Former DOJ employee apologizes for enabling Trump's nastiness

[lpetrich]

Erica Newland, who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel from 2016-2018, says she and her colleagues were "complicit" in supporting an "anti-democratic leader".
noting
Opinion | I’m Haunted by What I Did as a Lawyer in the Trump Justice Department - The New York Times

No matter our intentions, lawyers like me were complicit. We owe the country our honesty about what we saw — and should do in the future.

...
I never harbored delusions about a Trump presidency. Mr. Trump readily volunteered that his agenda was to disassemble our democracy, but I made a choice to stay at the Justice Department — home to some of the country’s finest lawyers — for as long as I could bear it. I believed that I could better serve our country by pushing back from within than by keeping my hands clean. But I have come to reconsider that decision.

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.

Staying in the DOJ she now considers a big mistake. Doing so enabled Trump's nastiness too much.

"Unlike the Trump Justice Department, the Trump campaign has relied on second-rate lawyers who lack the skills to maintain the president’s charade." As a result, "After four years of bulldozing through one institution after another on the backs of skilled lawyers, the Trump agenda hit a brick wall." Judges quickly rejected most of the Trump campaign's arguments.

Author Erica Newland suggests that it would have been better to leave the DOJ outright and leave it to Trump's cronies. Their incompetence would have made Trump's efforts much more vulnerable to legal challenge. Complete with a good likelihood of crushing defeats comparable to Judge Brann on the campaigners' arguments: “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence.”