Media Must Cover Trump's DOJ as a Rule of Law Crisis

ProPublica reviewed hundreds of federal court cases and found more than 40 in which judges — appointed by presidents of both parties, including Trump himself — explicitly questioned the DOJ's basic trustworthiness. Judges have called the department's conduct "unlawful," "unethical," and "unseemly." They have found DOJ lawyers filing AI-generated briefs citing nonexistent case law, submitting declarations with fabricated dates, and claiming a detainee had a criminal conviction from a year when he would have been four years old. A George W. Bush-appointed judge in Rhode Island referred DOJ lawyers to a disciplinary board and wrote that the department had "proven unworthy of trust at every point." A Bush-appointed judge in Minnesota called its use of grand jury subpoenas against political opponents "blatantly unlawful." As one former federal judge put it: "I don't think in the annals of the Department of Justice, in the history of jurisprudence in the United States, we've ever seen anything close to this."

This is not a story about judicial disagreements with administration policy. It is a story about the collapse of the foundational assumption that the United States government tells the truth in court. That assumption — the "presumption of regularity" — is the bedrock on which the entire federal legal system rests. When judges across the country, in jurisdiction after jurisdiction, say they can no longer take the government at its word, the rule of law itself is in crisis.

We call on the mainstream media to cover Trump's Justice Department not as a controversial but functioning institution, but as what federal judges from both parties are saying it has become: an arm of political vengeance that lies to courts, defies orders, and has shattered a century of prosecutorial norms. The public deserves reporting that treats that verdict with the gravity it demands.