Former Trump Justice Dept Lawyer Says She’s ‘Haunted’ By Her Work in Confessional NYT Op-Ed: ‘We Were Complicit’
An attorney who worked for the Department of Justice has written a confessional New York Times op-ed about her work for President Donald Trump’s administration, saying that while she had good intentions, she now feels they enabled Trump’s “assault on our democracy” and is “haunted” by guilt.
Erica Newland worked for the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel from 2016-2018, originally joining during the end of President Barack Obama’s term. She stayed on, she explains, because she “believed she could better serve our country by pushing back from within,” but now regrets that decision.
As Newland describes, she and the other DOJ attorneys made Trump’s executive orders “less destructive” and more likely to survive judicial scrutiny.
My job was to tailor the administration’s executive actions to make them lawful — in narrowing them, I could also make them less destructive. I remained committed to trying to uphold my oath even as the president refused to uphold his.
But there was a trade-off: We attorneys diminished the immediate harmful impacts of President Trump’s executive orders — but we also made them more palatable to the courts.
The post-election aftermath highlighted the problem for Newland, as she watched “second-rate lawyers who lack the skills to maintain the president’s charade” like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell repeatedly flop and flail trying to promote Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud.
If Newland and her fellow DOJ attorneys had resigned rather than work for Trump’s agenda, she theorizes, he would have had to resort to hiring these far less skilled attorneys, and “judges would have likely dismantled the Trump facade from the beginning, stopping the momentum of his ugliest and most destructive efforts and bringing much-needed accountability early in his presidency.”
Newland described herself as “haunted” with regret for the work she did. “The trade-off wasn’t worth it…No matter our intentions, we were complicit. We collectively perpetuated an anti-democratic leader by conforming to his assault on reality.”
She closed the op-ed by saying that she and her colleagues owe America “honesty” about what they witnessed and their apologies for their role in the Trump administration’s “assault on our democracy.”
