| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021144)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021144" |
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| engine: "engine undisclosed (ep-nov-12.greg.technology mirror)" |
| externalSource: "greg-ep-nov-12" |
| externalLicense: "not granted" |
| externalCredit: "ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| externalUrl: "https://ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| --- |
| |
| 40 |
| MICHAEL WOLFF |
| the presidency. That's what it looked like on paper. But the opposite was |
| true, too. There was a permanent-government class in the Justice Depart- |
| ment that believed an election ought to have no role at all in how the |
| DOJ conducted itself. The department was outside politics and ought |
| to be as blind as the courts. In this view, the Justice Department, as the |
| nation's preeminent investigator and prosecutor, was as much a check on |
| the White House, and ought to be as independent of the White House, |
| as the other branches of government. (And within the Justice Department, |
| the FBI claimed its own level of independence from its DO] masters, as |
| well as from the White House itself.) |
| Even among those at Justice and the FBI who had a more nuanced |
| view, and who recognized the symbiotic nature of the department's rela- |
| tionship with the White House, there was yet a strong sense of the lines |
| that cannot be crossed. The Justice Department and the FBI had, since |
| Watergate, found themselves accountable to Congress and the courts. Any |
| top-down effort to influence an investigation, or any evidence of having |
| bowed to influence-memorialized in a memo or email-might derail a |
| career. |
| In February 2018, Rachel Brand, the associate attorney general, a for- |
| mer Bush lawyer who had been nominated for the number three DOJ |
| job by Obama, resigned to take a job as a Walmart lawyer. If Trump had |
| fired Rosenstein during Brand's tenure, she would have become acting |
| leagues she wanted to get out before Trump fired Rosenstein and then |
| demanded that she fire Mueller. She would take Bentonville, Arkansas, |
| where Walmart had its headquarters, over Washington, D.C. |
| For a generation or more, the arm's-length relationship between the |
| White House and the Department of Justice often seemed more like a |
| never-ending conflict between armed camps. Bill Clinton could hardly |
| stomach his attorney general, Janet Reno, having to weather the blowback |
| from her decisions regarding Ruby Ridge, a standoff and deadly overre- |
| action between survivalists and the FBI; Waco, another botched standoff |
| with a Christian cult; and the investigation of Dr. Wen Ho Lee, with the |
| DO] chastised for its reckless pursuit of a suspected spy. Clinton came |
| very close to firing Louis Freeh, his FBI director, who openly criticized |
| SIEGE |
| 41 |
| him, but managed to swallow his rage. Top people from the Bush White |
| House, the FBI, and the Justice Department almost came to literal blows |
| at the bedside of the ailing AG John Ashcroft-James Comey himself |
| standing in the way of the White House representatives trying to get Ash- |
| croft to renew a domestic surveillance program-with the White House |
| finally having to back down. Under Obama, Comey, who by then was the |
| FBI director, made a further grab for the FBI's independence from the |
| Justice Department when he unilaterally decided to end and later reopen |
| the Hillary Clinton email investigation-and, by doing so, arguably toss- |
| ing the election to her opponent. |
| Enter Donald Trump, who had neither political nor bureaucratic |
| experience. His entire working life was spent at the head of what was in |
| essence a small family operation, one designed to do what he wanted and |
| to bow to his style of doing business. At the time of his election, he was |
| absent even any theoretical knowledge of modern government and its |
| operating rules and customs. |
| Trump was constantly being lectured about the importance of "cus- |
| tom and tradition" at the Justice Department. As reliably, he would |
| respond, "I don't want to hear this bullshit!" |
| He needed, one aide observed, "a hard, black line. Without a hard, |
| black line that he can't cross, he's crossing it." |
| Trump believed what to him seemed obvious: the DOJ and FBI |
| in his tenure about both his attorney general Jeff Sessions and his FBI |
| director James Comey. "I am the boss!" |
| "I could have made my brother the attorney general" Trump insisted, |
| although in fact he did not even speak to his brother (Robert, a seventy- |
| one-year-old retired businessman). "Like Kennedy. (Six years after John |
| E. Kennedy appointed his brother Robert attorney general, Congress |
| passed the Federal Anti-Nepotism Statute, called the "Bobby Kennedy |
| law." to prevent exactly this sort of thing in the future- although that |
| did not stop Trump from hiring his daughter and son-in-law as senior |
| advisers.) |
| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021144 |
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