President Donald Trump came up with a bonkers excuse to explain away the legal carnage in his administration.
One in five lawyers working for the federal government, which works out to be over 10,000 people, have left their jobs since Trump’s second term in office, according to a report in The New York Times.
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser told the Times that he hired 22 lawyers from across the federal government in the past year. He said his new hires were leaving because they “want no part” in Trump’s administration.
The Justice Department and the Department of Education have both suffered greatly from a departure of federal lawyers. The DOE, which Trump is seeking to close permanently, has lost 53 percent of the lawyers it employed prior to his second term as president.
Trump attempted to put a positive spin on the legal talent exiting the government under his watch. He made a Truth Social post on Sunday that claimed while the Times treats it as “a bad thing,” for him, “actually, it’s very good.”
“The people that are leaving are Radical Left Deep State Lunatics, who are destroying our Country, and Weaponizing Government,” Trump posted. “Many of them didn’t leave, but were fired!”
Trump, 79, repeated his claim that people losing their jobs and being fired is not a “terrible thing” and is actually “just the opposite.”
“We want people that will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, not people that are trying to destroy our Country, that were put in by Obama and Biden and, in many cases, they shouldn’t have been representing the U.S.A. in the first place,” he wrote.
“We want people that will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, not people that are trying to destroy our Country, that were put in by Obama and Biden and, in many cases, they shouldn’t have been representing the U.S.A. in the first place.
“Let them go on to `bigger, better, and brighter’ things in the future—I fully support that, and wish them all well!," Trump signed off.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
The Department of Homeland Security was the only government agency to increase lawyers, due to the spike in immigration cases as a result of Trump’s mass deportation efforts.
Over 2,600 lawyers have left the Department of Justice in the past 16 months, while six different government agencies have lost over a quarter of their attorneys, according to the Times.
“This is a remarkable shift in talent out of the federal government to other places,” Andrew Mergen, director of the Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School, told the publication.
Many experienced lawyers who are no longer working for the Trump administration are seeking employment with Democratic state attorneys general and nonprofits that are challenging Republican policies in court.
“There’s all this awareness that people in the federal government are dissatisfied, are angry, are frustrated, and want no part of it,” Weiser said.
“That’s translating directly to people saying, ‘I want to be part of organizations that actually operate with integrity, that people want to be a part of, that people feel good about doing the right thing.’”
One law student, who had just finished his first year at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, even suggested working in the Trump administration was toxic.
“A lot of people my age are asking, ‘Is it worth getting a job, and will that help career-wise—having one year of Trump administration experience on your résumé?’” Matthew Duray, who called himself a conservative Republican, said.
“Or will that hurt? And that’s the question I guess everyone’s asking, and that’s the bet you have to make ahead of time. But it’s hard to know long-term.”
Trump has fired lawyers in the Justice Department who did not align with his agenda, while attorneys previously assigned to prosecute Jan. 6 rioters, or indeed the president himself, have also lost their jobs.
Former Attorney General Pam Bondi also lost her job in April after the botched handling of the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
