Things aren’t great at the Department of Justice, and rather than get to the root of the issue, they’ve come up with a bold new staffing strategy involving duct tape, vibes, and whatever warm bodies happen to be nearby.
According to reporting from Bloomberg Law, the latest brainchild out of Main Justice is something called “emergency jump teams,” which sounds less like a serious prosecutorial strategy and more like a rejected pitch for a CBS procedural. According to a February 2 memo from Francey Hakes, the director of DOJ’s Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, each of the nation’s 93 U.S. attorney’s offices has until February 6 to volunteer one or two assistant U.S. attorneys who can be rotated into high-need areas facing “urgent assistance due to emergent or critical situations.” DOJ has blown a hole in its own staffing model and is now slotting in prosecutors to be human sandbags.
Trump’s personal law firm, which is how the once venerable DOJ was rebranded at the start of the Trump II term, is leaking attorneys like a sieve. But that’s what happens when career prosecutors are asked to drop corruption cases as part of a corrupt political bargain or sign off on baseless prosecutions of Trump’s enemies or be part of a fascist machine that ignores court orders and the Constitution.
DOJ lawyers are burning out, walking out, or in one memorable case, asking a judge to hold them in contempt just so they can finally get some sleep. Instead of reconsidering whether flooding line prosecutors with legally dubious ICE cases is a great idea, DOJ has opted for the institutional equivalent of shouting “NEXT!” and grabbing whoever hasn’t escaped yet.
Before landing on jump teams, DOJ tried plugging the gaps with military lawyers. Then came recruiting prosecutors on social media, which is a real thing that happened. Now, with morale somewhere beneath the Mariana Trench, DOJ wants AUSAs to sign up for short-term deployments to wherever the latest crisis has erupted — crises that, it should be noted, the federal government largely created for itself.
And let’s be very clear about what some of these “emergent or critical situations” are supposed to involve. Hakes’s memo explicitly ties the jump teams to carrying out Attorney General Pam Bondi’s December directive ordering law enforcement to “root out” antifa and other left-associated anti-government groups. Because nothing says neutral law enforcement quite like emergency prosecutorial squads mobilized to chase the attorney general’s preferred political boogeymen.
The DOJ is treating career prosecutors as replaceable widgets while also demanding they shoulder legally questionable cases at breakneck speed. That is unsustainable, and this plan is literally rearranging deck chairs on a ship that keeps springing new leaks. And no amount of jumping is going to save that.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @Kathryn1@mastodon.social.
The post ‘Emergency Jump Teams’ Are DOJ’s New Plan To Paper Over Its Self-Inflicted Crisis appeared first on Above the Law.
Things aren’t great at the Department of Justice, and rather than get to the root of the issue, they’ve come up with a bold new staffing strategy involving duct tape, vibes, and whatever warm bodies happen to be nearby.
According to reporting from Bloomberg Law, the latest brainchild out of Main Justice is something called “emergency jump teams,” which sounds less like a serious prosecutorial strategy and more like a rejected pitch for a CBS procedural. According to a February 2 memo from Francey Hakes, the director of DOJ’s Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, each of the nation’s 93 U.S. attorney’s offices has until February 6 to volunteer one or two assistant U.S. attorneys who can be rotated into high-need areas facing “urgent assistance due to emergent or critical situations.” DOJ has blown a hole in its own staffing model and is now slotting in prosecutors to be human sandbags.
Trump’s personal law firm, which is how the once venerable DOJ was rebranded at the start of the Trump II term, is leaking attorneys like a sieve. But that’s what happens when career prosecutors are asked to drop corruption cases as part of a corrupt political bargain or sign off on baseless prosecutions of Trump’s enemies or be part of a fascist machine that ignores court orders and the Constitution.
DOJ lawyers are burning out, walking out, or in one memorable case, asking a judge to hold them in contempt just so they can finally get some sleep. Instead of reconsidering whether flooding line prosecutors with legally dubious ICE cases is a great idea, DOJ has opted for the institutional equivalent of shouting “NEXT!” and grabbing whoever hasn’t escaped yet.
Before landing on jump teams, DOJ tried plugging the gaps with military lawyers. Then came recruiting prosecutors on social media, which is a real thing that happened. Now, with morale somewhere beneath the Mariana Trench, DOJ wants AUSAs to sign up for short-term deployments to wherever the latest crisis has erupted — crises that, it should be noted, the federal government largely created for itself.
And let’s be very clear about what some of these “emergent or critical situations” are supposed to involve. Hakes’s memo explicitly ties the jump teams to carrying out Attorney General Pam Bondi’s December directive ordering law enforcement to “root out” antifa and other left-associated anti-government groups. Because nothing says neutral law enforcement quite like emergency prosecutorial squads mobilized to chase the attorney general’s preferred political boogeymen.
The DOJ is treating career prosecutors as replaceable widgets while also demanding they shoulder legally questionable cases at breakneck speed. That is unsustainable, and this plan is literally rearranging deck chairs on a ship that keeps springing new leaks. And no amount of jumping is going to save that.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @[email protected].
