Sarah Isgur: DOJ Had People In Trump’s First Term Who Followed The Law, This Second Term Has Very Different People
SCOTUSBLOG editor Sarah Isgur compares the Trump Justice Department with last term during ABC’s “This Week” roundtable:
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Sarah, let me ask you about these prosecutions. We saw Letitia James prosecuted this week. James Comey last week. In both situations, the indictment came after the president fired his own appointment as the U.S. attorney in Virginia after they had rejected bringing charges saying there was insufficient evidence, put in his former personal attorney. You worked for Jeff Sessions as the first attorney general. You were in the Justice Department in the first term. What would you have done if that happened during the first term? SARAH ISGUR: There were very different people in office during the first term than in this term. I think that’s the big difference. I don’t think Donald Trump has changed. I think the personnel in the Department of Justice has changed. In the first term, there was really a united front about the role of the Department of Justice and the purpose of the rule of law, telling the president this is not what the Department of Justice will do. Obviously, I think there’s a lot more fractures in this Department of Justice. There’s a lot different feeling of what the role is. Now, what you will hear from MAGA, what you will hear from those people in the Department of Justice, is this is what deterrence theory is about. When you’re playing a cooperative game and the other side defects — in this case, the Democrats with the Alvin Bragg prosecution as the biggest example, then you hit them back disproportionately to create that deterrence. I think the problem that they will find is that actually, that was incredibly unpopular for Democrats. When you asked who is a bigger threat to democracy in the run-up to this last election, they said Democrats. STEPHANOPOULOS: So, if I’m hearing you correctly, you’re saying that you, and more importantly, the attorney general would have tried to stop it? ISGUR: I think you saw many times during the first administration that people at the Department of Justice acted very differently, offered to resign, and the president, interestingly, didn’t take them up on that. This time, he is.
