Will Justice Department and FBI officials carry out Trump’s prosecutions against his rivals?

Since entering the 2024 race, Donald Trump has done just that called for criminal charges of at least sixteen rival politicians and fifteen law enforcement, military and intelligence officials – according to an NBC News review of his public comments – not to mention employees at two federal public health agencies, two tech billionaires, Google, as well as all the lawyers, campaign donors and political operatives engaged in what the former president has called “unconscionable conduct” during the election.

A separate recent review by National Public Radio found that Trump had threatened prosecution more than 100 times.

But could Trump actually carry out prosecutions of such unprecedented scale and scope? And if so, how would that work?

To understand how this could play out, NBC News interviewed multiple current and former officials from the Justice Department and FBI, as well as legal experts.

Everyone agreed that what Trump is proposing would overturn fifty years of post-Watergate norms that dictate that federal prosecutors do not take orders from the president regarding criminal investigations. These rules were intended to prevent a repeat of the abuses of Richard Nixon, who inappropriately used the Justice Department to punish his political enemies.

But there are ways around the guardrails, current and former officials said, making it possible for Trump to turn the department into a tool for him to exact revenge on his political opponents.

“A corrupt U.S. attorney with one corrupt prosecutor can do enormous damage,” said Joyce Vance, who served as U.S. attorney in Alabama and is a legal analyst for NBC News.

A new president appoints about 300 senior DOJ officials, including the U.S. attorneys who run offices across the country. All 300 must be confirmed by the Senate, but several former Justice Department officials said they fear Trump will install partisans willing to do his bidding.

Typical American lawyers relying on lower-level career prosecutors to do critical investigative work behind the scenes. They can’t be easy discharged according to current guidelines. But those who resist cooperating with an investigation would face enormous pressure. Some may resign.

In situations where there is resistance, Trump could appoint a special counsel to carry out the prosecutions he calls for.

“My fear is that the good people will resign,” said Barbara McQuade, a former federal prosecutor and legal analyst at NBC News. “Who will replace them? People who go along with illegal orders.”

One of Trump’s most far-reaching proposals, known as Schedule F, calls for the reclassification of the approximately 50,000 career civil servants in the federal government so that they can be hired, promoted and fired by Trump and his inner circle.

Even if he did not take such a drastic step, the officials and experts said, the likely outcome of the upheaval would be an even more extreme version of the chaos, division and protracted legal battles that marked Trump’s first term. This would slow the work of the Justice Department, which prosecutes nationwide and oversees the FBI, DEA, ATF, all federal prisons, and multiple other federal law enforcement agencies.

“It is a recipe for halting all the undoubtedly vital national security work that needs to be done by the DOJ and the FBI,” warned a former DOJ official who asked not to be named. fear of retaliation.

A former U.S. attorney who asked not to be named added that a version of that chaos is already unfolding in the Trump transition team, where hardline Trump supporters are calling for unprecedented use of the DOJ and the FBI and more mainstream Republicans oppose such moves.

“Within Trump’s transition planning,” the former U.S. attorney said, “there is a battle between the normies and the freaks.”

A central focus of a second Trump administration

Both Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, have said the Justice Department will be a core focus of a second Trump administration. During his campaign in Georgia on October 11, Vance said the attorney general would be more important than his own role as vice president.

“The most important person in government, I think, after the president for this cycle will be the attorney general,” said Vance, who claimed the current DOJ was the “most corrupt” in American history and said Trump would have to do “clean house” there.

Current and former DOJ officials have roundly rejected Vance’s claims of corruption, citing Biden’s Justice Department prosecutions against prominent Democrats including Hunter Biden, New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez and New York City Mayor Eric Adams . Democrats have said they believe Trump is looking for an attorney general who would drop pending federal cases against him — over his alleged role in the storming of the U.S. Capitol and mishandling of classified documents — brought by special prosecutor Jack Smith.

A draft list of a dozen people Trump could nominate as attorney general included federal Judge Aileen Cannon, ABC News recently reported this. Cannon threw out the classified documents case against the former president, a ruling that was harshly criticized by legal experts and praised by Trump. He called Cannon a “brilliant woman” and dismissed the charges as a “fraud case.”

Another name on the list of potential attorney generals was Jeffrey Clark, a midlevel DOJ official who backed Trump’s false claims of 2020 election fraud. Days before the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Trump’s attempt to appoint Clark as acting attorney general failed when the DOJ’s entire senior leadership threatened to resign, citing fears that public confidence in the neutrality of the ministry would be irrevocably damaged.

Another option discussed by Trump’s tougher legal advisers is appointing a series of acting attorneys general who would not require Senate confirmation. Under current federal lawan acting attorney general can serve 210 days at a time.

Mike Davis, a Republican lawyer and former senior Senate staffer, said during a performance on conservative influencer Benny Johnson’s show that he would conduct a “three-week reign of terror” as Trump’s acting attorney general and then be pardoned by Trump, Politico reported this.

Davis pledged to indict Joe Biden, pardon defendants on January 6 –“especially my hero, hornman”– fire “deep state” employees, detain people in the “DC gulag,” and start deporting millions of immigrants and putting “kids in cages.”

Trump has publicly praised Davis. During a rally earlier this month he greeted Davis as “tough as hell” and said: “We want him in a very high capacity” in a second government.

A small number of loyalists are needed

Vance, the former U.S. attorney in Alabama, said it wouldn’t be difficult for Trump to find 93 people — whose only qualification will be loyalty to him — to serve as U.S. attorneys, or the top federal prosecutors, in states in the whole country.

“You can bring them in from outside – they don’t have to live in the county or the state,” Vance said. “Trump could easily appoint his most loyal, most malleable people.”

She added that putting allies in top DOJ positions would be enough for Trump to carry out his prosecutions. “You don’t have to corrupt the entire office to prosecute,” she said. “All you have to do is hire three or four people and find some people in the FBI, the Secret Service, who want to play ball.”

Stephen Gillers, a professor of legal ethics at NYU School of Law, said, “I’m sorry to say,” but “there is no doubt” that Trump will be able to find lawyers willing to carry out his wishes at the DOJ.

Gillers praised the bar associations for disbarring several lawyers involved in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election results, such as Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, for making false statements in court. But he believes that won’t be enough of a deterrent.

“You’re dealing with 1.3 million American lawyers,” Gillers said. “He will undoubtedly find a thousand people who will support his goals and strive to achieve them.”

Gillers argued that the Justice Department was different from other federal agencies because of its role in instilling confidence that the U.S. justice system is fair.

“The administration of justice is different from agricultural administration,” he said. “The rule of law should not be corrupted by politics.”

Gillers sharply criticized the Supreme Court’s recent immunity ruling, which stated that all of the president’s actions involving the DOJ were “absolutely immune” from criminal prosecution. For the first time in American history, he said, a president can direct an attorney general to prosecute his political enemies without fear of criminal prosecution for abusing his powers.

“The opinion is arrogant at the expense of the Constitution,” Gillers said. “These five people have rewritten the meaning of the separation of powers in a democratic system and that is abhorrent.”

Trump would also have the power to appoint a special counsel who could, in theory, conduct investigations into alleged corruption spanning the country, legal experts said.

Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, noted that if the prosecution’s evidence was extremely weak, a jury could acquit a suspect regardless of jurisdiction.

But Somin argued that federal prosecutions, even if they result in an acquittal, could drag on for years and seriously damage a person’s professional reputation and ability to get a job.

“For many people, being charged and prosecuted is already a heavy burden,” he said.

Justice Department officials have risen to the occasion and defied presidential overreach in the past. During the Watergate scandal, the attorney general and deputy attorney general resigned when Richard Nixon asked them to fire special prosecutor Archibold Cox in what became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.”

And the episode with Clark, the election denier, in which a group of senior DOJ officials — all Republicans — blocked his nomination as acting attorney general by threatening to resign, offers some hope for department veterans.

But the former DOJ and FBI officials said it is difficult to imagine that U.S. law enforcement would not be seriously hampered by what would likely happen under a second Trump administration.

“Let’s assume you have the numbers. You go in and knock out a large portion of the workforce,” the former DOJ official said. “I don’t care who you put in there – it’s no longer a functioning institution.”