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'Bow to the Emperor': We Asked 50 Legal Experts About the Trump Presidency Before the election, we surveyed the legal establishment about what a
second Trump term could mean for the rule of law. A year later, they're
very, very worried.
By Emily Bazelon, NYT.
Oct. 6, 2025
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 u 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 rosumos."
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.
Has Trump's second term posed a greater or lesser threat to the rule of law than you expected?
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 u more so than last year u 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 u wielding the law to justify his wishes u as being far worse than they imagined before his re-election.
And every single one of the 50 respondents believe that Trump and his
attorney general, Pam Bondi, have used the Justice Department to go after
the president's political and personal enemies and provide favors to his allies.
To measure the degree to which the Justice Department has changed in
Trump's second term, several people pointed to what happened at the end of
his first presidency. Trump insisted that the department investigate "fact- free claims," as Bill Barr, the attorney general at the time, wrote in his memoir, that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election because of voter fraud. Until then, Barr had been Trump's close ally. But in late December 2020, he resigned rather than give in to the president's demands. When
Trump continued to push for the baseless investigation, other remaining top officials said that they too would resign rather than use the department to seek to overturn the election.
Because of the lawyers in the room, the safeguards held. But if such a scenario were to play out in Trump's second term, the same result is "unthinkable," said Peter Keisler, who was an acting attorney general under President George W. Bush.
"No one in the room now will say no," said the Justice Department official from Trump's first term. The lesson Trump drew from his first term, the
former official continued, is that the lawyers who talked him out of "bad ideas" were the wrong kind of lawyers. "The president has set it up so that the people who are there are predisposed to be loyalists who will help him
do what he wants."
That is not how things are supposed to work. Since Watergate, presidents
have continued to nominate the attorney general and to set policy
priorities for the Department of Justice. But the department's case-by-case legal judgments "must be impartial and insulated from political
influence," according to the Justice Manual, the department's bible, first written in 1953. "It is imperative that the department's investigatory and prosecutorial powers be exercised free from partisan consideration."
In the eyes of almost all our survey respondents, this post-Watergate structure is collapsing. "I still think we get through it," said the former official who served in several administrations, "but I'm less certain of
that each passing day."
Several legal experts told us they began worrying on the day Trump retook office. One of the president's first acts u granting pardons and
commutations to the Jan. 6 rioters u unraveled the work of what prosecutors have said is the Department of Justice's largest-ever investigation. Trump also fired lawyers who worked on the Jan. 6 cases.
Then, in February, Emil Bove, a former defense attorney for Trump who was appointed second in command at the Justice Department, ordered Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, to drop an active corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams. Sassoon resigned, saying the administration was rewarding Adams for promising to help with Trump's immigration-enforcement plan. It was a clear example of quid pro
quo, Sassoon said.
At least 10 more career prosecutors resigned over the order to drop the
Adams charges. Bove, in turn, took the unusual step of appearing alone in court to argue for the dismissal of Adams's charges himself, presumably because no one else would.
In June, Trump nominated Bove for a lifetime appointment to a federal judgeship. The Senate confirmed him 50 to 49 in July despite a whistle-
blower report from another prosecutor accusing Bove of suggesting that the Justice Department tell a judge "[expletive] you" and ignore a court order
in an immigration case. Bove said he couldn't recall making such a
statement. (News of two more whistle-blower reports, corroborating parts of the first complaint, also emerged before the Senate vote.)
ImagePresident Trump and another man sit at a wooden courtroom table. Trump has his hands folded on a stack of papers. The other man fiddles with pen
and looks off to the side.
Emil Bove was Trump's defense lawyer before he was appointed to be No. 2 in the Justice Department and then nominated to be a federal judge. Credit...Maansi Srivastava/The New York Times
Several respondents raised Bove's ascension as a sharp break from the past. Trump also stunned many of them when he issued a flurry of executive orders
in March and April targeting big law firms perceived as being aligned with Democrats. Four firms sued and won injunctions against the president. But
nine struck deals, offering nearly a combined $1 billion worth of pro bono work.
Just as notable, in the eyes of many of our respondents, is the work these firms and others are not doing for fear of Trump u their names, and the resources they bring, are missing from suit after suit challenging his executive orders. Thirty-three said that big firms as a group are doing
little or nothing to constrain excessive uses of presidential power;
another 12 said they were doing so only somewhat. "We're off the playing field," said an Obama administration official who works at a large firm.
"Big law was so active right after the travel ban in Trump's first term. He figured out he could make us all stop."
More than any step the president has taken, according to a lawyer from the Reagan solicitor general's office, Trump's bullying of law firms has undermined the rule of law. "Whatever happened to the bedrock principle
that everyone deserves the best lawyer they can find?" asked a former Republican-appointed judge. "My firm is scared to death."
Are you a federal worker? We want to hear from you.
The Times would like to hear about your experience as a federal worker
under the second Trump administration. We may reach out about your
submission, but we will not publish any part of your response without contacting you first.
Six respondents lay blame on the Biden administration for posing similar,
or even greater, threats to the rule of law as Trump. Some of them saw
Merrick Garland's decision to appoint Jack Smith as special counsel to investigate Trump as a fatal misjudgment. "Garland thought he was limiting himself by appointing Smith," said the former Trump official. "But from Day
1 of Smith's appointment, it was clear Trump would be indicted. In an alternate universe, there's no Smith, no Jan. 6 case against Trump, which
they didn't have to bring, and maybe American politics looks different
today."
Another respondent, Richard Painter, who was chief White House ethics
lawyer for President George W. Bush, faulted Biden for diminishing public trust at the end of his term by accusing the justice system of playing "raw politics" in prosecuting his son, Hunter Biden. "To lash out at D.O.J. when
he knew that Trump was coming set a poor example," Painter said.
But the prosecution of Biden's son, along with the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Biden's own handling of classified documents, demonstrated the Justice Department's independence from the White House. Painter sees the opposite happening now. "We haven't seen the president use the department to go after his enemies since Nixon," he said, "and it's frightening."
In Trump's Justice Department, in fact, retribution has been institutionalized. In February, Bondi created a "weaponization working
group" to investigate "abuses of the criminal justice process." She
instructed the group to look into people who prosecuted Trump.
To the dismay of some of our respondents, the head of the working group, Ed Martin, promised to smear the reputations of any targets he couldn't
indict. "In a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed," Martin said in May.
Martin's promise, respondents pointed out, is a clear violation of Justice Department policy. "You prove your charges in court, or you walk away,"
said the former official who served in multiple administrations. "There's
no third way. Nor should there be. What Martin is doing is disgusting."
In September, Trump trampled whatever remaining hope prosecutors had of exercising their judgment independent of the president. Trump forced the resignation of Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney in Eastern Virginia who
had concluded there wasn't enough evidence to charge Comey, whom Trump
blames for the F.B.I.'s investigation of whether Russia meddled in the 2016 election.
On social media, Trump ordered Bondi to take action "NOW!!!" against Comey,
as well as against Senator Adam Schiff, who led the congressional investigation of Russian influence, and Letitia James, the attorney general
of New York, who prosecuted Trump and the Trump Organization for fraud. The next day, news broke that Trump's Justice Department closed an
investigation into Tom Homan, Trump's so-called border czar, who was
recorded last year accepting a bag with $50,000 in cash in an undercover F.B.I. investigation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/magazine/legal-experts-trump-justice- department.html
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