The Attorney Who Refused to Help Trump Break the Law
In February, when Attorney General Pam Bondi took over the Justice Department, she immediately informed its 10,000-odd lawyers that they would have to “zealously” advocate for the United States. What she actually meant was that, under her watch, the department would have to zealously advocate for Donald Trump. DOJ lawyers, she said in her February 5 memo, are required to “aggressively” enforce civil and criminal laws and “vigorously” defend all “presidential policies and actions.” While those lawyers have a certain amount of discretion in their duties, Bondi warned that it “does not include latitude to substitute personal political views or judgments for those that prevailed in the election.”
In past Democratic and Republican administrations alike, DOJ lawyers had the informal right to decline to affix their names to the signature block at the end of a court filing—the lawyerly equivalent of a screenwriter changing his credit to Alan Smithee when he disagrees with the studio’s choices. They could also decline to participate in some cases on conscience grounds.
Bondi ended that practice, treating it as an anti-constitutional act. DOJ lawyers who “refuse to advance good-faith arguments by declining to appear in court or sign briefs,” she claimed, undermine the constitutional order and deprive Trump “of the benefit of his lawyers.” Any DOJ attorneys who sought such exemptions “will be subject to discipline and potentially termination.”
This year, in response to Bondi’s dictates, hundreds of lawyers have left the department. Erez Reuveni was not one of them—at least, not at first. Reuveni began his tenure at the Justice Department in 2010 as a trial attorney, and across three presidencies worked his way up through the Office of Immigration Litigation. He was not a political appointee; he was a civil servant expected to represent the United States in court regardless of the president’s party or ideology, and he did.
Then something happened that made it untenable to go on. In March, a federal immigration agent detained Kilmar Abrego Garcia—who had entered the United States without authorization after fleeing El Salvador when he was 16 years old—outside a Home Depot in Hyattsville, Maryland. Three days later, a U.S. government flight sent him and dozens of other men to the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, a Salvadoran-run prison where he would be held indefinitely.
