I keep trying to find a way to condense this while retaining its essence, but I can’t seem to do it. So I’ve separated the chapter into two parts and shall present it in its entirety.
page 545ff
The Department of Justice (DOJ) has a long and noble history. That history began with the creation of the Office of the Attorney General pursuant to the Judiciary Act of 1789 and has continued through the creation of the department in 1870, the formation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1908, reforms following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and to the present day. Properly understood within the framework of a constitutional republic that values ordered liberty, the Department of Justice has two primary functions: protecting public safety and defending the rule of law.
Unfortunately, the department has lost its way in recent years and has forfeited the trust of large segments of the American people. Large swaths of the department have been captured by an unaccountable bureaucratic managerial class and radical Left ideologues who have embedded themselves throughout its offices and components. The department also suffers from institutional inattentiveness to its core functions. Instead of being perceived as possessing the utmost impartiality and fairness as it advances the national interest on behalf of the American people— fighting crime and defending the rule of law—the DOJ has become a department that 46.6 percent of Americans recently indicated is, in their view, “too political, corrupt, and not to be trusted.”
The weight of the publicly available evidence indicates that there are many reasons for this lack of trust. For example:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, knowing that claims of collusion with Russia were false, collaborated with Democratic operatives to inject the story into the 2016 election through strategic media leaks, falsified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant applications, and lied to Congress.
Personnel within the FBI engaged in a campaign to convince social media companies and the media generally that the story about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop was the result of a Russian misinformation campaign—while the FBI had possession of the laptop the entire time and could have clarified the authenticity of the source.
The DOJ engaged in conduct to chill the free speech rights of parents across the United States in response to supposed “threats” against school boards, yet it failed to engage in any concerted campaign to protect the rights of Americans who actually were terrorized by acts of violence like those perpetrated against pregnancy care centers.
The FBI tasked agents with monitoring social media and flagging content they deemed to be “misinformation” or “disinformation” (not associated with any plausible criminal conspiracy to deprive anyone of any rights) for platforms to remove.
The FBI engaged in a domestic influence operation to pressure social media companies to report more “foreign influence” than the FBI was actually seeing and stop the dissemination of and censor true information directly related to the 2020 presidential election.
The department has devoted unprecedented resources to prosecuting American citizens for misdemeanor trespassing offenses or violations of the FACE Act while dismissing prosecutions against radical agents of the Left like Antifa.
The department has consistently threatened that any conduct not aligning with the liberal agenda “could” violate federal law—without actually taking a position that the conduct in question is illegal—using the prospect of protracted litigation and federal sanctions to chill disfavored behavior such as with state efforts to restrict abortion or prevent genital mutilation of children.
The department has sued multiple states regarding their efforts to enhance election integrity.
The department has failed to do its part to stop the flood of fentanyl and other deadly drugs that are flowing across our borders and decimating families and communities across the United States.
The department has abdicated its responsibility to assist in the enforcement of our immigration laws and has engaged in whole scale abandonment of its duty to adjudicate cases in the immigration court system.
1, 2, and 7 help the administration define truth, with
3–6 providing a template for the new reality.
These actions stand in stark contrast to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s assertion before taking office that “there [must] not be one rule for Democrats and another for Republicans, one rule for friends and another for foes.”
While it is true, as it is with other federal departments and agencies, that there are committed career personnel across the department who perform their duties faithfully and with the best intentions, this small sampling of scandals illustrates that the DOJ has become a bloated bureaucracy with a critical core of personnel who are infatuated with the perpetuation of a radical liberal agenda and the defeat of perceived political enemies. It has become a Cabinet-level department whose leadership appears to care more about how they are perceived in the next Politico or Washington Post article, or their stature with any number of radical leftist organizations, than they do about justice and advancing the interests of the American people.
It is essential that the next conservative Administration place a high priority on reforming the DOJ and its culture to align the department with its core purposes and advance the national interest. Critically, this must include the FBI. Anything other than a top-to-bottom overhaul will only further erode the trust of significant portions of the American people and harm the very fabric that holds together our constitutional republic. At a practical level, not reforming the Department of Justice will also guarantee the failure of that conservative Administration’s agenda in countless other ways.
Successful reform will require more than minor peripheral adjustments. It will require a holistic, energetic, leadership-driven effort to remedy the damage that has been done and advance the national interest. Additionally, some needed reforms will not be possible without legislative changes from Congress. While it is true that certain offices and components—like the FBI or the Civil Rights Division—will require more attention than others, committed direction from the department’s political leadership can restore the department’s focus on its two core functions: protecting public safety and defending the rule of law.
This chapter features prominently the things the department must do to restore its focus on these functions. Of course, there are other important reforms that do not necessarily fit within either of those core functions, so this chapter includes an additional section to address those areas.
PRIORITIZING THE PROTECTION OF PUBLIC SAFETY
Ordered liberty is at risk when our citizens lack physical safety, when career criminals do not fear the law, when foreign cartels move narcotics and illegal aliens into our nation at will, and when political leaders call citizens “domestic terrorists” for exercising their constitutional rights. The Department of Justice—in partnership with state and local partners—must recommit in both word and deed to protecting public safety.
The overwhelming majority of crimes in the United States are properly handled at the state and local levels, but the DOJ can provide critical technical support for local law enforcement and play a critical agenda-setting role. With respect to the Department’s core responsibilities—enforcing our immigration laws, combating domestic and international criminal enterprises, protecting federal civil rights, and combating foreign espionage—the federal government has primary authority and, accordingly, accountability.
The evidence shows that the Biden Administration’s Department of Justice has failed to protect law-abiding citizens and has ignored its most basic obligations. It has become at once utterly unserious and dangerously politicized. Prosecution and charging decisions are infused with racial and partisan political double standards. Immigration laws are ignored. The FBI harasses protesting parents (branded “domestic terrorists” by some partisans) while working diligently to shut down politically disfavored speech on the pretext of its being “misinformation” or “disinformation.”
A department that prosecutes FACE Act cases while ignoring dozens of violent attacks on pregnancy care centers and/or the coordinated violation of laws that prohibit attempts to intimidate Supreme Court Justices by parading out- side of their homes has clearly lost its way.
A department that has twice engaged in covert domestic election interference and propaganda operations—the Russian collusion hoax in 2016 and the Hunter Biden laptop suppression in 2020—is a threat to the Republic.
Restoring the department’s focus on public safety and a culture of respect for the rule of law is a gargantuan task that will involve at minimum four overriding actions:
Restoring the FBI’s integrity.
Renewing the DOJ’s focus on violent crime.
Dismantling domestic and international criminal enterprises.
Pursuing a national security agenda aimed at external state and non-state actors, not U.S. citizens exercising their constitutional rights.
RESTORING THE FBI’S INTEGRITY
The FBI was founded in 1908 to “tackle national crime and security issues” when “there was hardly any systematic way of enforcing the law across this now broad landscape of America.” It best serves the American people when it dedicates its resources and energies to attacking violent crime, criminal organizations, child predators, cyber-crime, and other uniquely federal interests.
Revelations regarding the FBI’s role in the Russia hoax of 2016, Big Tech collusion, and suppression of Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 strongly suggest that the FBI is completely out of control. To protect the Constitution, fight crime effectively, and protect the nation from foreign adversaries, the next conservative Administration should begin to restore the FBI’s domestic reputation and integrity and enhance its effectiveness in meeting actual foreign threats. To do so, the next conservative Administration should:
Conduct an immediate, comprehensive review of all major active FBI investigations and activities and terminate any that are unlawful or contrary to the national interest.
This is an enormous task, but it is necessary to re-earn the American people’s trust in the FBI and its work. To conduct this review, the department should detail attorney appointees with criminal, national security, or homeland security backgrounds to catalogue any questionable activities and elevate them to appropriate DOJ leadership consistent with the new chain of command (discussed below). The department should also consider issuing a public report of the findings from this review as appropriate.
Align the FBI’s placement within the department and the federal government with its law enforcement and national security purposes.
DOJ veterans often opine that the FBI views itself as an independent agency—accountable to no one and on par with the Attorney General in terms of stature—but the fact remains that “[t]he Federal Bureau of Investigation is located in the Department of Justice.” It is not independent from the department ( just as Immigration and Customs Enforcement is not independent from the Department of Homeland Security) and does not deserve to be treated as if it were.
The next conservative Administration should direct the Attorney General to remove the FBI from the Deputy Attorney General’s direct supervision within the department’s organizational chart and instead place it under the general supervision of the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division and the supervision of the Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division, as applicable.
This can be accomplished through a simple internal departmental reorganization and does not need to be approved by Congress.
Such a structure would allow the FBI to play an important role in advising the department’s leadership on emerging threats and updating notable investigations through daily briefings conducted with the Criminal Division and National Security Division leadership, but it would also place the FBI under a politically accountable leader with fewer things to manage than the Deputy Attorney General or the Attorney General have. All notifications and approvals that currently run to the Deputy Attorney General or the Attorney General should be evaluated and redirected in the first instance, where appropriate, to the relevant Assistant Attorney General.
Such a move would better align the FBI with the mission of the divisions with which it most often interacts and emphasizes the need for the areas on which it should focus. In general, however, under no circumstances should the FBI ever be able to go around the Attorney General or the department’s leadership on any matter within its area of responsibility.
Prohibit the FBI from engaging, in general, in activities related to combating the spread of so-called misinformation and disinformation by Americans who are not tied to any plausible criminal activity.
The FBI, along with the rest of the government, needs a hard reset on the appropriate scope of its legitimate activities. It must not look to or rely on the past decade as precedent or legitimization for continued action in certain spaces. This is especially true with respect to activities that the FBI and the U.S. government writ large claim are efforts to combat “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “malinformation.”
The United States government and, by extension, the FBI have absolutely no business policing speech, whether in the public square, in print, or online. The First Amendment prohibits it. The United States is the world’s last best hope for self-government, and its survival relies on the ability of our people to have healthy debate free from government intervention and censorship. The government, through its officials, is certainly able to speak and provide information to the public. That is a healthy component of an informed society. But government must never manipulate the scales and censor information that is potentially harmful to it or its political leadership. This is the way of totalitarian dictatorships, not of free constitutional republics.
The DOJ needs a hard firewall between its legitimate activities (monitoring online activity for potential threats in its mission space, looking at social media profiles for evidence of intent or other criminal activity, etc.) and those in which it must not engage (asking or demanding public forums or publishers to remove material based on the content and/or viewpoints expressed or itself censoring speech).
Streamline the non–law enforcement functions within the FBI, such as its Office of General Counsel, and obtain those services from other offices within the department.
The next conservative Administration should eliminate any offices within the FBI that it has the power to eliminate without any action from Congress. For example, few Americans know that the FBI maintains a core of approximately 300 attorneys within its Office of General Counsel, an office that has been involved in some of the FBI’s most damaging recent scandals. These attorneys are not necessary to the functioning of the FBI in their current capacity. Legal advice should come from attorneys at the DOJ, whether those attorneys are within the Criminal Division, the National Security Division, the Justice Management Division, or the Office of Legal Counsel. Moving legal review outside the FBI would serve as a crucial check on an agency that has recently pushed past legal boundary after legal boundary. Similarly, the FBI does not need its own Office of Congressional Affairs separate and apart from the DOJ Office of Legislative Affairs, nor does it need its own Office of Public Affairs.
Emphasize, fund, and reward field offices while shrinking headquarters staff.
While the FBI has essential headquarters functions that must be fulfilled and should likely be fulfilled by a team in Washington, D.C., the next conservative Administration should make a priority of deploying, funding, and rewarding the work of the field offices to the greatest extent possible. The Department of Justice must value badges over bureaucracy, must rethink its internal reporting structures, and should aim to realign the FBI’s resources accordingly.
Submit a legislative proposal to Congress to eliminate the 10-year term for the Director.
After J. Edgar Hoover’s decades-long term as FBI Director came to an end following his death in 1972, and in light of oversight conducted by Congress into alleged Intelligence Community and FBI abuses in the 1970s, Congress limited the Director’s tenure to one “ten- year term.” The realities of the FBI’s abuses and overreach in recent years demonstrate that further reform is still necessary.
The Director of the FBI must remain politically accountable to the President in the same manner as the head of any other federal department or agency. To ensure prompt political accountability and to rein in perceived or actual abuses, the next conservative Administration should seek a legislative change to align the FBI Director’s position with those of the heads of all other major departments and agencies.
Trump wants all cases against him dropped and he wants all the details scrubbed. So let’s de-fang the FBI and turn them into a briefing agency.
RENEWING THE DEPARTMENT’S FOCUS ON VIOLENT CRIME
Despite the DOJ’s pronouncements that violent crime continues to be a top priority, it has increased across the United States. The department’s leadership must make actually reducing violent crime a priority across the United States—and it must do so in partnership with state and local officials in a manner that is tailored to the needs and conditions in those states and localities.
Targeting Violent and Career Criminals, Not Parents.
The next conservative Administration must ensure that the Department of Justice devotes significant effort to reducing violent crime nationwide. The Attorney General should require all U.S. Attorneys to develop a jurisdictional-specific plan—whenever possible in coordination with state and local law enforcement—to reduce violent crime within each of their districts. Then the Attorney General should hold each U.S. Attorney accountable for achieving actual results.
In recent years, federal and state officials have succumbed to calls from anti–law enforcement advocates for so-called criminal justice reform. The pleas- ant-sounding terminology of reform masks the darker reality of this movement, which is one that has supported dismantling effective federal, state, and local law enforcement and stripped away some of the most fundamental tools that law enforcement has long had at its disposal. This campaign is not just ill-advised; it has clearly had real-world consequences in the form of catastrophic increases in crime—particularly violent crime—nationwide. As discussed in the next section, the Department of Justice has a special obligation to restore law and order in such districts.
Juxtaposed against this increase in violent crime are things like Attorney General Merrick Garland’s October 4, 2021, memorandum directing the commitment of significant resources and energies to combating imaginary, politically convenient threats of violence toward members of school boards and their staffs during the heat of the Virginia gubernatorial race. There was no similar effort to investigate elected officials and other public officers who conspired with outside allies to target and harass parents who were merely exercising their constitutional and statutory rights. If we are to continue to have informed and civil dialogue in the United States on issues of public concern, the DOJ must enforce applicable civil rights laws in an even-handed way when citizens’ livelihoods are threatened merely because they have exercised their rights.
Enhancing the Federal Focus on and Resources in Jurisdictions with Rule-of-Law Deficiencies.
A disturbing number of state and local jurisdictions have enacted policies that directly undermine public safety, leave doubt about whether criminals will be punished, and weaken the rule of law. While the prosecution of criminal offenses in most jurisdictions across the country must remain the responsibility of state and local governments, the federal government owes a special responsibility to Americans in jurisdictions where state and local prosecutors have abdicated this duty.
Jurisdictions suffering from deficiencies in the rule of law warrant, as appropriate within our federal system, greater attention and additional federal resources that are sufficient to protect the rights of American citizens and federal interests. In the next conservative Administration, the DOJ, acting primarily through its U.S. Attorneys, should therefore:
Use applicable federal laws to bring federal charges against criminals when local jurisdictions wrongfully allow them to evade responsibility for their conduct.
The department should also increase the federal law enforcement presence in such jurisdictions and explore innovative solutions to bring meaningful charges against criminals and criminal organizations in such jurisdictions.
Where warranted and proper under federal law, initiate legal action against local officials—including District Attorneys—who deny American citizens the “equal protection of the laws” by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions.
This holds true particularly for jurisdictions that refuse to enforce the law against criminals based on the Left’s favored defining characteristics of the would-be offender (race, so-called gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) or other political considerations (e.g., immigration status).
Pursue policies and legislation that encourage prosecution of violent crimes as well as appropriate sentences for such offenses.
The Biden Administration has adopted policies that do not prevent armed career criminals, who actually commit violent crimes, from committing those crimes. A recent U.S. Sentencing Commission report shows that armed career criminals are consistently sentenced below their minimum sentencing guidelines range.
There are valid reasons for sentence reductions in particular cases (for example, if the defendant has provided substantial assistance in prosecuting other offenders). At the same time, the DOJ must ensure that its line attorneys are consistently using the tools at their disposal in cases with violent offenders, including pursuing mandatory minimum sentences under the Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA). The department should also support legislative efforts to provide further tools, such as the Restoring the Armed Career Criminal Act, which Senators Tom Cotton (R–AR), Marsha Blackburn (R–TN), and Cindy Hyde-Smith (R–MS) introduced in 2021 in response to U.S. Supreme Court decisions neutering the ACCA.
Enforce the death penalty where appropriate and applicable.
Capital punishment is a sensitive matter, as it should be, but the current crime wave makes deterrence vital at the federal, state, and local levels. However, providing this punishment without ever enforcing it provides justice neither for the victims’ families nor for the defendant.
The next conservative Administration should therefore do everything possible to obtain finality for the prisoners currently on federal death row. It should also pursue the death penalty for applicable crimes—particularly heinous crimes involving violence and sexual abuse of children—until Congress says otherwise through legislation.
DISMANTLING DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL ENTERPRISES
Criminal organizations are as old as crime itself, but are more extensive, sophisticated, and dangerous today than at any other point in history. The Department of Justice has a key role in tackling transnational criminal organizations like Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Mexican drug cartels as well as purely domestic criminal organizations like those built on the more traditional mafia crime model as part of its obligation to ensure the safety and security of the American people.
The department’s primary directive under the next Administration should be to return to an unapologetic focus on dismantling these criminal organizations and incarcerating their membership. Once this reprioritization occurs, the department’s political leadership should take concrete steps to use agency reach and resources to prevent these criminal organizations from operating and surviving. Assaulting the business model of these criminal organizations—which are massive, diversified enterprises with nationwide or international operations—is essential for success. The next Administration will therefore need to:
Revitalize the DOJ’s use of the array of statutory tools that exist for dealing with the threat of criminal organizations.
The most potent ones are the simplest. For example, the department should:
Rigorously prosecute as much interstate drug activity as possible, including simple possession of distributable quantities. Recent efforts to create the impression that drug possession crimes are not serious offenses has contributed to the explosion of criminal organization activities in the United States.
Aggressively deploy the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), which Congress expressly created to empower the Department of Justice to treat patterns of intrastate- level crimes, such as robbery, extortion, and murder, as federal criminal conduct for criminal organizations and networks. The next Administration can use existing tools while it works with Congress to develop new tools.
Secure the border, which is the key entry point for many criminal organizations and their supplies, products, and employees.
Mexico— which is arguably functioning as a failed state run by drug cartels—is the main point of transit for illegal drugs produced in Central and South America, fentanyl precursors from the Chinese Communist Party–led People’s Republic of China,49 weapons, human smuggling and trafficking, and other contraband. Mexican drug cartels, including the dominant Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), are the main drivers of fentanyl production and distribution in the United States. The southwestern land border is sufficiently porous that Mexican drug cartels have operational control of large sections of the border, which facilitates easy movement of product and personnel. These cartels are also violent and not afraid to demonstrate force on both sides of the border. Their conduct represents a clear and present danger to the United States and its citizens.
In addition to finalizing the southwestern land border wall, the next Administration should take a creative and aggressive approach to tackling these dangerous criminal organizations at the border. This could include use of active-duty military personnel and National Guardsmen to assist in arrest operations along the border—something that has not yet been done. A new and forceful approach to interdiction will have a ripple effect on the operations of these criminal organizations, which currently operate freely without concern for criminal prosecution, and will lay the necessary groundwork for initial prosecutions of these organizations and their leaders.
It is critical that the federal government staunch the flow of drugs by preventing the far-too-easy access to the United States that now exists. There can be no serious dispute that the Biden Administration has opened the southwest border to whomever wants to enter and that some of those entrants are smuggling fentanyl into the country. More than 100,000 Americans died in a one-year period from opioid overdoses, and many of them died specifically from having used fentanyl. The federal government should treat this problem as aggressively as necessary. Enforcing the customs and immigration laws is a matter of life and death.
PURSUING A NATIONAL SECURITY AGENDA AIMED AT EXTERNAL STATE AND NON-STATE ACTORS, NOT U.S. CITIZENS EXERCISING THEIR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS
The Department of Justice plays a vital role in protecting our national security, and it must not refrain from engaging in public initiatives that identify our adversaries and educate the American people about their activities.
The DOJ’s China Initiative under President Trump reflected the department’s priority of combating Chinese threats to our national security. Because China was accountable for approximately 80 percent of all prosecutions for economic espionage and approximately 60 percent of all thefts of trade secrets, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions set key goals for the China Initiative that included development of an enforcement strategy concerning researchers in labs and universities who were being coopted into stealing critical U.S. technologies, identification of opportunities to address supply-chain threats more effectively, and education of colleges and universities about potential threats from Chinese influence efforts on campus.
In February 2022, the Biden Administration terminated the department’s China Initiative largely out of a concern for poor “optics.” While the Biden Administration correctly identified China as America’s “only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it,” it folded in the face of political correctness and sent the message that liberal sensitivities outweighed bringing justice to threats from China. The next conservative Administration should therefore:
Restart the China Initiative.
Pursue other programs to educate the American people about the real and dangerous threats to our national security and economic security that are posed by actors across the globe, most notably China and Iran.
Ensure that it is agile enough to devote sufficient resources and attention to other emerging threats that involve federal interest such as increases in “sextortion,” ransomware, and the continued proliferation of child pornography.
DEFENDING THE RULE OF LAW
The DOJ’s actions over the course of the Biden Administration exhibit scorn for its stated mission: “to uphold the rule of law, to keep our country safe, and to protect civil rights.” The Biden Administration’s unprecedented politicization and weaponization of the department therefore demand a comprehensive response from the next Administration.
Restoration of the department’s values of independence, impartiality, honesty, integrity, respect, and excellence must serve as first principles for its efforts on all fronts. Concretely, the DOJ must identify and address all individuals, policies, and directives that have fueled the destruction of these core values and the American people’s loss of trust in the department and its officials. The next Administration will need to exert significant energy to dismantle the two-tiered system of justice currently in place at the department while simultaneously applying the rule of law evenly and with neutrality.
Specific examples of department corruption, such as the Russia collusion hoax, will need to be tackled, exposed, and addressed head-on. This will require not just winning in a court of law but also demonstrating culpability to the public and the media in a concrete and non-refutable manner. These efforts will require commitment and willpower, but they will be essential to restoring the trust of the American people.
Promptly and Properly Eliminating Lawless Policies, Investigations, and Cases, Including All Existing Consent Decrees.
Few things undermine the DOJ’s credibility more than brazenly partisan and ideologically driven prosecution of an Administration’s perceived political enemies, yet the department has readily indulged in such misadventures during the Biden Administration. Before even entering the Robert F. Kennedy building on January 20, 2025, the next Administration should:
There’s the admission that they intend to weaponize the DOJ.
Conduct a thorough review of all publicly available policies, investigations, and cases.
In a manner consistent with applicable law, prepare a plan to end immediately any policies, investigations, or cases that run contrary to law or Administration policies.
Ensure that upon the next President’s inauguration, appointees at the department obtain information about anything that was not learned before taking office and conduct the same analysis.
Bring in politically aligned sycophants to scrub all evidence against Trump.
An egregious example of the need for such a review is provided by the department’s use of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act to harass pro-life demonstrators while not pursuing similar investigations of shocking acts of violence committed against pro-life pregnancy resource centers. On the morning of September 23, 2022, pro-life activist Mark Houck was arrested by more than 15 FBI agents at his home in Pennsylvania in front of his wife and small children. Agents came to his door with guns drawn to arrest the 48-year-old father of seven whose alleged crime involved a minor altercation with an activist who was harassing one of his children in front of an abortion clinic almost one year before Mr. Houck’s arrest by the FBI. Similarly, Paul Vaughn, a 55-year-old father of 11, was arrested at his home in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, by armed FBI agents for allegedly participating in a peaceful protest at an abortion clinic one year earlier.
These arrests stand in stark contrast to the department’s virtual silence on the wave of vandalism and violence directed at religiously affiliated institutions, including pregnancy resource centers, following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The Catholic News Agency reported more than one hundred such incidents as of September 2022.
By engaging in disparate and viewpoint-based enforcement of an already controversial law like the FACE Act against pro-life activists, the DOJ has needlessly undermined its credibility with law-abiding people of faith. The department should make every effort to uphold equal protection of the law and avoid politically motivated and viewpoint-based prosecutions. Specifically, it should:
Ensure that its review extends beyond ending the absurd double standards embodied in the ongoing campaign of FACE Act prosecutions and instead be a thorough and holistic review of all DOJ activities, including all consent degrees and settlement agreements currently in force.
Seek to terminate any unnecessary or outdated consent decree to which the United States is a party.
Consider pursuing intervention in other matters where consent decrees or settlement agreements continue to bind parties years or decades after the fact.
As its review concludes, and consistent with applicable law, take appropriate action in all cases, including those on appeal.
Enact policies and regulations that prohibit settlement payments to third parties.
Engaging in Zealous Advocacy for and Defense of the Constitution and Lawful Administration Regulations and Policies.
The Department of Justice has the exclusive responsibility for the “conduct of litigation in which the United States, an agency, or officer thereof” is involved and has been charged with the supervision of “all litigation to which the United States, an agency, or officer thereof is a party.” However, in politically contentious cases, Assistant United States Attorneys and other line prosecutors during conservative Administrations seek to influence outcomes of cases not because of any legal deficiency in the case or policy being defended, but by refusing to take certain positions, by writing public letters of protest, and by engaging in faux resignations from certain internal appointments. This can cause the department to take positions that are inconsistent with the interests of the President and his appointees in other places throughout the Administration.
While the supervision of litigation is a DOJ responsibility, the department falls under the direct supervision and control of the President of the United States as a component of the executive branch.
Thus, and putting aside criminal prosecutions that can warrant different treatment, litigation decisions must be made consistent with the President’s agenda. This can force line attorneys to take uncomfortable positions in civil cases because those positions are more closely aligned with the President’s policy agenda.
Ultimately, the department will have to make tough calls as it manages its litigation, but those calls must always be consistent with the President’s policy agenda and the rule of law. A line attorney should never either directly or indirectly pursue a policy agenda through litigation that is inconsistent with the agenda of his or her client agency or the President. The department should also be cognizant of any attempts to slow litigation and outlast the Administration to avoid finality.
READ THAT AGAIN!
The President’s policy agenda determines the rule of law?
The next conservative Administration should therefore:
Issue guidance to ensure that litigation decisions are consistent with the President’s agenda and the rule of law.
Ensure that, consistent with this principle, the department’s leadership is prepared to impose appropriate disciplinary action as circumstances arise.
Thanks for reading
Bob
Here’s a link to a glossary of acronyms.
Glossary of Acronyms in Project 2025
Here’s a link to the entire document.
https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
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