Name: How Trump Remade the Justice Department in His Image
Uploaded: 2025-12-30T17:00:00Z
Duration: 5 min 36 s
Description: Loyal aides allowed the president to bypass norms inside the agency and punish political enemies. As part of our video series on Trump’s second term, The Wall Street Journal’s Sadie Gurman explains how it's changing law enforcement on the ground.

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Loyal aides allowed the president to bypass norms inside the agency and punish political enemies. As part of our video series on Trump’s second term, The Wall Street Journal’s Sadie Gurman explains how it's changing law enforcement on the ground. Photo Illustration: Annie Zhao

https://m.wsj.net/video/20251230/16a58553-b946-4401-9e1e-08b2e71b0222/2/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Loyal aides allowed the president to bypass norms inside the agency and punish political enemies. As part of our video series on Trump’s second term, The Wall Street Journal’s Sadie Gurman explains how it's changing law enforcement on the ground.

How Trump Remade the Justice Department in His Image

President Trump has always had a fraught relationship with the Justice Department, from the start of his first term when he was under investigation for his campaigns potential ties to Russian interference in the 2016 election, to the Biden administration when a special counsel brought criminal cases against him. It's created this sort of extraordinary dynamic where one day you have President Trump sitting in the courtroom as a defendant, and then later he's walking through the blue curtains on the main stage at the Justice Department, like a vindicated conqueror.

I will insist upon and demand full and complete accountability for the wrongs and abuses that have occurred.

From putting loyalists in top law enforcement roles to wielding his clemency powers to undo thousands of hard fought convictions, here's a look at how Trump has fundamentally changed the Justice Department in the last year. My name's Sadie Gurman, and I've been covering the Justice Department for almost a decade. During Trump's first term, Trump had chosen attorneys general who he expected to be loyal to him. You had Jeff Sessions, and you had Bill Barr, and Sessions and Barr just didn't go far enough.

I have recused myself in the matters that deal with the Trump campaign.

Well, the early claims that I understood were completely bogus and silly, and usually based on complete misinformation.

What Trump learns during his first term is that he wants an Attorney General who's going to be more of a personal defense attorney. That leads us to Pam Bondi.

Our predecessors turned this Department of Justice into the Department of Injustice, but I stand before you today to declare that those days are over and they are never going to come back.

Sadie: In the first year of a second term, Trump has basically brought the Justice Department to heel. This was very clearly on display when Trump explicitly asked Attorney General Bondi to file charges against some of his top opponents, like New York's Democratic Attorney General Letitia James, and former FBI Director James Comey. The indictments of Comey and James marked a massive shift for the Justice Department. After those cases were brought, current and former officials I talked to said it was clear that the Justice Department was shifting away from an independent law enforcement agency and becoming another arm of Trump's agenda. Key to executing that agenda includes deciding who prosecutes those cases. The federal prosecutor under pressure to bring criminal charges against James and Comey resigned after Trump said he wanted them out. He had told supervisors there wasn't enough evidence to bring either case. Shortly after, Trump appointed his own personal attorney, Lindsay Halligan, who had been working in the White House, to prosecute his adversaries, and within her first few weeks on the job, that's exactly what she did. But this ultimately backfired after a judge found Halligan wasn't properly appointed as a federal prosecutor and dismissed the cases.

I think anybody that looks at it very fairly would say, boy, are they guilty!

Nowhere is Trump's campaign of retribution playing out more visibly than at the FBI. He installed one of his most trusted foot soldiers, Kash Patel, as director of the FBI, and as soon as he got there, he started making sweeping personnel changes. There's a lot of concern about a lot of that institutional knowledge walking out the door, and what that means for what have traditionally been the FBI's main priorities of fighting terrorism and other national security matters. One result of Trump's emphasis on fighting violent crime in blue cities is that FBI agents have been working alongside local police, patrolling the streets and focusing on lower level street crime, which is not something they've traditionally done.

We're getting the FBI agents out of the headquarters in Washington DC and back on the streets in pursuit of dangerous criminals, where they belong and where they wanna be.

I've heard agents complain that they're spending their time writing citations to food truck vendors and arresting drunken drivers rather than working on their own white collar cases and national security cases, and they're very concerned by this.

Crowd: Free Jan 6th, free Jan 6th!

Sadie: Outside the halls of DOJ and the FBI, Trump has been using his executive authority to grant presidential pardons in sweeping fashion.

So this is January 6th. These are the hostages, approximately 1500 for a pardon.

In the first year of his second term, Trump has granted clemency to more than 1600 people, and more than half of those pardons relate to prosecutions initiated and pursued by the Justice Department during the Biden administration. Trump has also found ways to wield influence over various law firms during his second term. He singled out firms that had worked on behalf of his political opponents, claiming their work was an attack on the administration and its policies. He secured agreements from eight law firms to provide nearly a billion dollars in pro bono work in order to avoid severe sanctions like losing government contracts and security clearances. This unprecedented attack had a chilling effect of deterring some lawyers and firms from representing clients or causes that challenged the Trump administration. Something that I hear from a lot of people who worked in Trump's first term in the Justice Department and stopped short of doing some of the things that we see his appointees doing now is that they didn't wanna do this because they knew that it could mean that a future Democratic administration would do the same. Traditionally in both Democratic and Republican administrations, the Justice Department has taken pains to keep its distance from the White House, particularly when it comes to criminal investigations. So what we saw during the first term is that Trump would try to have the Justice Department bring charges against a favored target, but they stopped short of allowing this to happen. But what we're seeing now is that Trump is directly ordering the Justice Department to take certain actions, and the Justice Department is doing that immediately.

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