Justice as a political weapon: the pro-Trump appeal that shakes the independence of the DOJ

The warning issued by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in a large report published in early February regarding the fact that, under the Trump Administration, the US is transforming into a state with authoritarian reflexes, seems to gain consistency through the information provided by ABC News, in an article published yesterday.

The cited source shows how a simple post on social networks can become the signal of a much larger change: the transformation of the recruitment of American federal prosecutors from a professional process, built precisely to be free from party loyalties, into an ideological filter, in which the implicit criterion becomes loyalty to President Donald Trump. According to ABC News, Chad Mizelle, former chief of staff of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and one of the top advisers to Attorney General Pam Bondi in the first months of his term, has publicly launched a call for lawyers who "support President Trump” to join the Justice Department, suggesting that he can help them obtain positions as federal prosecutors.

The formula "write me in private messages, we need good prosecutors” seems banal at first glance, but its weight changes completely the moment it is amplified by people at the top of power. According to the cited source, Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff at the White House, retweeted the message with the exhortation "patriots are needed”, and Jason Reding Quinones, the current chief federal prosecutor for the Southern District of Florida, also shared it with the mention "we are hiring”. The result is not just a more visible recruitment, but a dangerous institutional message, former federal prosecutors quoted by ABC News say. They say that if support for President Donald Trump becomes a gateway to the federal judiciary, then the separation between law enforcement and political interest begins to unravel.

Here's where the real stakes of the subject begin: In the American system, there are political appointments in the Justice Department, and federal district attorneys are traditionally political appointees, precisely because they represent an administration's priorities. But career federal prosecutors, the assistant federal attorneys who process cases, decide sentencing, negotiate settlements and go to court, are designed to remain nonpartisan and apolitical, no matter who is in the White House. This is not an academic nuance, but a functional one: The credibility of the rule of law depends on the perception and reality that criminal prosecution is not a tool for rewarding the loyal and punishing opponents. Former federal prosecutor Perry Carbone, with more than three decades in the system and most recently chief of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, has formulated, according to ABC News, a red line: The Justice Department should not have a favorite politician, but a favorite document - the U.S. Constitution. When loyalty to one person becomes a recruitment criterion for law enforcement officers, says Perry Carbone, it is "the day the rest of us should get very nervous."

In his reading, Mizelle's message, pushed forward by a senior White House official and a serving federal prosecutor, directly conflicts with laws and regulations that prohibit discrimination in the hiring of career civil servants based on "political affiliation,” and Carbone explicitly invokes the Civil Service Reform Act and internal provisions in the Justice Department's manual that require personnel decisions for career positions to be made without regard to partisan affiliation and even recommends reporting attempts at partisan influence to the deputy attorney general. In simple terms, the former prosecutors warn that we are not talking about a private individual's freedom of expression on the Internet, but about the signal sent to the system: "we are here to select and filter.”

The source also points out that Andy McCarthy, a conservative commentator and frequent Trump critic and former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, has issued a stark warning: if support for President Donald Trump becomes a condition for federal law enforcement, then Congress should cut off funding to the Justice Department, because an institution that operates partisanly becomes, in his logic, "too dangerous to freedom.” He also adds the comparison that shows the double standard he sees: if such a message had come from Merrick Garland's office, McCarthy says, the hard core of Trump supporters and the Republican Party would have called for his impeachment. This type of reaction indicates that this is not just a dispute between camps, but a deeper fear: politicizing the federal prosecutor's office would change the rules of the game for everyone, regardless of who wins the next election.

Mizelle's defense, as reported in the cited press article, attempts to move the discussion onto constitutional ground: Article II of the Constitution is invoked, arguing that "all executive power" belongs to the president and, therefore, when a federal prosecutor exercises executive power, he should do so in accordance with the president-elect's agenda. In the same vein, Mizelle stated that, when he worked for Pam Bondi, his mission was to "expose" people considered hostile to Trump, claiming that "on the first day" about 100 people were fired, and then "thousands" left, concluding that this is how government should work: if you can't follow the president-elect's "wishes," you should leave, and now they are looking for people to follow his agenda.

Here we see the rupture in institutional philosophy that alarms former prosecutors: it is one thing for an administration to change priorities, resources, and criminal policies within the bounds of the law; it is another to transform career prosecutors into enforcers of personal loyalty. Perry Carbone rejects this interpretation outright, insisting that prosecutors must exercise "independent professional judgment,” not "political obedience.” The difference between the two is not semantic; it determines whether cases are opened based on evidence and public interest or on political whim and signal. The cited source also invokes a relevant institutional precedent, precisely to show that these rules are not decorative. A 2008 report by the Justice Department Inspector General, which began with allegations that political affiliation criteria were used to select candidates for internship programs and a program for inexperienced graduates under the George W. Bush administration, explicitly notes that both Justice Department policy and civil service law prohibit discrimination in hiring for career positions based on political affiliation.

Here comes the central fear: if you come to control the recruitment mechanism for career prosecutors and condition access on political sympathies, then you no longer control just the so-called political top, but the pipelines through which cases are built, resources are allocated, and who becomes a target is decided. In terms of power, this is the difference between running an institution and colonizing it.

Another strong warning comes from Mark Rotert, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s and a member of the hiring committee, who, according to the source cited, calls Mizelle's post "disgraceful” and explains, from first-hand experience, that it would never have occurred to him to ask candidates what they thought of the president or what kind of job he was doing; partisan politics were neither relevant nor acceptable as a topic of discussion. This kind of testimony matters because it is not theory but institutional memory: a professional culture in which, even if prosecutors are people with opinions, those opinions do not enter the interview door and do not influence the hiring decision, precisely so that, later, the decision to indict cannot be suspected of coming from the party line.

Ultimately, it is not a question of whether an administration has the right to set its priorities in law enforcement, but of where legitimate politics ends and the system begins to be transformed into an instrument of loyalty. If the message sent to lawyers is "come to the Department of Justice if you support the president,” and if this invitation is publicly certified by people in key positions, then the line between state and party, between law and agenda, between prosecutor and activist begins to blur. And in a system that has been built, for decades, on the idea that federal justice should be above electoral cycles, this blurring is not a simple momentary controversy, but a change in institutional architecture, with knock-on effects on civil liberties, public trust, and the way in which executive power is held in check.