Emily Bazelon for the NYT:
Last year, in the months before the 2024 presidential election, the magazine surveyed 50 members of what might be called the Washington legal establishment about their expectations for the Justice Department and the rule of law if Donald Trump were re-elected. The group was evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. They had worked as high-level officials for every president since Ronald Reagan.
A majority of our respondents told us they were alarmed about a potential second Trump term given the strain he put on the legal system the first time around. But several dissenters countered that those fears were overblown. One former Trump official predicted that the Justice Department would be led by lawyers like those in the first term — elite, conservative and independent. “It’s hard to be a bad-faith actor at the Justice Department,” he said at the time. “And the president likes the Ivy League and Supreme Court clerkships on résumés.”
Eight months into his second term, Trump has taken a wrecking ball to those beliefs. “What’s happening is anathema to everything we’ve ever stood for in the Department of Justice,” said another former official who served in both Democratic and Republican administrations, including Trump’s first term.
We recently returned to our group with a new survey and follow-up interviews about Trump’s impact on the rule of law since retaking office. The responses captured almost universal fear and anguish over the transformation of the Justice Department into a tool of the White House. Just as chillingly, the new survey reflects near consensus that most of the guardrails inside and outside the Justice Department, which in the past counterbalanced executive power, have all but fallen away. The indictment of James Comey, the former F.B.I. director whom Trump ordered the Justice Department to charge, represents a misuse of power for many of our respondents that they hoped never to see in the United States.
These respondents include former attorneys general, solicitors general and their deputies in the Justice Department and White House counsels, as well as former U.S. attorneys and retired federal judges from across the country. (Forty-two people who took the survey last year did so again, and we added eight more to replace those who did not. The group is again evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.) Some of the former officials we surveyed, in both parties, are speaking out against the wrongs they see unfolding despite the professional and personal risks.
But many of them — more so than last year — don’t want to speak on the record. These are people with stature in their world, custodians of the American Bar who have represented clients of all stripes, taught law students, served on professional committees. But now they’re worried about retribution, for their law firms or their family members, if they draw Trump’s ire.
Our new survey channeled their collectively grim state of mind. All but one of the respondents rated Trump’s second term as a greater or much greater threat to the rule of law than his first term. They consistently characterized the president’s abuses of power — wielding the law to justify his wishes — as being far worse than they imagined before his re-election….