Trump Loyalists in DOJ Face Criticism as Judges Expose Blunders

Judges’ rebukes this week of blunders by top Justice Department lawyers show the pitfalls of installing President Donald Trump loyalists to their roles, lawyers and scholars said.

A federal magistrate judge on Monday denounced “a disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps” by the FBI and Lindsey Halligan, the Eastern District of Virginia’s top prosecutor, in a case against former FBI Director James Comey, while another judge on Tuesday spurned “clearly wrong” legal assertions in a letter from DOJ Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon underpinning Texas congressional redistricting plans.

The scoldings are some of the most direct judicial criticisms of Trump’s lawyers as the president relies on allies with unorthodox backgrounds to serve in top DOJ roles. They underscore how the limited government experience some bring to their roles threatens to undercut the administration’s efforts to prosecute Trump’s perceived enemies and achieve its civil rights priorities, legal scholars and former federal prosecutors said.

“If you are an administration that’s prioritizing partisan, ideological, or personal connections or loyalties, it’s going to be hard to find people with that kind of expertise and background to successfully manage these sorts of issues,” Harvard Kennedy School professor Maya Sen said.

The latest rebukes follow a string of missteps by government lawyers in challenges to Trump administration policies. Federal courts have found “serious defects” in the government’s representations in court in more than 60 cases this year, according to a study by the nonpartisan legal journal Just Security.

“These aren’t accidents. They’re symptoms of a department whose attorneys are under pressure to deliver outcomes the White House wants, even if it means ignoring facts or the law,” said Chiraag Bains, former senior counsel for the Civil Rights Division during Barack Obama’s administration.

The US attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia declined to comment. A DOJ spokesperson said the department had no comment.

Grand Jury Fumbles

Judges’ scrutiny of Halligan, an insurance lawyer with no prior prosecutorial experience, is expected to hurt the Comey case and how courts view the legal soundness of the administration’s prosecutions, former government lawyers said.

“It’s sort of like asking a math teacher to come in and teach French class,” Barbara McQuade, a University of Michigan Law School professor and former US attorney, said of Halligan.

Halligan became the Eastern District of Virginia’s interim US attorney after her predecessor resigned under pressure to bring charges against Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James (D). Halligan was the sole prosecutor who went before grand juries to obtain indictments in both cases.

US Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick on Monday noted 11 potential errors in securing the indictment against Comey. These included DOJ’s reliance on materials obtained in previous search warrants, as well as DOJ’s potential use of privileged information to prepare its case.

In a hearing Wednesday, federal prosecutors revealed the final indictment charging Comey was never viewed by the full grand jury—an oversight Comey’s lawyers say provides grounds for dismissing charges of obstruction and lying to Congress.

Such missteps are evidence of “one of the many perils of using people with no prosecutorial experience to, for example, present an indictment to the grand jury,” said Jason Manning, a Levy Firestone Muse LLP partner and former federal prosecutor.

Halligan isn’t alone in this, Manning said, pointing to other US attorney’s offices that have struggled securing grand jury indictments against protesters in cities the Trump administration targeted with immigration raids and military deployments.

Courts’ traditional presumption of regularity—the assumption that government officials are acting in good faith and following normal procedures—has “been severely undermined this year by political appointees in a series of criminal and civil cases,” Manning said.

Voting Rights Rebuke

Dhillon, the Civil Rights Division leader, faced criticism from a federal judge this week over a July letter to Texas officials questioning the constitutionality of congressional districts. The judge, a Trump appointee, said the directive from the former Republican party official “contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors” that it’s “challenging to unpack.”

The July letter, signed by Dhillon and her then-deputy Michael Gates, asked Texas officials to redraw political boundaries to dismantle certain districts where minority groups comprise more than half of the voting population.

The DOJ officials claimed the state’s so-called coalition districts where multiple minority groups constitute a majority of the population were unconstitutional. Texas state legislators responded with a new map that changed the racial compositions of the targeted districts.

State legislatures are prohibited from considering race in redistricting decisions. But with its letter, DOJ “directed Texas to engage in racial gerrymandering,” Judge Jeffrey Brown said in a scathing opinion on behalf of a split Texas federal court panel.

The judge—whose opinion drew an impassioned dissent from another Republican appointee—also took the department to task for its interpretation of a 2024 appeals court ruling it used to justify the redistricting request, calling its reading “clearly wrong.”

The mistakes in the letter—signed by the two political officials and no career attorneys—follow mass departures across the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which lost more than 75% of its career managers this year, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis.

“This is what happens when you completely unmoor DOJ from the historical expertise that DOJ possesses,” said Sasha Samberg-Champion, a former appellate lawyer for the Civil Rights Division. “There is a zero percent chance that any of the actual experts in Voting Rights Act litigation, that at one time made up the DOJ, had any input into this.”

Such errors from the government erode its credibility, attorneys said.

“While it was satisfying to read, it was also embarrassing,” Dena Robinson, a former Civil Rights Division attorney, said of Brown’s opinion. “They have created a Justice Department that courts and the American people can no longer rely on to be just, and this case is just another perfect example of it.”