The Department of Justice (DOJ) lost its fourth official in the week following the midterms, with Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division Brett Shumate resigning Monday.
The Civil Division handles a wide variety of cases and has seen significant departures during the Trump administration as caseloads soared.
Shumate has overseen a number of controversial cases. These include suing universities that offered in-state tuition for undocumented citizens, defending Trump’s executive order on mail-in voting restrictions, fighting state-level laws that sought to ban federal agents from wearing masks and also suing states to force them to issue undercover license plates to immigration officers.
Under outgoing official, the Civil Division was bleeding staff, including among high profile divisions like appellate staff as well as the federal programs branch, two areas involved with defending the president’s priorities in court.
Minimize your legal liability…
I’d like to know how many laws they broke before they left. And I’d like them to be prosecuted for those infractions.
I would be willing to be they know exactly what they did, and are more than happy to talk.
So would I, unless New York votes ole Chuck and Jeffries out, probably no luck there.
If you’re already doing horrible shit for the Trump DOJ, why resign? The only thing I can think of is they don’t want to have to sit in a congressional hearing, but they can still be subpoenaed to appear. So that plan won’t work.
Maybe it’s because they don’t want to continue doing shady shit and it’s better to resign than be fired. But really, when facing the prospect of accountability, it’s a lot better to be fired for doing the right thing than to resign after never doing the right thing.
Because Trump is now a lame duck. The smart people are moving on within the next eight months, using their contacts to find a safe landing space. The ones who hang on until the end will have less job opportunities.
They’re also losing cases right and left, with more and more judges holding individual attorneys to account for their shitty pleadings. Just last week a judge threw out the presumption of regularity – the legal requirement that a judge MUST assume that any case brought by the government is brought in good faith unless there is clear evidence to the contrary – because the case provably met that high bar. From that decision:
The presumption of regularity directs the courts to assume, unless clear evidence indicates differently, that government officials have properly discharged their duties, acted in good faith and followed required procedures
This presumption of regularity is the bedrock of govt litigation. It never gets discarded. If it does, it’s incredibly rare. But other judges will likely follow suit. My guess is that Trump and Blanche thought that by the time individual judges started to revolt, they’d already have much broader authoritarian control over the courts. They thought wrong.
And then came the midterms.
Meanwhile any attorney working for the DoJ, especially in immigration, is being ordered by their bosses to defend cases that are shit to start with, they are being ordered to lie, hide evidence, break every rule of civil procedure – and then when the judge gets pissed because this is literally the 352nd case where the DoJ failed to meet some basics of procedure or willfully lied or willfully disregarded prior judicial orders or failed to produce specifically ordered evidence, it’s the attorney who will get that judge’s heat, and rightly so. Some, like in Trump’s “1776” $1.76 billion slush fund thing in Florida, are even facing sanctions, if I remember correctly.
These lower-level and even some mid-level DoJ attorneys are Trump’s legal cannon fodder, foot soldiers thrown into court to win their cases and absorb the ire of seasoned judges while they enjoy the privilege of the presumption of regularity – at least until now. No attorney wants a contempt charge, much less sanctions or to lose their law license. And especially not over such a shitty cause.
Of course they’re quitting. The highest paid first, because they can: they have experience, options and no student debt. This is just the start of the exodus.
Buh bye
Lmao
