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TRUMP WILL GET AWAY WITH IT

The Atlantic

January - February 2024

If Donald Trump regains the presidency, he will once again become the chief law-enforcement officer of the United States. There may be no American leader less suited to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed," as the Constitution directs the president. But that authority comes with the office, including command of the Justice Department and the FBI.

- Barton Gellman

We know what Trump would like to do with that power, because he's said so out loud. He is driven by self-interest and revenge, in that order. He wants to squelch the criminal charges now pending against him, and he wants to redeploy federal prosecutors against his enemies, beginning with President Joe Biden. The important question is how much of that agenda he could actually carry out in a second term.

Trump tried and failed to cross many lines during his time in the White House. He proposed, for example, that the IRS conduct punitive audits of his political antagonists and that Border Patrol officers shoot migrants in the legs. Subordinates talked the former president out of many such schemes or passively resisted them by running out the clock. The whole second volume of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report, which documented 10 occasions on which Trump tried to obstruct justice, can be read as a compilation of thwarted directives.

The institutional resistance Trump faced has reinforced his determination to place loyalists in key jobs should he win re election. One example is Jeffrey Clark, who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. Trump sought to appoint Clark as acting attorney general in early January 2021, but backed off after a mass- resignation threat at the DOJ. People who know him well suggest that he would not let that threat deter him a second time. Trump will also want to fire Christopher Wray, the FBI director, and replace him with someone more pliable. Only tradition, not binding law, prevents the president and his political appointees from issuing orders to the FBI about its investigations.