Subverting, undermining, or sabotaging President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming agenda will be cause for termination, Trump transition adviser Mark Paoletta warned DOJ career attorneys Wednesday.
“Career DOJ lawyers must be fully committed to implementing President Trump’s policies or they should leave or be fired,” Paoletta posted on X.
“The duty of a lawyer is to promote the objectives of his client within the bounds of the law, not to substitute his views for those of the client,” he wrote, giving concrete examples of previous transgressions.
Paoletta’s full post is below:
Career DOJ lawyers must be fully committed to implementing President Trump’s policies or they should leave or be fired. Why do I keep raising this? Because there are several examples (below) of career staff sabotaging cases they disagreed with in the first Trump Administration. This can’t happen again.
There are superb career employees in the US government. I know this from first-hand experience working as the General Counsel at OMB. I worked with terrific career lawyers who helped us figure out how to accomplish President Trump’s agenda. For example, it was a career lawyer who first suggested that we could tap funds at the DOD to build the wall.
There were others within OMB who were not helpful and tried to thwart our efforts to implement the President’s agenda. An OMB employee leaked documents from a meeting to a publication to harm our management reform efforts and then lied when this employee was questioned by an OMB career attorney who was investigating the leak. (I know this happened because several months later I received a call from an intel agency telling me this employee had admitted to leaking this document in a polygraph session.)
I hope DOJ attorneys will embrace their responsibility to implement President Trump’s agenda. That is their constitutional duty. If the president wants to deport illegal aliens, secure the border, ban race-based “affirmative action” and DEI, investigate antisemitism, halt Big Tech censorship, grant pardons and commutations to Jan 6th defendants, he has every right to expect that these perfectly lawful policies are implemented, and it is absolutely unacceptable for career employees to seek to thwart this policy agenda.
The duty of a lawyer is to promote the objectives of his client within the bounds of the law, not to substitute his views for those of the client. Government lawyers may respectfully suggest alternative actions, but once the duly elected President makes a decision, it is the job of civil servants to carry out that decision to the best of their abilities whether they personally agree with it or not. Under the Constitution, the People vested ALL executive power in the PRESIDENT, not in the unelected lawyers who are to assist him in the exercise of that power.
Any civil servant who claims their actions to resist these policy initiatives will be doing so to uphold the rule of law is being dishonest. They are undermining the rule of law and subverting democracy and should be fired.
Here are two brief examples of career DOJ attorneys sabotaging two cases in the first Trump Administration:
Example 1: Pursuing President Trump’s policy of eliminating racial discrimination in higher education admissions and in response to complaints of race discrimination by Asian college applicants, the DOJ Civil Rights Division conducted a 2-year investigation into Yale University’s admission practices. The evidence demonstrated that Yale was indeed discriminating against Asians and whites. In fact, it was 8 times harder for Asian applicants to be admitted than black applicants with comparable SAT/grades in certain admissions strata. 50 Asian applicants a year who otherwise would have been admitted to Yale were rejected solely because they were Asian. Yale went so far as to use race to strike preliminarily accepted students from its admission list to balance the racial composition of its freshman class.
The Civil Rights Division leadership (appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate) wanted to file suit, but no career lawyer from the relevant section, the Educational Opportunity Section, was willing to work on the case. They were all “too busy.” The political leadership had to draft the complaint and pull in lawyers from other sections and divisions to work on this case.
The career staff resistance delayed the DOJ filing this case, which was seeking compensation for the victims of Yale’s racial discrimination. Each year of delay meant another class of Asian and white applicants illegally discriminated against.
The Trump DOJ’s position was vindicated by the Supreme Court in two companion cases filed by a private party, Students For Fair Admissions vs. Harvard and Univ of North Carolina.
The views of the career attorneys who refused to work on the Yale case were not only legally wrong under the constitution but in the minority of public opinion. A majority of Americans, including black Americans, are opposed to racial preferences in college admissions. The will of the American people should not be thwarted by unelected civil servants willing to ignore the law to advance their personal opinions favoring race discrimination.
Shortly after Biden’s inauguration, the Biden DOJ dismissed the Yale case. There are indications that Yale continues to racially discriminate in its admission practices and has recently received a letter from SFFA raising these concerns and asking for Yale to preserve documents (see below).
Example 2: Career attorneys seek to block investigation into coverup of Covid nursing home deaths in state run by Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo. In the summer of 2020, New York had by far the highest Covid death toll of any state in the country – twice that of Texas, and Florida. Yet, New York was reporting relatively low numbers of Covid nursing home deaths. DOJ Civil Rights political leadership repeatedly directed the career staff to draft a short request asking the Cuomo Administration to produce data concerning Covid nursing home deaths so that DOJ could determine what was going on. Yet the career staff failed to do so, and political appointees eventually were forced to draft and send the request themselves.
Why did the career staff fail to investigate New York’s peculiar and suspicious nursing home Covid death claims? Because Governor Cuomo, a Democrat, was the Left’s foil to President Trump during Covid and the career staff apparently did not want to make Cuomo look bad.
Data disclosed by New York officials in response to the DOJ request revealed that the Cuomo Administration had covered up a third or more of NY’s Covid nursing home deaths in state-run facilities, and the Cuomo administration obstructed a subsequent investigation into privately run nursing homes – trying to wait until after the election and Biden inauguration in the hope the matter would be allowed to drop by a “friendly” DOJ. As it turned out, revelations of New York’s Covid coverup kicked off other allegations (of sexual misconduct) that forced Cuomo to resign. But the Biden DOJ did quietly bury investigation of the Covid nursing home coverup after Biden was inaugurated.
Career attorneys who refuse to carry out the policies of the President because they disagree with him are not protecting the rule of law and democracy; they are subverting it. The American people elected President Trump to implement his agenda, and the career staff took it upon themselves to thwart it, not because it was a threat to democracy but because they disagreed with the policies. How many reports were there of career employees refusing to implement Biden’s flagrantly unlawful energy and student loan policies?
The American people overwhelmingly want to end DEI, ban boys from playing in girls’ sports and using girls’ locker rooms, secure our border, and deport illegal aliens. The Deep State should not be allowed to subvert the will of the American people.
As I stated in my prior post, those DOJ career staff who refuse to implement in good faith President Trump’s agenda should leave. Those who resist by trying to sabotage the duly-elected President’s agenda should be terminated for failing to do their jobs.
Throughout the Biden administration, many Republicans argued the DOJ was ripe for an overhaul. Trump has yet to pick a department head to lead the DOJ.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.