Fmr DOJ Spox Reflects On Being a ‘Target’ for Standing Up to Trump: We Prevented ‘Greater Harm,’ but ‘Obscured the Reality’ of His Leadership

Former Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur penned a pre-Christmas column to share regrets about her work under Donald Trump’s presidency.

In a piece for the Washington Post, Isgur aligns herself with the “shallow state.” She argues that the “deep state” refers to people in the government who are actively thwarting elected officials, whereas the “shallow state” are “people who accepted jobs in the Trump administration despite their profound concerns about the president” in order to advance certain political goals and ideological principles.

Isgur recalled how Trump interviewed her for the DOJ position by pulling out a dossier full of her negative past comments about him. Isgur said she pursued the job regardless due to a sense of duty, but shortly after she was hired, she was thrown into the middle of Trump’s war with the DOJ over the investigation of his 2016 campaign’s possible connection to Russia.

“The question for President Trump was not what he could do for the Justice Department, but what the Justice Department could do for him,” Isgur wrote. “And those who stood in his way became targets. At least four times, someone from the White House told department officials to fire me.”

As Isgur reflected on when she was eventually removed from her post, she wondered if “maybe I should have” quit beforehand, and she shared that the White House repeatedly tried to purge others like herself from the DOJ. She said it was her colleagues who mitigated the full impact of Trump’s disastrousness, but the trade-off was that the public never got to see how much “greater harm” Trump was capable of.

We told ourselves that, by going in, we were preventing greater harm to the country. But we obscured the reality of a Trump presidency from the public. We gave voters a false sense of what kind of president Trump was. And now, more than 74 million people have voted to reelect a president who refuses to honor our most basic of values — the transfer of power based on the will of the American electorate.

It’s hard to imagine a greater harm.