Revelations since Biden’s inauguration are adding detail to a portrait of ethical decay at the department.
About the author: David A. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Sometimes, the actions a government takes look bad at the time, but posterity treats them kindly. Other times, a president might look good in the moment but see his reputation sink in retrospect. Then there’s the Trump administration, and especially its Justice Department, which looked bad when it was in power and now looks even worse. Late yesterday, The New York Times reported that the Justice Department subpoenaed Apple to try to obtain data from accounts belonging to Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, their aides, and even one of their children as part of an investigation into leaks about Trump associates’ ties to Russia. Even after the probes produced few results, Attorney General Bill Barr insisted that prosecutors keep them alive. This is only the latest ugly revelation about the Trump Justice Department to emerge since January 20—sometimes despite the best efforts of the Biden team to keep things secret. We now know that prosecutors sought to compel records of reporters from The Washington Post, CNN, and the Times; failed to prepare for right-wing violence because of a focus on antifa; and even saw a plot by the assistant attorney general and the president to oust the acting attorney general in order to overturn the result of the presidential election. The scope of the subpoenas disclosed last night by the Times is still not clear. Schiff and Swalwell were perhaps natural suspects for the White House, because they were among the noisiest of the president’s critics.
