro-Trump sheriff in Virginia who had been sentenced to 10 years in prison after being convicted on federal bribery charges. Incredibly, one of Martin’s aides at the weaponization working group is Jared Wise, a former January 6 defendant who was among those Trump pardoned at the beginning of his term.

“Jared Wise is a valued member of the Justice Department, and we appreciate his contributions to our team,” a DOJ spokesperson told reporters last month.

It’s not just corruption and favors for friends. The Trump DOJ has also cut corners and taken shortcuts in pursuit of the administration’s policy goals. In April, career DOJ lawyer Erez Reuveni was fired after he told a judge that the government had improperly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran national who became a political football in the fights over immigration enforcement. Reuveni filed a whistleblower complaint in which he accused the Justice Department officials of noncompliance with court orders. He alleged that Bove, then the deputy attorney general, suggested that if courts enjoined the government’s removal of illegal immigrants that Bove would tell the courts “f— you.” (Again, Bove is now a federal judge himself.)

And in Southern California, acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli has struggled to win indictments from grand juries in the administration's efforts to charge people protesting the administration’s immigration enforcement policy with crimes. Just last week, his office failed to secure a conviction against one protester who had been accused of assaulting a federal agent. The defendant was swiftly acquitted, the Los Angeles Times reported, even after the leader of a U.S. Border Patrol team testified that he had witnessed the assault.

Failing prosecutions, outrageous disregard for court rulings, blatant favoritism, and vindictive legal action—all without much of any pushback from professionals who can try to hold the administration accountable to the law. What’s left there is a “mess,” says Gregg Nunziata, a conservative attorney with stints at DOJ and on Capitol Hill who is now the executive director of the Society for the Rule of Law. 

“He's staffing the department with people who think their job is to enable Trump to get away with things rather than to advise him on how to comply with the law,” said Nunziata.

Jack Goldsmith, a prominent and well-connected conservative legal scholar, put it this way last month during a panel discussion at a conference.

“The administration has systematically and ruthlessly and successfully eliminated, with one exception, all internal legal resistance,” said Goldsmith. “It is simply not acceptable to offer an opinion contrary to the one that the president, who is not a lawyer, wants to push. It’s really an extraordinary thing.”