LIPSTICK ON A PIG

Trump Justice Department Scrambles as Lawyers Flee in Droves

The DOJ has made a desperate new move to “prove” it’s doing more with less.

President Donald Trump’s embattled Department of Justice has imposed new quotas on prosecutors in a bid to shore up its public safety statistics despite an exodus of talent.

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The department has hemorrhaged thousands of veteran attorneys since Trump returned to office thanks to the president’s revenge campaigns, violent immigration crackdown, and increasingly overwhelming workloads.

The government has lowered hiring standards and resorted to offering $25,000 signing bonuses, despite historically being deluged with applications from lawyers who were happy to take a pay cut in exchange for the prestige and satisfaction of federal service.

But that apparently hasn’t been enough to make up for the shortfall, because now the DOJ—which is headed by Trump’s former personal attorney Todd Blanche—is taking steps to try to show the department is doing more with less, Bloomberg Law reported.

Over the past few weeks, the deputy attorney general’s office told all 93 U.S. attorney’s offices that every prosecutor must maintain at least “25 open matters” at all times, four people told Bloomberg Law.

The emphasis will be on driving up public safety and fraud statistics.

It’s not clear yet what exactly counts as an “open matter,” whether exceptions will be made, or what will happen to attorneys who don’t hit the target.

A DOJ spokesperson, however, told Bloomberg Law that 25 cases represented “the bare minimum” and that “hundreds of [assistant U.S. attorneys] routinely juggle 100+ open matters.”

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The new quota is likely to exacerbate recruitment and retention challenges, sources told the outlet.

While it’s easy for prosecutors to maintain or surpass 25 active investigations and prosecutions if they work in heavy-volume districts or handle simple drug and gun cases, complex white-collar or national security investigations can fully occupy prosecutors for months, according to Bloomberg Law.

“A one-size-fits-all policy is unworkable,” said Mark Yancey, a former senior official in the DOJ’s Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys. “These things need to be worked at the district level by the U.S. attorney.”

The quota also runs the risk of prosecutors feeling pressured to bring cases with insufficient evidence just to hit their targets, Yancey told Bloomberg Law.

The DOJ’s spokesperson, Kiersten Pels, told the outlet in a statement that the policy will not result in charging bad cases.

“It will result in low productivity AUSAs leaving the department and patriotic AUSAs taking their place and sending terrible criminals to federal prison,” she said.

The Daily Beast has also reached out for comment.

The New York Times reported in late May that 2,665 DOJ attorneys had left since the start of Trump’s second term, representing 21 percent of the department’s lawyers.

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The White House’s aggressive immigration crackdown has also diverted criminal prosecutors from their usual caseloads as they’ve been forced to respond to a surge in civil habeas corpus petitions from immigrants who had been denied bond hearings.

In the meantime, federal judges have increasingly lambasted DOJ attorneys for making false statements to the court and engaging in grand jury misconduct, which has led to several cases being dismissed.

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