A cancer is eating away at the foundation of American justice, and its metastases are now visible in courtrooms from Washington to Newark.
The Trump administration is systematically weaponizing the power of the state, turning federal agencies against a growing list of political adversaries.
To enable this campaign, the president has systematically dismantled the independence of the Department of Justice, shattering the core barrier that once prevented the machinery of government from being used for partisan vengeance.
The deliberate and systematic politicization of the U.S. Department of Justice by the Trump administration has created a crisis of credibility so profound that it now threatens to shield the guilty and tarnish the innocent.
When the very machinery of law enforcement is wielded as a cudgel against political enemies, the public is left unable to distinguish a legitimate accusation from a manufactured one.
This is not a theoretical concern. The architecture of impartiality, painstakingly built after the Watergate scandal, has been deliberately dismantled.
The independent Office of Professional Responsibility has been decapitated. The Merit Systems Protection Board, a shield for civil servants, has been rendered impotent. Seasoned career prosecutors have been purged and replaced, in some cases, by the President’s former personal attorneys who possess scant prosecutorial experience but demonstrated personal loyalty.
Consider the unsettling cases unfolding in our own backyard. The indictment of Congresswoman Lamonica McIver is a mountain made from a molehill. Prosecutors earned a judge’s tongue-lashing when they dropped charges leveled against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka.
The indictment of Congresswoman Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick for allegedly misusing millions in FEMA funds is, on its face, a serious matter. But the specter of politics looms large.
Those charges were brought by a U.S. Attorney’s office in Florida, yet they were announced with unusual fanfare by Attorney General Pam Bondi herself, who declared “no one is above the law” in a statement that felt more like a political broadside than a legal summary.
This creates an impossible dilemma for the public.
Is this a righteous prosecution, or is it a warning shot to other political adversaries? We have no way of knowing for certain, and that is the intended effect.
The administration’s actions have destroyed our capacity for trust. When the President publicly demands the prosecution of specific enemies and the DOJ subsequently obliges, every case emanating from the department is cast under a shadow of doubt.
This poison does not just affect high-profile targets. In New Jersey, the legally questionable appointment of Alina Habba—another of the President’s former personal lawyers—as interim U.S. Attorney was followed by her declaration that she hoped to help turn the state “red.”
She is now prosecuting a Democratic congressman and investigating the state’s Democratic governor. The message is chillingly clear: the law is a weapon, and the battlefield is electoral politics.
Unqualified interim US Attorney Lindsey Halligan in Virginia revealed that the indictment against former FBI Director James Comey was never approved by the grand jury because it was not seen in its final form by all grand jurors.
“The grand jury voted to reject the only indictment that the government presented to it,” wrote Comey’s attorneys. “Instead of presenting the grand jury with a revised indictment, Ms. Halligan signed a new two count indictment that the grand jury had never seen or voted on.”
The most devastating consequence of the government’s flagrant misconduct is the erosion of our ability to confront genuine corruption.
When a politician is legitimately caught stealing public money or abusing their office, the public’s first and justified reaction may now be to assume it’s a political hit.
The guilty can hide in plain sight, shielded by the administration’s own rampant abuse of power.
The Trump administration, in its relentless pursuit of political enemies, is creating a world where actual criminals can dismiss their crimes as mere politics.
This is the reality of a justice system collapsing under the weight of its own politicization. The legal termites have been let loose by the very people sworn to protect the structure, and now the entire edifice groans, threatening to bury both truth and justice in the rubble.
When the government cries “corruption,” a cynical public, trained by bitter experience, can only wonder who the real target is today.