Trump Defends Exodus of Lawyers from His Administration After Buzzy NY Times Report: ‘Shouldn’t Have Been Representing the U.S.A. in the First Place!’

(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

President Donald Trump defended the mass departure of lawyers from his administration — which the New York Times reported on in a buzzy feature on Sunday.

In a post to his Truth Social platform Sunday afternoon, the president claimed that many of attorneys (reported by the Times to be more than 10,000) to depart his administration over the past 16 months were fired, and that their departure was for the best.

“The New York Times wrote a story today entitled, ‘Trump Administration Sees Striking Exodus of Legal Talent,’ as though that’s a bad thing, when actually, it’s very good,” Trump said. “The people that are leaving are Radical Left Deep State Lunatics, who are destroying our Country, and Weaponizing Government. Many of them didn’t leave, but were fired! The Failing New York Times writes this, but makes it sound like it’s a terrible thing when actually, it’s just the opposite. We want people that will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, not people that are trying to destroy our Country, that were put in by Obama and Biden and, in many cases, they shouldn’t have been representing the U.S.A. in the first place. Let them go on to ‘bigger, better, and brighter’ things in the future — I fully support that, and wish them all well!”

Despite Trump’s comments, the numbers reported by the Times are staggering. Six different government agencies have lost more than a quarter of their attorneys — with the Department of Education having lost 53 percent of the lawyers they had prior to the start of Trump’s second term. The Department of Justice has shed 21 percent of its attorneys — as more than 2,600 lawyers have left the DOJ over the past 16 months.

“This is a remarkable shift in talent out of the federal government to other places,” Andrew Mergen, director of the Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School, told the Times.

——

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!