Loyalty above all else: Trump stacks DOJ with former personal attorneys

This is an adapted excerpt from the July 29 episode of “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”

On Tuesday, Republicans in the Senate confirmed Donald Trump’s former personal attorney Emil Bove to a lifetime appointment as a judge on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In the wake of Bove’s confirmation, it’s worth remembering what made him such a controversial nominee to begin with.

Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, Bove has served as a top-ranking official at the Justice Department, where he has displayed a stunning willingness to ignore and violate the rule of law.

First, there was his role in quashing the corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams. After Adams essentially allied himself with Trump, Bove reportedly ordered prosecutors in the Justice Department to drop the case against the mayor, which led to the mass resignation of at least seven career prosecutors.

That alone should have been disqualifying for Bove, but there was more. Months later, a whistleblower came forward and alleged that Bove had instructed Justice Department officials to ignore court orders while carrying out Trump’s immigration agenda.

According to the whistleblower’s complaint, Bove told Justice Department prosecutors that, if a judge tried to stop some of Trump’s most controversial deportations, they “would need to consider telling the courts ‘f--- you’ and ignore any such court order.” (During his confirmation hearing, Bove told Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California that he had “no recollection” of that conversation with prosecutors.)

Again, that should have been more than enough to sink Bove’s nomination, but then we got a second whistleblower allegation that backed up everything the first whistleblower had said. A third whistleblower allegation against Bove soon followed, this one alleging serious misconduct in the Adams case. Attorneys for one of the whistleblowers said the Justice Department sat on their client’s complaint for months, claiming, conveniently, that they had lost it.

All of these whistleblower allegations ended up on the lap of Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who oversaw Bove’s confirmation process. The 91-year-old senator has spent much of his long career building a reputation as someone who really cares about whistleblowers. In 2007, a group of 25 whistleblower advocacy groups even gave Grassley a lifetime achievement award for his work with government whistleblowers.

But I guess those groups underestimated just how long Grassley’s lifetime in the Senate would be and how much Trump would influence the later years of it, because the Iowa Republican dismissed those whistleblowers to push Bove’s nomination through.

That’s because Grassley and Bove both understand there is only one rule in Trump’s Republican Party: loyalty to Trump above all else. The only thing that matters to them is what Trump wants, and no law, or Justice Department rule, or judge’s order, or lifetime Senate reputation can stand in the way.

Bove’s lifetime federal appointment is Trump’s way of rewarding his former attorney for his service, while making sure that Bove continues to do Trump’s bidding in the future.

But Bove isn’t the only one. Trump had a big roster of attorneys defending him in his various legal troubles, and a number of them have been given new roles in his administration.

Take another of Trump’s former personal attorneys, Todd Blanche. After Blanche defended Trump in his criminal trial, Trump made Blanche the deputy attorney general. Blanche now appears to be using that position in an effort to help Trump find a way out of the Jeffrey Epstein debacle.

Last week, Blanche flew to Florida to interview Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator, former Trump acquaintance and sexual predator, Ghislaine Maxwell. Blanche said he wanted to ask Maxwell, “What do you know?” Just days after Blanche visited Maxwell, Trump refused to rule out the possibility of granting her a pardon.

There are more former personal attorneys where those two came from. Tim Parlatore is now a top lawyer at the Defense Department. He’s now reportedly being investigated as part of the Signal chat scandal for potentially obtaining access to classified information above his clearance level.

There’s former Trump attorney William Scharf, who now serves as the White House staff secretary. Trump also appointed him to be the chairman of an important Washington, D.C., planning commission, a job Scharf has used to help the president wage war on the Federal Reserve chairman.

Then there’s Trump’s other, other, other personal attorney Alina Habba, who Trump named interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, despite a complete lack of qualifications for the job.

Under the law, Trump could make Habba the interim U.S. attorney for only 120 days. After that 120 days were up, judges for the federal district court in New Jersey chose another prosecutor to replace Habba. The Trump administration abruptly fired her replacement and took advantage of a loophole in the law to put Habba back in the job by making Habba her own assistant, so that once the job was open, she could step in and fill the role.

It’s a blatant end-run around the normal process for making sure U.S. attorneys are qualified and impartial prosecutors, and the Trump administration is doing this to install loyalists as U.S. attorneys all across the country.

In the Northern District of New York, Trump appointed John Sarcone as the interim U.S. attorney using the same tactic. Same thing in Nevada, where Trump appointed Sigal Chattah, a member of the Republican National Committee, for the nonpartisan role of U.S. attorney, despite more than 100 retired federal and state judges writing to the court in opposition to her nomination.

Then there is Trump’s pick to be the U.S. attorney in the Central District of California, Bill Essayli, a former Republican state lawmaker. Since taking that job, Essayli has brought federal charges against a California union leader arrested at an immigration protest and stood idly by during the violent detention of Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif. On Tuesday, Essayli dropped a fraud case against a fast-food chain owner and major Trump donor who the Justice Department had called a “serial tax cheat.” Under Essayli, his office has already lost a third of its career staff.

The Trump administration has used the same trick to keep Essayli in that job as well.

In total, 93 U.S. attorneys serve in all 50 states and U.S. territories. They are in charge of prosecuting federal crimes within their jurisdiction: Medicaid fraud, financial crimes, even terrorism cases. That is why that job is supposed to be completely apolitical.

But Trump is taking unprecedented steps to put his own handpicked people in at least some of these key jobs. Across the country, U.S. attorneys are effectively being shown that in order to keep their jobs, they will need to be loyal foot soldiers for the president, and Trump’s own personal attorneys have provided them all the example they need.