I’m hoping to bring you some news on the DOJ-in-Exile front in the not-too-distant-future. It was probably simply too early in the spring and summer of 2025. It’s not too early now. But the DOJ-in-Exile idea was and is part of a more general ambition and agenda — to create a baseline record, a predicate and an expectation of future accountability for the Trump administration’s criminal conduct. Some of that effort is a kind of opposition therapy, resisting the authoritarian aim of convincing the public that the law, the ecosystem of criminal accountability has disappeared. It heartens people. It provides a framework of expectation: the law hasn’t disappeared. We’re in an interregnum. It will return, as will accountability. The battle over expectations about the future is a central battle in any authoritarian takeover.
But it’s not solely a matter of heartening, strengthening the morale of the opposition. It is also very directly and literally laying the groundwork for criminal accountability for a renegade executive and all the corrupt actors and criminals who now populate the executive branch.
This morning we saw news that the head of the Virginia state senate, Louise Lucas, had her office raided after successfully leading the effort to redistrict the Virginia House map. It’s conceivable that there’s some legitimate criminal probe into Lucas’s conduct. But one of the key issues in recent public corruption cases and high-profile prosecutions brought by the Justice Department is that we should no longer have any expectation of good faith from the DOJ. In a case like Lucas’s we should assume that this is retribution until there is some strong evidence to the contrary. These prosecutions — in which former FBI director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and others have been targeted — aren’t simply non-standard, retributive, controversial. They are definitional abuses of power which are themselves criminal in nature. It’s part of the game that we’re supposed to start seeing these as, if not normal, than just kind of what one has to expect or deal with under Trumpism. That’s wrong. This is criminal conduct which absolutely must be investigated with an eye to holding officials criminally accountable for their actions.
The same applies to the wild and increasingly open selling of pardons, apparent foreign and domestic bribery of federal officials (Jared Kusher, Steve Witkoff, et al.), all the ways the Trump family has monetized the presidency in the last 18 months. The manufactured presidential immunity doctrine is only as strong as the current corrupt Court majority. But even on its own terms it leaves plenty of room for clawing back the gains piled up by the Trump family’s criminal conduct.
This is the complement to killing the filibuster and reforming the Supreme Court. You can’t end this kind of corruption, confirm the illegitimacy of abuses of power at this scale without criminal accountability. Is it challenging? Is it hard? Of course. But there’s simply no other way forward.