Robert Gamer: Author & Activist

In a banana republic, it is customary for the dictator to neutralize enemies, real or imagined. Absolute loyalty is expected. In El Salvador, for example, death squads were deployed to murder suspected dissidents. Every day, piles of corpses accumulated. One of the most notable victims was Archbishop Óscar Romero, assassinated while celebrating Mass. The Salvadoran armed forces targeted civilians during the insurgency. In Cuba, Fulgencio Batista and his forces tortured and killed thousands to maintain power. In Nazi Germany, Hans Frank, the legal architect of the Third Reich, made Adolf Hitler’s will the ultimate source of German law.

These chilling precedents cast a long shadow over the recent news that more than a dozen Department of Justice lawyers who brought cases against former President Donald Trump have been fired. The DOJ is a nonpartisan federal agency tasked with upholding the rule of law, independent of political influence. Given the rigorous standard by which DOJ lawyers evaluate cases, the fact that they pursued legal action against Trump suggests they believed there was a strong likelihood of conviction.

The administration’s spokesperson for these firings, Assistant Attorney General James McHenry, argued that the dismissed lawyers could not be trusted to implement the president’s agenda because they had been involved in adjudicating cases against him. But since when has the DOJ served a president’s agenda? The DOJ’s mission has always been to uphold the law, protect civil rights and ensure public safety. The president’s personal or political interests should not intersect with these responsibilities. If a president attempts to stack the DOJ with loyalists who will serve his political goals, then the department ceases to be an independent body and instead becomes a political instrument.

Defenders of these firings claim that, as chief executive, the president has the constitutional right to make such personnel decisions. But under this logic, a president could justify nearly anything—including deploying armed insurrectionists to storm the Capitol and target his own vice president. If the DOJ and other federal institutions are being bent to serve a political will rather than their constitutional duties, it is imperative to acknowledge this for what it is: an erosion of democratic norms.

Hans Frank effectively purged the German legal system of anyone who was not absolutely loyal to Hitler, replacing them with sycophants who rubber-stamped the Nazi agenda. The mass firing of DOJ lawyers who brought cases against Trump bears an unsettling resemblance to this tactic. If the DOJ is indeed being transformed into a partisan weapon, its independence is in jeopardy. The final step in this transformation would be the appointment of a Hans Frank-like figure as attorney general—a truly ominous prospect.