Trump has a growing problem – his lawyers are leaving

In less than a week, Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has seen four high-profile resignations, amid a growing crisis for an administration addicted to prosecutions and mired in controversy. The department’s head Todd Blanche, Trump’s personal criminal lawyer who became the US’s 96th attorney general in August, revealed the resignation on Monday of his assistant attorney general in the civil division, Brett Shumate. The resignation – effective immediately – was “abrupt and unexpected”, department sources told CBS. There was speculation it was linked to the promotion of Stephen Miller to White House chief of staff. Last week, the assistant attorneys general for the DoJ’s national security and civil rights divisions also quit. A key US attorney in Miami, who had overseen an unproductive investigation into Trump’s political enemies, also left last week. None have spoken publicly, but speculation has linked their departure to the Democrats’ surge in the midterms, which will see fresh scrutiny by Congress of Trump’s attempts to use the DoJ as a weapon against political adversaries. And they’re just the tip of the iceberg. More than 10,000 federal lawyers have quit since Trump took office, and many were not replaced. Observers say the drain of talent and experience is damaging the delivery and credibility of justice in America. Departures and purges The New York Times estimated in May that more than 10,000 lawyers left the federal government since the start of 2025: roughly one in five. While many were replaced, departures continued to outpace hiring.In November last year the American Bar Association Journal reported that the DoJ “has lost thousands of experienced attorneys since the start of the Trump administration and has backfilled a fraction of the open jobs, with the process snarled by a lack of qualified candidates, bureaucratic delays and hiring freezes.” Many left on principled grounds, as they found themselves pressured into leading prosecutions or investigations they considered baseless or unethical. Officials who stayed put were reportedly compared to the bureaucrats who followed orders in Nazi Germany. The issue was not helped by an internal purge, led by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, of veteran prosecutors who had worked on cases viewed as anti-Trump. The purge has continued under Blanche, targeting lawyers who refuse to prosecute for lack of evidence cases that the administration wants pursued. And the DoJ has also undermined its own recruiting processes on culture war grounds: in 2025, a Trump appointee to the DC Civil Division threatened the prestigious Georgetown Law School with refusing to hire their graduates unless they ended their diversity-equity -and-inclusion programs, the New Yorker reported. Lawyer by lawyer, the DoJ is shrinking. ‘The system sucks’ Those left behind are struggling. To put it mildly. An investigation last month by The Hill found the mass exodus of veteran attorneys had meant a huge workload increase for attorneys in the civil division, in some cases almost doubling. It has become a vicious cycle that leads to more resignations. In February, in a district court in Minnesota at the height of the ICE anti-immigrant operation Metro Surge, one lawyer made a shocking admission. “I wish you would just hold me in contempt of court so I can get 24 hours of sleep,” said Julie Le, an attorney working with the local US Attorney’s Office said. She had been deputised to the office after a wave of resignations by lawyers who did not want to press charges against anti-ICE protesters, and in response to the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent. According to one report, the office had lost almost half its staff. “We are down to a skeleton crew,” one source told Mother Jones. The wave of immigration cases left them almost no time to work on investigations into drug trafficking, gang violence, fraud or child abuse. In Le’s case, District court judge Jerry Blackwell had complained of having “so many issues with noncompliance” with court orders by government lawyers, including orders to release people being held in ICE detention unlawfully. “The Government makes the point that some of the attorneys currently are under extraordinary strain,” Blackwell said “But what you cannot do is to detain first and then sort out lawful authority later.” Le told the judge she had “stupidly” volunteered to help the DoJ handle the ICE case load, had no proper orientation or training, her emails didn’t work properly, and she found herself having to threaten to quit to get senior colleagues to respond to queries. “If I walk out – sometime I wish you would just hold me in contempt, Your Honor, so that Ican have a full 24 hours of sleep. I work days and night just because people are still in detention,” she said. “What do you want me to do? The system sucks. This job sucks..” She said she had written an email in “big, bold font” to her superiors about her frustrations. “And to be honest, Your Honor, I did put for a request to be transferred [out], but no one [was] willing to come here to stand in front of you to explain and/or to help to improve the system.” The transcript was widely shared in the legal community and beyond, as one of the most frank expressions of a crisis felt across the country. Days later, Le was no longer working at the US Attorney’s office. Losing talent Chris Geidner, a legal reporter who specialises in US federal cases, wrote in January that “the destruction done to the Department of Justice in the past year is hard to overstate”. The ABA Journal reported that the department used to attract some of the best alumni of the nation’s top law schools and firm. Now it has “difficulty finding qualified candidates for open slots”. Local US Attorney offices have resorted to emailing their networks begging for applicants. One former federal prosecutor said it was “like, ‘If you ever threw a pass, do you want to be a quarterback?’” But graduates and working lawyers are reluctant to come forward. “A lot of people I’ve spoken to just in the last few months have said that they would look down on a person if they had a federal job on their résumé that they started during this administration,” a law student told the Times after turning down a DoJ internship. John E Jones, a retired federal judge and now president of Dickinson College, blames Trump for a “massive reputational problem” at the DoJ, where the president “has had the attorneys general essentially do his bidding and prosecute his enemies”. Losing credibility Judges are starting to take notice – and it’s changing how they treat the government. In January, district court judge Irene Berger ordered the release of a detainee arrested, without a warrant, by ICE at a traffic stop. In her judgement, Berger wrote: “The presumption of regularity and integrity previously and routinely afforded to the Executive branch and the United States Attorney’s Office has been undeniably eroded in this jurisdiction and across the country, and this Court will no longer blindly accept statements of fact from [them].” Under pressure from the administration, prosecutors are starting to cut corners or even lie, judges claim. In July ProPublica published a review of hundreds of cases in which judges have criticised the actions of federal prosecutors since Trump’s re-election. They found that, increasingly, judges could not rely on a legal principle called “the presumption of regularity”: the assumption that the government has done its job properly and in good faith. “Judges simply don’t believe the representations that are being made by United States attorneys, assistant United States attorneys and the like,” former federal judge John E. Jones told ProPublica. “We’ve never seen anything close to this.” In a scathing editorial in June, former federal prosecutor James Zirin put it like this: “Plagued by the lack of experienced prosecutors and infected by politicised charging decisions that went nowhere, the Justice Department has lost sight of its core mission to see that justice is done.”