Should I Stay or Should I Go?
On March 7, 2025, Celia Cohen, a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, was finishing up a meeting at 26 Federal Plaza, in lower Manhattan, when she learned that a federal marshal had arrived on the premises and wanted to see her. She was soon led to a conference room where the marshal served her with a letter from Todd Blanche, then the Deputy Attorney General, informing her that she and Andrew Rohrbach, another prosecutor at the S.D.N.Y., were being investigated and placed on administrative leave. After Cohen collected her personal belongings, the marshal escorted her out of the building.
Cohen, who has a reserved bearing, was deeply embarrassed. By the time she was back home, in Westchester County, her shock had settled into despair. Prosecutors at the S.D.N.Y., the nation’s most prestigious federal trial court, typically stay for five to seven years before moving on to jobs at private law firms, where they can earn vastly higher salaries. Cohen had no such plans. Since her early twenties, when she’d spent a year working as a paralegal at the Department of Justice, she’d dreamed of becoming a prosecutor. A few years after she graduated from law school, mentors at the Manhattan law firm where she was working encouraged her to apply to become an Assistant U.S. Attorney at the S.D.N.Y. When Preet Bharara, who was then running the office, called to offer her a job, she exclaimed, “This is the best day of my life!”
Cohen joined the S.D.N.Y. on the Monday after the 2016 Presidential election. She started out at the General Crimes Unit before moving to Violent Organizations and Crime, and then to Public Corruption. Although the hours were long and the salary was relatively modest, she loved the job and planned to spend the rest of her career in the office.
Shortly after Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second term as President, Emil Bove, the acting Deputy Attorney General, summoned S.D.N.Y. leaders to a meeting in Washington to discuss the pending trial of Eric Adams, the mayor of New York. In September, 2024, Adams had been indicted for soliciting illegal campaign contributions and for accepting bribes from Turkish officials. (He has denied any wrongdoing.) Cohen had been a prosecutor on the case. At the meeting in Washington, which she didn’t attend but soon learned about, Adams’s attorneys pressed for the case to be dropped, claiming that it was interfering with the Mayor’s ability to enforce Trump’s immigration policies. Ten days later, Bove issued a memorandum ordering the S.D.N.Y. to dismiss the charges. The problem was not the evidence, which, he acknowledged, the Justice Department had not reëvaluated; rather, the case was impeding Adams’s ability “to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior Administration.” The memo demanded that the charges be dismissed without prejudice—meaning that they could later be reinstated. This would give the White House immense leverage over Adams.
Two days later, Danielle Sassoon, the interim U.S. Attorney at the S.D.N.Y., outlined her objections to Bove’s order in a letter to Pam Bondi, then the Attorney General. The appeal made by Adams’s lawyers, Sassoon wrote, “should be called out for what it is: an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for a dismissal of his case.” If the directive wasn’t reconsidered, she added, “I am prepared to offer my resignation.”
Like many of Sassoon’s peers, Cohen hoped that the letter would persuade the D.O.J. to change course. Sassoon was a member of the conservative Federalist Society, had clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and had been appointed to her position by Trump. One might have thought that these credentials would bolster her credibility with the White House. But Bove not only accepted Sassoon’s resignation; he scolded her for “suggesting that you retain discretion to interpret the Constitution in a manner inconsistent with the policies of a democratically elected President.” He soon transferred responsibility for the Adams case from New York to the D.O.J.’s headquarters, in Washington, D.C.
Cohen was dismayed by these developments, but she didn’t resign. The S.D.N.Y. still had hundreds of other important cases on its docket. The best way to continue serving the public, she believed, was by remaining in her job. Six weeks after she and Rohrbach were put on leave, the D.O.J. informed them that they could indeed return, but only if they and other members of the S.D.N.Y. team apologized, declaring that they had acted wrongfully in prosecuting Adams and in failing to comply with the directive to dismiss the charges. Once she learned of these demands, Cohen knew that her career as a federal prosecutor was over. A few days later, she resigned.
In 1970, Harvard University Press published “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty,” by a German-born economist named Albert Hirschman. The book examined the ways that social actors can respond to dysfunction and decline in organizations, from businesses to political parties and governments. One option is to protest from within—to exercise “voice.” Another is to vote with one’s feet and “exit” the situation. A third response is “loyalty”—to stick around in the hope of preserving what remains of the organization’s core values.
Hirschman’s book appeared a few years after President Lyndon B. Johnson dramatically escalated America’s involvement in Vietnam, a decision that Hirschman clearly wished had prompted more of Johnson’s advisers to resign. Exit from government had become “deplorably infrequent” in Washington, Hirschman wrote, attributing this reluctance to spinelessness and to a “member-of-the-team trap” that led insiders to overestimate their ability to exert a correcting influence. Yet elsewhere in the book Hirschman acknowledged that breaking from the team, however courageous, can have perverse consequences, especially in organizations responsible for the provision of public goods like education and crime prevention. The output of such organizations affects everyone, and a conscientious official may reasonably fear that exiting in a crisis will only accelerate it. Hirschman posited that the member of a deteriorating organization will compare “the disutility, discomfort, and shame of remaining a member to the prospective damage which would be inflicted on him as a nonmember and on society at large by the additional deterioration that would occur if he were to get out.” The worse the situation becomes, he added, the stronger the conviction an employee may have “that one has to stay on.”
The predicament described in Hirschman’s book is now playing out for many civil servants and federal workers in the Trump era. Should they exit if ordered to do something illegal or unconscionable by their superiors? Or should they display loyalist behavior, not least to avoid being replaced by sycophants or opportunists who will do whatever their bosses tell them? In no agency have the stakes of this quandary been higher than in the Department of Justice, whose mission is to uphold the rule of law. In May, the Times published an analysis of federal-employment data which found that one in five government lawyers had left their job since the start of 2025. The largest numerical decline was in the Justice Department, where more than four thousand have left—a reduction of roughly thirty per cent.
Stacey Young, an attorney in the department’s Civil Rights Division, exited almost immediately after Trump was inaugurated. Unlike some of her peers, Young took Trump at his word when he promised to use his power to exact revenge on his enemies should he be reëlected. She’d also read Project 2025, a blueprint issued by the right-wing Heritage Foundation which called for reclassifying civil servants as at-will employees—thus making it easier to replace them with politically aligned subordinates—and for rooting out “progressive ideology” in the federal bureaucracy. In 2016, she’d founded a group within the D.O.J. to address gender disparities and sexual misconduct.
After quitting, Young started Justice Connection, a nonprofit to assist current and former D.O.J. employees who, like her, had been thrust into ethical and professional crises by the actions of the Trump Administration. The group was launched with support from the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit that advocates for whistle-blowers. Justice Connection has helped hundreds of D.O.J. attorneys secure everything from legal counsel to mental-health services. Its website features an archive of resignation letters submitted by lawyers who have chosen to leave. One states, “I can’t with a clean conscience defend actions by our clients that I cannot square with even the most tortured reading of the U.S. Code and Constitution.” Another affirms, “I will not . . . serve this current incarnation of the Department. It defines ‘justice’ in a way that I do not recognize.”
Over coffee in Washington recently, Young, who has thick silver hair and steely green eyes, praised the courage of such litigators. Among them were six federal prosecutors in Minnesota who’d resigned after reportedly being pressured to investigate the widow of Renée Good, a U.S. citizen who was killed by an ICE agent on January 7th. “They could have tried saying, ‘I want to get off this case—put me on other cases,’ ” Young told me. “They sacrificed their jobs and, possibly, their careers to do the right thing.” These actions were especially notable because, contrary to what Trump has claimed, the people resigning weren’t partisan members of the “deep state.” Young noted, “The typical D.O.J. lawyer is fairly apolitical. They’re law nerds.”
Celia Cohen told me that, for most of the time that she’d worked at the U.S. Attorney’s office, she hadn’t even known the political views of her colleagues. “That just wasn’t a topic of conversation,” she said. Before joining the S.D.N.Y., she clerked for Alison Nathan, a federal judge who had been appointed by President Barack Obama, but Cohen was hardly a left-wing ideologue. “I’m allergic to extremes,” she told me. We were outside her local library on a chilly spring day, and she was wearing a cream-colored scarf and a matching crew-neck sweater. She’d grown up in New Jersey, she said, in a household where debates about current events often took place at the dinner table; her mother, a journalist, would encourage her to participate. Cohen recalled, “There was always point-counterpoint, which teaches you the danger of staking out extreme positions that are hard to defend.” One thing that attracted her to the law was that it facilitates a “peaceful reconciliation of differences.”
Cohen accepts that policy priorities shift when a new Administration takes power. If Trump had pardoned Eric Adams, she told me, she wouldn’t have objected, because doing so was a Presidential prerogative. “That’s a very different path than instructing us to execute a political decision,” she said. Resigning, she went on, was both the hardest and the easiest thing she’d ever done. It was easy because the correct choice was so clear to her. On the same day she was placed on leave, the Justice Department made a filing in federal court laying out why the charges against Adams should be dismissed. One reason it cited was the supposed misconduct of the prosecutors who had brought the case. This departed from what Emil Bove himself had written in his memo to Danielle Sassoon, which explicitly noted that the order to drop the charges “in no way calls into question the integrity and efforts” of the prosecutors.
To accede to Bove’s demand would have required her to become an apparatchik, Cohen told me, which was a non-starter. Even so, the decision to quit had been wrenching. She mournfully recalled something that Preet Bharara would say to prosecutors at the S.D.N.Y.: “Every day is Thanksgiving.” As he liked to put it, and as she came to feel, they should all be grateful to have a job with only one requirement—“to do the right thing, the right way, for the right reason.”
In a new book, “The Department of Revenge,” Devlin Barrett, a reporter at the Times, catalogues the damage that the Trump Administration’s weaponization of the Justice Department has caused. Numerous attorneys have been pushed out or fired after refusing to prosecute such Trump enemies as the former F.B.I. director James Comey and the New York attorney general Letitia James. When these vindictive prosecutions eventually fell under scrutiny in courtrooms, they didn’t fare well. It is extremely rare for grand juries to dismiss charges brought by federal prosecutors, but the case against James, who was accused of committing mortgage fraud, has been rejected twice. Indictments of James and Comey were initially secured by Lindsey Halligan, a lawyer and a former beauty-pageant contestant whom Trump had appointed as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, even though she’d had no experience as a prosecutor. But a magistrate judge subsequently reprimanded her for a “disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps,” including repeatedly misstating the law to grand jurors. Another judge then dismissed both cases, ruling that Halligan had been appointed unlawfully. “Trump’s quest for revenge was ending careers, destroying reputations, forcing an exodus of legal experience, and killing the credibility of the Justice Department,” Barrett concludes. “In many instances, the people whose reputations it was tarnishing were not Trump’s intended targets, but rather those willing to carry out his angry orders.”
Several people who have exited the D.O.J. told me that any lawyer of integrity who can afford to stop working there should do so. “Can you work for justice in an unjust department?” one asked, adding that his “reservoir of grace” for those who remained had “run dry.” Alexander Kristofcak, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Civil Division of the S.D.N.Y., shares this sentiment. In March, 2025, Kristofcak posted on LinkedIn a copy of a letter that Ed Martin, whom Trump appointed as the interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, had sent to the dean of Georgetown Law School. Martin had threatened that his office would refuse to hire Georgetown students and graduates unless the university ended its diversity-equity-and-inclusion programs. The letter was “a grotesque abuse of power” and “an astonishing admission of viewpoint discrimination,” Kristofcak wrote on LinkedIn. (The D.C. Bar has since opened disciplinary proceedings against Martin.) Afterward, Kristofcak received many private notes from people thanking him for his comments. But on March 7, 2025—the same day the federal marshal came to Celia Cohen’s office—he also got a letter from Todd Blanche informing him that he’d been placed on leave.
Kristofcak, in fact, had already decided to quit. He grew up in Czechoslovakia, which was ruled by a Communist dictatorship until 1989. When Trump was reëlected, Kristofcak reread “The Power of the Powerless,” by Václav Havel, the playwright and dissident who’d helped topple the Communist regime. Kristofcak was struck by a passage in which Havel describes a grocer who places a sign bearing the slogan “Workers of the World, Unite!” in his shop window, not because he believes in Communism but because he’s afraid of the authorities and hopes to mollify them. History was now repeating itself in the United States, Kristofcak thought. Kristofcak, who is gay, had been startled when a group called DOJ Pride—which was established in 1994 to advocate for L.G.B.T.Q.+ employees—voluntarily ceased operations after Trump was reëlected. This echoed the kind of preëmptive, fear-driven compliance that Havel had described. Kristofcak has come to the conclusion that lawyers at the D.O.J. should resign en masse. “I don’t feel like staying there is making a difference,” he told me. “I believe that the department now often acts like a criminal organization—and being part of it is just helping it achieve its aims.”
One risk of staying in the current D.O.J., various people told me, was that your work could inadvertently give a veneer of legitimacy to Administration misconduct. Indeed, this was among the few reasons that senior officials still seemed to value having career attorneys around.
A striking example of this phenomenon occurred on June 12th, when the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division announced that it was closing its review of Paramount Skydance’s proposed merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, clearing the deal to move forward. The press release cited a “rigorous eight-month investigation led by the Division’s career staff,” who had solicited more than two million documents before determining that the merger would actually “increase competition across the media and entertainment ecosystem, with benefits for American consumers and workers.”
A lawyer who has worked in the Antitrust Division was aghast, telling me that the press release had glossed over a key fact: that the team of career staff reviewing this material had serious concerns about the merger. They were pleading for more time, so that they could decide whether to recommend challenging the proposal, when the investigation was abruptly closed. “Staff didn’t want the result that ultimately happened, and their work was used to justify an ending that they thought was unwise,” the lawyer said. “We had been used as dumb pawns.”
Jack Smith—the former special counsel who oversaw the criminal investigations into Trump’s role in the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol and into his alleged mishandling of classified documents—resigned shortly before the President returned to office. Yet, in an interview this summer on MS NOW, Smith praised D.O.J. prosecutors who’d stayed at the agency. “What I tell friends who are still in the department is ‘Serve as long as you can,’ ” he said. “Our country needs the Justice Department to do its job.”
Shortly after Smith’s interview aired, I spoke to a federal prosecutor who’d needed no convincing to stay put. Every time the Trump Administration did something corrupt or morally problematic, it made the prosecutor want to “dig my heels in more.” The prosecutor was aware that some people viewed career officials who had remained at the Justice Department as comparable to the bureaucrats who had dutifully followed orders in Nazi Germany. This made the prosecutor livid, particularly when the judgment came from former peers who’d left for the private sector and were now keeping silent—perhaps so that they could return to public service when Trump was no longer around.
The prosecutor acknowledged that staying in the job was difficult but told me that “some abstract general objection to being associated with it isn’t reason enough to just abandon the mission and the people who we’re supposed to be fighting for.” Every day, the prosecutor said, D.O.J. lawyers were performing vital functions, from convicting sex traffickers to handling sensitive national-security cases. Moreover, when troubling directives were issued, career officials could still find ways to limit the damage. Some have done so, the prosecutor explained, by slow-walking directives of dubious merit, such as orders to investigate voter fraud by noncitizens—a phenomenon that Trump has falsely claimed is rampant. (In fact, it is exceedingly rare.) “You have these meetings, you hear them out, you nod and say, ‘We’ll look into it,’ ” the prosecutor explained. “And then at some point you have another meeting and gently tell them why they’re fucking insane and wrong.” Half the time, the prosecutor said, “they say you’re right, because they’re distracted by the next thing.” Career officials who witness corruption could also create a paper trail so that the people responsible may one day be held accountable. “Eventually, all of this will be looked into, and there are going to be consequences,” the prosecutor said.
The prosecutor agreed that officials who were ordered to cross an ethical line should stand their ground, as the attorneys in the Eric Adams case had. (This is also the view of Smith, who told MS NOW, “Obviously, if you’re asked to do something that you know is wrong, then your number’s up.”) But, the prosecutor said, “make them fire you.” Too many people had quit well before this juncture, which only abetted the Administration’s efforts to dismantle the federal bureaucracy.
The prosecutor brought up a recent book, “Making a Career in Dictatorship,” by the political scientists Adam Scharpf and Christian Glässel, which examines the junta that ruled Argentina in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, during the so-called Dirty War, when as many as thirty thousand people were killed or disappeared. The secret police was filled with loyalists, most of whom were low-performing officers who’d fared poorly at military academies but had been promoted into leadership positions because they would do whatever the junta asked, including torture. To the prosecutor, this dynamic was reminiscent of what is unfolding in the U.S. Justice Department, where attorneys with no prior management experience have been handed leadership positions because of their willingness to advance the Administration’s political priorities. Prominent appointments have gone to figures such as Jason Reding Quiñones, a prosecutor who reportedly received low scores on performance evaluations while working at the Southern District of Florida. Last year, Trump appointed him to run the Florida office, and Quiñones is now overseeing an investigation into whether a cabal of “deep state” actors, including the former C.I.A. director John Brennan, conspired to violate Trump’s rights.
In other countries that have recently experienced democratic backsliding, such as Turkey and Hungary, installing loyalists in the judiciary and in government agencies has played a key role in helping autocrats consolidate power. This underscored the importance of staying at one’s job, the prosecutor felt: “I have some level of resentment toward people who are just quitting without coming close to a red line and putting themselves out as being heroic for doing so and being praised as heroic for doing so. To me, it feels like abandonment—and selfish.”
In May, the Times columnist Michelle Goldberg asked, of the Justice Department, “How long can decent people continue to work for such a corrupted institution?” Many decent people still did work there, Stacey Young, of Justice Connection, told me. “There are some extraordinarily brave people on the inside who are taking enormous risks to do the right thing,” she said. The bravest, she thought, were those trying to hold the line in units, such as the Civil Rights Division, where the corruption and the pressure to conform are most intense: “The real heroes are the ones who do terrible work and make sure they do it as ethically as possible.”
Such individuals face increasing risk. On September 1st, Matthew Evans, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Minnesota, sent an e-mail to the attorneys of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan migrant who’d been shot in the leg, in January, by an ICE agent during Operation Metro Surge, the Trump Administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration in Minneapolis. Sosa-Celis, who was unarmed, was shot through his front door, a seemingly clear-cut example of unwarranted aggression. Evans informed the attorneys that the Justice Department was planning to charge the ICE officer only with making false statements about the circumstances that had led to the shooting—the officer claimed that he’d acted in self-defense—and not with violating Sosa-Celis’s civil rights, a far more serious crime. “I objected in the strongest possible terms,” Evans explained in the e-mail, which was first reported by ProPublica. “It wasn’t enough.” The next day, he was fired. In a chilling development, Evans is now under criminal investigation for allegedly leaking details of the case. If charged and convicted, he could be jailed or disbarred.
The investigation of Evans was overshadowed in most press accounts, which focussed on the fact that the ICE agent, Christian Castro, was the first federal officer deployed to Minneapolis during Operation Metro Surge to be prosecuted for any crime. (Castro has pleaded not guilty to all charges.) But Evans’s fate alarmed a D.O.J. attorney I spoke to in early September. “They’re not just going to get rid of us—they’re going to prosecute us,” the attorney said.
One D.O.J. lawyer who’s been preparing for the possibility of being prosecuted is Zachary Phillips, who lives in Morrison, Colorado, outside Denver. Phillips is fifty-nine, with a shaved head and prominent tattoos on his forearms. He could easily be mistaken for a cop, which is what he was before he decided to go to law school. In 2008, he became an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Colorado. Being a federal prosecutor, Phillips told me, “was the best job in the world.” In 2022, he began going to Washington to help investigate and prosecute the January 6th assault on the Capitol. He was supposed to work on the detail for six months; he ended up staying for three years. During that time, he watched endless footage of the insurrection. “The amount of violence that took place that day is mind-numbing,” he said. The most vicious assaults, he added, had targeted police officers. “I’m a very, very pro-law-enforcement guy,” he said. “I’ve been shot at. I know what it’s like to be in life-and-death situations. Those officers are heroes.”
When Trump was reëlected, Phillips expected him to keep a campaign promise to pardon many of the January 6th rioters. Nonetheless, he was gutted when a near-blanket pardon was issued. “It’s pretty jarring to have more than fifteen hundred cases you’ve worked on all of a sudden just go away,” he said. Fearing retribution, he contacted a lawyer to discuss what he should do if the federal prosecutors who’d investigated January 6th cases were prosecuted themselves—a step that some January 6th defendants have publicly called for.
After Trump pardoned the rioters, Phillips had to stay on the detail and help file the paperwork to dismiss the cases. He eventually asked to work on something removed from criminal prosecutions, and his office obliged. In April, 2025, he was assigned to asset forfeiture and returned to the District of Colorado office. He liked the job, but his mood darkened. He no longer took pride in telling people that he worked for the Justice Department. Soon after Pam Bondi became Attorney General, she issued a memo instructing attorneys in the Justice Department to “zealously advance” the Administration’s policies; anyone who didn’t would be “subject to discipline and potentially termination.” Phillips was appalled by the memo’s implication that D.O.J. attorneys were President Trump’s lawyers. Then came the fatal shootings of U.S. citizens by ICE agents in Minneapolis, which the Justice Department has neglected to prosecute. Denver, like Minneapolis, has been called a sanctuary city. “Are we next?” Phillips asked himself. He also wondered if, by training younger colleagues, he might be passing along skills and experience that would be used to subvert the rule of law. Even doing something innocuous like asset forfeiture started to make him feel complicit, since filling this role might enable the Administration to hire someone else to perform another, more nefarious function.
In April, Phillips left the Justice Department. He recalled that, when he told his wife, “it was amazing how good I immediately felt.” The decision didn’t come without costs. Phillips was less than three years away from being able to retire with a full pension, but, he told me, some things were more important than money. At his home, in the room where we were sitting, he’d mounted a poster. Titled “Insurrection Maze,” it was a detailed rendering of the siege on the Capitol, showing rioters smashing windows and wielding bats, sticks, pepper spray, and stun guns. A “Seditious Scumbag Checklist” revealed the names of the insurrectionists in the drawing. Phillips had helped bring some of these people to justice.
In July, I met with Dena Robinson in Washington, D.C. Robinson joined the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in 2020. This unit, which was created in 1957, has long been regarded as the D.O.J.’s crown jewel. It is supposed to enforce anti-discrimination laws in housing, voting, education, and other sectors, to help fulfill the promise that all Americans are granted equal protection under the law.
Robinson, a queer Black woman with flowing locs and an easygoing manner, was thrilled to begin working at the division, not long after graduating from the University of Maryland’s law school. At the time, the division had some four hundred attorneys. Today, there are roughly two hundred. Under the leadership of Harmeet Dhillon, a fierce critic of what the Administration calls “woke ideology,” the division has shifted its focus to combatting diversity initiatives that allegedly violate the rights of white people, fighting supposed anti-Christian bias, and defending gun rights. Dhillon made the decision not to investigate the killing of Renée Good; instead, she launched an investigation into Brandon Johnson, the mayor of Chicago, for allegedly engaging in discriminatory hiring practices, after he highlighted the fact that many Black officials are serving in his administration. The division’s attorneys have investigated universities that allegedly failed to protect Jewish students on campuses where protests erupted over the Gaza war. One of these universities was Brown, where, according to a whistle-blower complaint filed recently by former Civil Rights Division attorneys, investigators found no evidence that the school had violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination on the basis of race or national origin. Despite this, the whistle-blowers claimed, senior government officials refused to send a “notice of no violation” to the school, and instead secured a settlement that required Brown to pay fifty million dollars to local organizations in order to end the investigation and have its federal research grants restored.
In early 2025, several senior leaders from the Civil Rights Division were transferred to a newly created Sanctuary Cities Enforcement Working Group, which turned out to be a “rubber room”—a holding tank where employees were given nothing of substance to do. It was clear that the Administration wanted these employees to quit; the D.O.J. also launched a buyout program. But Robinson urged her co-workers to resist. “I was Team Hold the Line,” she said. She’d made it known that there were certain things she would refuse to do because they were inconsistent with the section’s previous enforcement work and her personal values. For example, she would have nothing to do with what she called “anti-trans investigations.” (One of her best friends is a trans man.) Yet she still felt an obligation to stay. “One of the things we talked about was the importance of bearing witness to all the ways this Administration might contravene established policies,” she said. “Documentation is so important in the federal government, including for the people who will eventually come back to rebuild.”
However committed Robinson was to staying, the emotional experience was excruciating. “What is going on with you?” her mother would ask her when they spoke on the phone, telling her that she never sounded happy or excited anymore. Robinson’s loctician told her that there was a heaviness about her, “like you’re being followed by a dark cloud.” One morning, while Robinson was on the train to work, the conductor announced that a small mechanical fire had broken out. Robinson said to herself, “I wish the fire would come into this car, so I wouldn’t have to go into that building.” A few weeks later, she learned that nearly all the managers in her section, who had served as a buffer between the Administration and the staff attorneys, were resigning. She started sobbing, fearing that the entire section would collapse. On May 30, 2025, Robinson walked out of her building for the last time. Seven co-workers also exited that day.
Alyssa Lareau, who left the Civil Rights Division’s Federal Coordination and Compliance Section last year after concluding that anti-discrimination laws such as Title VI were no longer being faithfully enforced, was similarly torn. “Doing a workday felt like an assault,” Lareau recalled. “And then I would finish, and the toll of it, the wrestling with it, would hit me—am I enabling a fascist regime, or is there great power in being a bureaucrat? Leaving was the hardest decision I’ve ever made.” Her entire section departed collectively in May. Among the reasons: a memo from Dhillon that described her section’s mission as enforcing such Trump priorities as “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism” and “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” Workers from other sections gathered in the building’s lobby and clapped as Lareau and her colleagues walked out. Lareau is at peace with her decision, she told me, feeling that they had to leave to avoid being used “as tools for evil.” But, as they filed out, the mood was “funereal,” she said.
Samantha Trepel, a former prosecutor at the Civil Rights Division, led the investigation into the death of George Floyd, which resulted in the conviction of four Minneapolis police officers, in 2022. Trepel ultimately came to believe that staying in her job served little purpose. “Cases were getting dismissed, people were being removed,” she said. Within a few months, for example, the Civil Rights Division abruptly closed lawsuits or investigations related to eight police departments that the D.O.J. had previously determined were engaging in discriminatory policing and using unconstitutional force. “The conclusion I was coming to was that I was not going to be very effective in my priorities—to protect the work, to protect the people under me, and to protect the institution,” Trepel said. “The D.O.J. left me. I didn’t leave the D.O.J.”
Trepel also believed that her legal skills could be put to better use outside the department. She is now a program director at the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit that aims to safeguard elections and defend the rule of law from federal overreach. In her final months at the D.O.J., everything she did felt “defensive,” she told me, as her section tried to keep Title VI and environmental-justice investigations from being dismissed. Now she is actively assisting states that are seeking protection from federal investigations that she considers baseless, and from unlawful deployments of federal law enforcement. “That felt so much better to me,” she said.
Robinson, too, now works at a nonprofit, as a senior staff attorney at the A.C.L.U. She is currently focussing on litigation intended to protect L.G.B.T.Q.+ Americans against discriminatory statutes. Among them is a law passed by the Kansas legislature which retroactively invalidated the driver’s licenses of trans people and prohibited them from using rest rooms that align with their gender identity. The job is clearly more in synch with Robinson’s values, but she nevertheless wakes up some mornings feeling grief and guilt. “I really enjoy the work that I’m doing now,” she said. “At the same time, I do sometimes wish that I was inside, fighting. Every time I talk to someone on the inside and I hear about what’s going on or just the stress they’re facing, there is a part of me that wishes I was there with them.” (A spokesperson for the D.O.J. insisted that the Civil Rights Division “enforces federal civil-rights laws even-handedly.”)
Ironically, Robinson and other former Justice Department lawyers may be better positioned than their peers on the inside to engage in another form of protest that Albert Hirschman described in his book: voice. In Hirschman’s account, voice is presented as an alternative to exit, one exercised mainly by insiders who “kick up a fuss” from within, through mechanisms such as “individual or collective petition to the management” or an “appeal to a higher authority with the intention of forcing a change in management.”
Some Justice Department attorneys have tried to lodge internal protests. On March 14, 2025, a D.O.J. official named Erez Reuveni attended a meeting at which Emil Bove allegedly told lawyers that they might have to say “Fuck you” to the courts if they blocked the Trump Administration from using the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely invoked wartime law, to deport Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador. (Bove has claimed that he doesn’t recall saying this and denies advising D.O.J. attorneys to violate court orders.) A judge soon issued an injunction halting the deportations, but this didn’t stop the removals. Reuveni, who had been promoted to serve as the acting deputy director for the Office of Immigration Litigation, warned his superiors that the government might be in violation of the court order. At a hearing three weeks later, he told a federal judge that the deportation of one of the migrants, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, had been a mistake. In response, Reuveni’s superior ordered him to sign a brief describing Abrego Garcia as a terrorist. The records Reuveni had been shown contained no evidence of this, and he refused to comply. (“I didn’t sign up to lie,” he told his boss.) The same day, Reuveni was put on leave, in part for his “failure to follow a directive” from a superior.
Less than a week later, he was fired. Reuveni then filed a whistle-blower complaint with the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General. It stated that high-level government officials “willfully defied court orders, directed their subordinate attorneys to make misrepresentations to courts, and engaged in a scheme to withhold relevant information from the court to advance the Administration’s priority of deporting noncitizens.” The office responded a day later by informing him that the issues he had raised “do not warrant an investigation.” Reuveni’s lawyers also sent his complaint to Charles Grassley, a Republican senator from Iowa and a longtime champion of whistle-blowers; Grassley was unmoved, dismissing the complaint as a mere “political strike.”
This unresponsiveness has not entirely stopped D.O.J. attorneys from reporting wrongdoing. Some have taken to relaying information to reporters. In June, Justice Connection and Protect Democracy, another nonprofit group, published a six-page guide titled “Speaking Up from Within the Government,” which offers federal workers advice on how to engage with the press in a way that protects them and respects the law. Disclosing information that constitutes an abuse of authority or other gross misconduct is legally protected, with only narrow exceptions—classified and grand-jury information can’t be revealed, for example.
Nevertheless, D.O.J. attorneys know that talking to the press can now get them fired, or worse. Their former colleagues who have left may feel less constrained. Indeed, Hirschman noted in his book that officials who resign from institutions that produce public goods may be emboldened to exercise what he called “voice from without”—speaking out after one’s exit to cast light on “mistaken policies.”
Some former Justice Department lawyers have joined organizations such as the Washington Litigation Group, a nonprofit that has been drawing attention to the Trump Administration’s assault on the rule of law by suing it. One of the attorneys now working there is Alexander Kristofcak, the former Assistant U.S. Attorney who was dismissed from the D.O.J. for posting a critical comment about Ed Martin on LinkedIn. More recently, Kristofcak served as the lead counsel in a lawsuit challenging the Department of the Interior’s removal of a Pride flag from Stonewall National Monument, in New York City. In April, under a settlement, the flag was put back in place.
Other former officials have spoken publicly about the unethical things they were instructed to do. This past May, Brian Driscoll, a decorated law-enforcement agent who became the F.B.I.’s acting director at the start of Trump’s second term, told CNN that he had been ordered to provide the Trump Administration with a list of agents who investigated January 6th cases so that they could be purged. He refused, a decision that soon led the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, to fire him. In the interview, Driscoll said that he’d known he would be punished but needed to be able to tell his family, “I didn’t compromise what I knew was right.”
Until we met last spring, Celia Cohen hadn’t spoken publicly about the Eric Adams case and the circumstances that led her to leave her job. She had, however, exercised voice. On the day she resigned, she and her colleagues sent a letter to Todd Blanche. It was co-signed by Andrew Rohrbach, the prosecutor who had also been placed on leave, and by Derek Wikstrom, another Assistant U.S. Attorney at the S.D.N.Y. who’d worked on the Adams prosecution. “We will not confess wrongdoing when there was none,” they wrote in response to the Justice Department’s demand that they apologize for prosecuting Adams and failing to comply with orders. “We have served under Presidents of both parties, advancing their priorities while pursuing justice without fear or favor. . . . Now, the Department has decided that obedience supersedes all else, requiring us to abdicate our legal and ethical obligations in favor of directions from Washington. That is wrong.”
The letter, which was three paragraphs long, took little time to write. But it took considerable courage to send. A few weeks after federal marshals escorted Cohen out of 26 Federal Plaza, other marshals were dispatched to deliver a letter to Liz Oyer, a pardon attorney at the Justice Department who’d been fired after she refused to recommend restoring gun rights to Mel Gibson, a prominent Trump supporter. (The D.O.J. denied that this was the cause of her firing.) The letter cautioned her about participating in an upcoming congressional hearing. Oyer’s son was at home without her, and she and a former colleague had to make panicked pleas to get the marshals called off. (An attorney for Oyer described this stunt as a use of “the Department’s security resources to intimidate a former employee.”) Cohen had two young kids. Could something like that happen to her? “It was a time when it felt like there were no rules,” she said. “It was very scary.”
Cohen, an intensely private person, knew that the resignation letter would circulate among her peers and could, at some point, become public. When it did, she hoped that it would help highlight the apolitical basis of her team’s decision—and the danger of weakening norms that protect prosecutors from political reprisal. But the letter aroused only fleeting press attention. For a while, Cohen told me, “I felt a bit defeatist about what we’d done, looking at all the damage that happened afterward. It didn’t stop.”
Cohen’s feelings changed when she later read the resignation letters of other Justice Department lawyers—letters that often contained strikingly similar language to hers. But this did not diminish the grief she felt about the Justice Department. One thing she loved about her former job was the respect accorded to federal prosecutors for being honest brokers. She said, “We were not treated like any other litigant, because the courts trusted that, when an attorney for the government stood up and said something, there was a weight behind it—a truth behind it—that wasn’t expected of other counsel.”
This trust, known as the presumption of regularity, has been shattered, and a growing number of judges have expressed frustration and alarm. Mary S. McElroy, a federal district judge in Rhode Island, recently discovered that the government had lied by claiming that a hospital had stopped responding to its requests for records on gender-transition care for youths. “D.O.J. has proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case,” McElroy declared. “This reckless disregard for the duty of candor owed to a federal court is appalling.” In Chicago, April Perry, a U.S. district judge in northern Illinois, expressed similar dismay after finding out that, in a prosecution of ICE protesters, federal attorneys had, among other things, removed grand jurors who expressed skepticism about the case after reviewing initial evidence—and then tried to hide this maneuver by redacting the grand-jury transcripts. This conduct left Perry “incredibly shocked.”
For decades, few jobs in the legal profession were more prestigious or competitive than being a federal prosecutor. But in recent months the Justice Department has begun offering twenty-five-thousand-dollar bonuses to recruit lawyers to work in certain offices—a sign of the shortage of attorneys willing to carry out its current priorities, which include suing states to obtain sensitive voter-roll information. (Harmeet Dhillon has filed dozens of lawsuits to secure such data; judges in at least twenty-three states have rejected her demands, affirming that there are no grounds for turning this information over. Dhillon is appealing many of these rulings.) The struggle to fill these openings appears to be causing a staffing shortage that may hamper the Trump Administration’s ability to advance its agenda.
Even after Trump is gone, it is by no means clear that young lawyers will want to pursue careers as federal prosecutors. Who can assure these attorneys that, in some future Administration, they won’t be told to disregard court orders? Or that a loyalist won’t be appointed to run their office and then fire all their supervisors? Dena Robinson told me that, if she were graduating from law school today, she wouldn’t set her sights on joining the Civil Rights Division. “I would be scared,” she said. This fear is especially warranted for Black women, who have been pushed out of government jobs in outsized numbers during Trump’s second term.
Cohen now works at a private law firm, and she told me that she’s enjoying her new position. But working at the S.D.N.Y. wasn’t just a job for her. After the marshal’s visit, she recalled walking through the woods near her house, feeling bereft. “There were a lot of tears,” she said. “It was a loss of a huge component of my identity—who I was, what I had planned to dedicate my life to.” ♦