1/4/24, 6:05 PM Trump’s Second-Term Agenda: Turn the DOJ From His Prosecutor to His Biggest Defender - The

His Biggest Defender - The Messenger

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Trump’s Second-Term Agenda: Turn the DOJ From His Prosecutor to His Biggest
Defender
With a potential Trump victory, Inauguration Day 2025 would likely mean the end of the federal criminal cases and DOJ support to stymie
Georgia and New York
Published 11/12/23 06:00 AM ET | Updated 11/12/23 08:52 AM ET
Darren Samuelsohn

JWPlayer

D
onald Trump’s four indictments have come to define his 2024 presidential
bid. The historic criminal charges are at the core of his message to voters,
how he generates big donations and where he’s spending precious
campaign time.

They’re also guaranteed to be at the center of Trump’s first big explosive moves
should he win a second term: Seeing to it on Inauguration Day 2025 that his two
federal criminal cases go away - and to sidetrack, if not kill, the state cases too.

That’s the consensus from interviews with more than a dozen people across the
political spectrum — MAGA supporters, policy experts, former Trump lawyers, ex-
Justice Department officials from both GOP and Democratic administrations and
some of the former president’s biggest critics.

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At least some guard rails would remain in a second Trump term. No one doubts
Trump would face serious political opposition and landmark legal challenges that test
the American system and raise questions like nothing the country and its courts have
seen before. Should Trump win the presidency but Democrats are successful in
retaking the House of Representatives, impeachment would likely jump back to the
top of the agenda over any moves to kill his criminal cases. But even with that
constitutional backstop, almost every interview The Messenger conducted in recent
weeks came to a similar conclusion: that Trump could almost instantly make the
Justice Department shift footing from prosecuting him over mishandling classified
documents and trying to overturn the 2020 election results to instead becoming once
again his biggest legal defender.

"It would be done," said former Trump White House lawyer Ty Cobb. "There's zero
doubt."

Added Akhil Reed Amar, Yale University’s Sterling Professor of Law and Political
Science and a Trump critic: “The presidency is a very powerful office. He would be in
a position to do many things.”

“Who's gonna say no to him now?” former Virginia GOP Rep. Barbara Comstock, a
frequent critic of Trump’s, said last Wednesday night during a panel discussion in
Washington, D.C. hosted by the conservative group, the Society for Rule of Law.

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A demonstrator stands outside the Barrett Prettyman Courthouse in Washington, DC, on August 1, 2023, following former US President
Donald Trump's indictment. (Photo by STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)

‘The American voters are on notice of what President

Trump could do’

When it comes to the swirling mass of criminal allegations connected to his first term,
Trump’s second term plans are no real secret.

He’s talked openly for more than a year about potentially pardoning January 6
rioters. In April, Trump's campaign posted one in a series of videos promising if re-
elected to make it is "personal mission to restore the scales of justice in America."

Former aides unaffiliated with the Trump campaign stationed at the Heritage
Foundation have crafted a policy playbook that proposes major overhauls at DOJ,
including ending the 10-year term for Trump-appointed FBI Director Chris Wray and
an immediate review of all major FBI investigations and activities with a plan to
“terminate any that are unlawful or contrary to the national interest.”

Recent reporting by The New York Times and The Messenger has centered around
other efforts underway to stock a new Republican White House and its DOJ with
loyalist lawyers willing to make the kinds of decisions Trump’s first-term counselors
wouldn’t.

Trump’s calls for revenge against his political enemies were prominent during the
2016 White House race but now carry a much more specific and threatening tone

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1/4/24, 6:05 PM Trump’s Second-Term Agenda: Turn the DOJ From His Prosecutor to His Biggest Defender - The Messenger
since the 77-year old former president is a defendant in four different jurisdictions
where convictions could amount to significant prison time.

“If I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very
badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.' They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the
election,” Trump told Univision in an interview that aired Thursday.

Peter Strzok, a former FBI agent who landed in Trump’s cross hairs for leading the
early stages of the bureau’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016
election, said the former president’s campaign rhetoric is not cryptic.

“He doesn’t hide anything,” Strzok said. “It’s not complicated. It’s out there. Get rid of
as many people and get in as many loyalists as he possibly can. And turn the
government into an instrument of his will and desire to turn it into a patronage
system. It’s not hidden. He’s not talking out of both sides of his mouth.”

But sketching out how Trump’s second term would actually go is also inherently
difficult. There’s a long list of both incremental and significant developments set to
unfold over the next 12 months, including the pace of the Trump criminal court cases
and possible trials scheduled to start next spring, plus future decisions from judges,
juries and appellate panels that will keep on reshaping the landscape he would inherit
on January 20, 2025.

Who controls both chambers of Congress in a potential second Trump term also has
significant implications beyond just the legislative wins a Republican president might
envision to also include Senate confirmation votes for his appointees, as well as more
impeachments.

Trump’s supporters chuckle when asked about a third House impeachment

possibility as a result of Trump nixing his criminal cases. That may cause political
headaches but they also note that a re-elected Trump would be taking office with a
mandate to make his criminal cases go away.

“Who cares? Badge of honor,” said Mike Davis, a former senior aide to Iowa GOP Sen.
Chuck Grassley who is now founder and president of the Trump-supporting Article III
Project. “The American voters are on notice of what President Trump could do when
he’s back in office and they’re still going to put him back in office. The American
people will decide this issue in 2024.”

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Former US President and 2024 hopeful Donald Trump arrives to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Virginia, on
August 3, 2023, after his arraignment in court. OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images

Why a Supreme Court ruling would matter

How exactly Trump makes his cases vanish depends to a large degree on where they
are in the process, said Anthony Coley, a former Biden Justice Department
spokesman. A re-elected Trump would be most at risk in the event he’s been
convicted in one of the two federal cases and also lost on all his appeals, including up
to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“The operative words are fully adjudicated,” Coley said. “If the Supreme Court weighs
in and upholds a case then that is the end of the line. He’ll have to serve, if he’s
elected, incarcerated or we’ll see how the Bureau of Prisons would figure it out.”

The chances that any of Trump’s cases have gotten that far by January 2025 remains
an open question. His trial in Washington, D.C., on four felony counts connected to
2020 election interference and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol is
scheduled to run from early March of next year until at least early May. Sandwiched
inside that same time period is Trump’s criminal case in New York state court where
he’s charged with 34 criminal counts in connection with a hush money payment to
adult actress Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet about an alleged affair during the 2016
presidential campaign.

Trump’s South Florida federal trial for mishandling classified information after
leaving the White House is on the books for late May, though U.S. District Judge
Aileen Cannon on Friday issued an order that acknowledged she’s well aware of the
bunched-up calendar for all of Trump’s legal issues and that she’ll reconsider the

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timing of the 40-count felony trial involving the former president and two co-
defendants during an early March hearing. There’s no trial schedule yet for Trump in
Fulton County, Ga., where four of the former president's original 18 fellow co-
defendants have since pleaded guilty with cooperation agreements in District
Attorney Fani Willis' case that's also about 2020 election interference.

Donald Trump holds a rally at The Ted Hendricks Stadium at Henry Milander Park on Nov. 8, 2023 in Hialeah, Florida. (Photo by Alon
Skuy/Getty Images)

Considering all those moving parts, there’s a widespread expectation a second-term

Trump would be able to get the Justice Department to file motions in federal court
that permanently dismiss the federal charges. He could even do this without a
Senate-confirmed attorney general by getting a Justice Department staffer to sign off
on the filings “as long as they’ve got a bar card,” said a former senior DOJ official.

As for the political fallout from any mass Justice Department exodus over
presidential interference, a senior ex-Trump aide acknowledged the Watergate-era
scenario that played out along these lines before President Richard Nixon’s 1974
resignation: “That’d be a good riddance situation for most of the people in Trump
world. The Saturday Night Massacre scenario of resignations would be a welcome
thing. It’d not be an, ‘OMG we’re losing attorneys.’”

As a backstop, Trump’s supporters are also urging a self pardon — plus reprieves for
all his family, associates and supporters — in case any judges presiding over the
former president's cases won’t accept the DOJ’s change of position.

Trump critics like Yale’s Reed Amar, a constitutional expert and presidential historian
who served as an informal consultant to the TV show ‘The West Wing,’ said that there
are other ways a second-term Trump could secure a pardon protecting himself from

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criminal liability. “You could temporarily step aside, have your vice president do
certain things and then resume the powers of the presidency,” he said.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump rides in a motorcade as he travels to the Fulton County jail on August 24, 2023 in Atlanta,
Georgia. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

In the Georgia and New York criminal cases, that also means widespread expectations
that the DOJ would step in and file whatever motions are necessary requesting
Trump as the duly-elected president be extracted from whatever stage of the
proceedings he’s in, including incarceration should he have already been convicted.

That move has no precedent, and the U.S. Supreme Court could be asked to parse the
question of whether a sitting president’s constitutional obligations supersede the
outcome of a state criminal case. But even there, the expectation remains that Trump
would at least get to serve his four years in the White House before having to face any
kind of legal consequences in a state.

“If he's convicted and he doesn't get bailed out pending appeal, they'd have to spring
him at noon on January 20,” said George Conway, the conservative lawyer and
outspoken Trump critic who was married to former Trump White House counselor
Kellyanne Conway. “I believe that and I'll be honest, nobody wants to see Donald
Trump spend the rest of his life in prison more than I do.”

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