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It’s too soon to say with any confidence that Joe Biden will be the next president of United States. But it’s not too soon to start determining what he needs to do on day one if he is elected. Once you get beyond addressing the coronavirus pandemic, it’s pretty clear that the highest
priority Biden should have is reversing the disastrous direction that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has taken under President Donald Trump.
To regain its credibility, the department needs leaders who will publicly and systematically demonstrate that they are committed to restoring the values, norms and practices established in the nearly half-century since Watergate.
The near-total failure of the Justice Department to engage the pressing concerns raised by the Black Lives Matter protesters is only the most recent and dramatic manifestation of how rudderless the once-great department has become. Looking at the violent clashes between federal agents and protesters this summer, you would hardly know that the Department of Justice once worked to desegregate schools and prosecute civil rights violations in the South.
Trump’s Department of Justice has taken its cues from a president who ran for office by directing the “lock her up†chant at his opponent. It has increasingly undermined the all-important principle that enforcement, investigation and prosecution should be removed from partisan politics.
Trump’s project of delegitimising the department through politicking goes back to his extended efforts to paint the Russia investigation as politically motivated. His goal was to convince ordinary people that the FBI and DoJ were already completely partisan, in order to undercut any evidence implicating him or his campaign. Hence Trump’s pressure on Attorney General Bill Barr to break Department of Justice norms and reveal the progress of his investigation of the Russia investigation. The very existence of this investigation is a terrible sign of how Trump has successfully turned the initial investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election into a political football.
Much, much more could be said about all the ways that Trump has
undercut the Department of Justice. But I won’t bore you with a recap. The question now is, what can be done to restore norms that have been
systematically gutted?
The first is something not to do. Namely, barring some spectacular new evidence of overt criminality, the Department of Justice should not pursue criminal charges against Donald Trump after he is out of office. This will be a bitter pill to swallow for those who care about the rule of law, but the only way to put the department back on a legitimate, apolitical footing will be to resist the temptation to go after Trump or his associates. It’s much better to leave that task to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office for the office of the New York State Attorney General, both of whom have open investigations against Trump.
—Bloomberg