Once vaunted DOJ needs incentives to find new talent

 

The Justice Department is taking a new tack to overcome hurdles in attracting qualified legal talent and to prevent current lawyers from leaving: offering signing and retention bonuses throughout the Civil Division, reported Bloomberg Law.

New vacancy postings show signing bonuses of $25,000 are newly available to staff offices investigating youth transgender treatments and litigating the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.

The financial enticements are an apparent first for a department that in previous years would be inundated with resumes from lawyers willing to take significant salary reductions compared to private sector legal practice. Padding lawyers’ biweekly paychecks signals a division growing more desperate to stave off further departures of valuable legal minds, including those who’ve expressed discomfort with defending the president’s policies from a slew of lawsuits.

Further, the head of the Civil Division—which plays a crucial role advancing and protecting the president’s policies in court—informed all his attorneys Monday that they’ll begin receiving a “retention incentive allowance” ranging from around $60 to $220 every pay period through Thanksgiving, according to an internal email reviewed by Bloomberg Law.

Trial attorney vacancies posted on DOJ’s website Tuesday for the Civil Division’s recently created enforcement and affirmative litigation branch describe in bold print “a signing bonus of up to $25,000" that may be awarded to “well-qualified candidates.” The job advertisements, which would support a DOJ team that’s been repeatedly losing in court over efforts to subpoena pediatric hospitals for sensitive data on minors prescribed drugs for gender dysphoria, instruct applicants that time is of the essence.

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Autocracy Watch: Undermining the Integrity of the midterm elections

Perhaps nothing better reflects the breakdown of the guardrails that thwarted President Trump’s rashest impulses in 2020 than his creation last fall of a special White House post reinvestigating his loss to Biden, reported ProPublica. 

In December 2020, just days after AG William Barr rebuffed Trump’s Antrim County claims, lawyers in the White House counsel’s office helped prevent the president from heeding activists’ call to essentially declare martial law to seize voting machines. This multihour shouting and cussing match has been called the craziest meeting of the first Trump administration.

But the lawyer whom Trump hired in 2025 as his director of election security and integrity, Kurt Olsen, had worked to overturn Trump’s loss in court in 2020 and was later sanctioned by judges, including for making baseless allegations about Arizona elections.

Olsen’s work in the second Trump administration has breached the firewall between the White House and DOJ officials, established after Watergate to prevent law enforcement officers from making decisions based on political pressure, said Gary Restaino, a former U.S. attorney in Arizona.

“This is not a constitutional or even a statutory requirement,” Restaino said, “but it’s a democracy requirement to make sure that citizens throughout America understand that decisions about life and liberty are being made in an objective and consistent manner.”

In a previously unreported series of events, around the end of 2025, Olsen flew to Georgia to meet with Paul Brown, the head of the FBI’s Atlanta field office, according to people familiar with the matter. 

Olsen wanted the FBI to seize 2020 ballots from Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold, and gave Brown a report he claimed would justify the extraordinary action. Brown and his team emphasized to Olsen that any investigation his team did would be independent and fair. 

When Brown and his team examined the report, they found that Georgia’s election board had already looked into its allegations, dismissing many altogether, and concluding that others came down to human error, not criminal wrongdoing. The report had been assembled by a longtime ally of Olsen’s and participant in the Election Integrity Network who had a history of discredited claims, ProPublica has reported.

Based on their own investigation, Brown’s team submitted an affidavit to their superiors at DOJ that did not make a strong enough case to move forward with what Olsen wanted.

Soon after, Brown was offered a choice: retire or be moved to a new office, people with knowledge of the exchange told ProPublica. 

Olsen did not respond to requests for comment.

An FBI spokesperson said that Brown “elected to retire” and that its “work in the election security space is entirely consistent with the law.”

Brown’s ouster after refusing to carry out the seizure of 2020 election materials has been reported, but Olsen’s involvement and the details of their interactions leading to Brown’s retirement have not been previously disclosed. 

With Brown gone, the case moved ahead under his replacement. 

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CREATORS: If at First You Don't Succeed, Indict Again

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
May 5, 2026

The acting Attorney General of the United States, Todd Blanche, has announced the indictment of former Director of the FBI, James Comey. In any other administration, this would be huge news.

America reacted to the indictment with a yawn. This is the second time, and the second attorney general to appear at a press conference and announce the indictment of Comey. The first indictment didn't go so well for the Trump administration.

Days before Comey's first indictment, he was singled out by name in a social media post wherein President Donald Trump appeared to appeal directly to the Department of Justice to bring charges against Comey and complained that investigations into his political enemies had not resulted in criminal charges.

Former Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the first indictment based on allegations that Comey lied to Congress five years prior during remote testimony about Russian interference in the 2016 election. A federal judge dismissed the case, finding that the acting U.S. Attorney who sought the indictment was unlawfully holding her position and lacked authority to do so.

If possible, the second indictment is more suspect than the first. Comey was investigated last year over an Instagram post of a photograph of seashells in the sand on some sunny beach. The shells were aligned in the figures of "86 47." With the image, Comey wrote: "Cool shell formation on my beach walk."

According to NBC News, "the term '86' is used in the restaurant industry, and it can informally mean 'to get rid of.' The number '47' was thought to be related to Trump, the 47th president.

The indictment claims that a "reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances" would interpret the seashell image as "a serious expression of intent to do harm to the President of the United States."

This past Sunday, the acting Attorney General appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press," where he gave "assurances" that not everyone who posts the "86 47" message will be charged with threatening the president.

"That phrase is used constantly," according to Blanche, " ... every one of those statements do not result in indictments." Apparently, only avowed enemies of President Trump will face indictment for posting "86 47" online.

Let's start our examination of this indictment with the Fox News comments of George Washington Law School professor Jonathan Turley. If you don't know Turley, let's just say you won't find his name on a Trump enemy list, making his comments all the more surprising.

Turley told Fox, "If Comey is charged for the shell picture, it would face a monumental challenge under the First Amendment," Turley said. "In my view, the image itself is clearly protected speech. Absent some other unknown facts or elements, it would be unlikely to survive a constitutional challenge."

This time, Comey is charged with making a threat against the president and transmitting a threat in interstate commerce. Those charges require the government to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the former FBI director "knowingly and willfully" issued a threat to "take the life of" the president.

The Conservative podcaster Glenn Beck said recently, "If the seashell thing is the best the D.O.J. has on Comey, we're in trouble."

Alexis Loeb, a former DOJ deputy chief, told The Hill that the term "86" is open to different interpretations. "In the typical case — again, because the government's burden is to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt — you typically wouldn't see threats that are readily open to non-violent interpretations."

The pattern of multiple indictments against Comey is certainly an issue that Comey's defense team will raise. There is clearly an opportunity to argue vindictive prosecution or the weaponization of the Justice Department to settle a score with one of the president's enemies.

However, it may never get to that — Eugene Volokh, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who specializes in First Amendment law, told CNN, "This is not going anywhere. This is clearly not a punishable threat."

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book, "The Executioner's Toll," 2010, was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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Report: Public perception of crime often diverges from reality

Americans’ views on crime often don’t match reality — and a new report suggests those perceptions are shaped as much by personal experiences and economic conditions as by crime itself, reported the Pennsylvania Capital-Star..

The analysis, released by the nonprofit think tank Council on Criminal Justice, draws on decades of Gallup survey data to examine how people perceive crime and what drives those beliefs. The report’s authors found that, since the 1960s, public perceptions of crime have frequently diverged from actual crime trends.

Even during periods when crime declined, most Americans continued to believe it was rising. From 2005 to 2024, about 69% of survey respondents on average said crime was higher than the year before, despite overall crime rates falling in most of those years, according to the report.

Fear of crime has remained relatively stable over time. In 2024, 35% of Americans said they were afraid to walk alone at night — the same share as in 1968.

The researchers found that public concern tends to track major shifts in homicide rates more closely than broader crime trends. But overall, people’s views about crime and their fear of it have not matched shifts in crime rates for most years, according to the report.

Instead, the analysis points to other factors that shape how Americans think about public safety.

Household victimization — whether someone in the home has been a victim of a crime — was one of the strongest predictors of both fear and the belief that crime is increasing. 

Property crimes, such as theft, and people’s own experiences with crime were more closely tied to concerns about the issue than actual violent crime rates.

Economic sentiment also played a role. People who said it was a good time to find a job or expected to spend the same or more on holiday shopping were less likely to say crime was rising and less likely to report fear of walking alone at night, according to the report.

Political views showed a more limited effect. While people with more conservative ideologies were somewhat more likely to perceive crime as increasing, political party affiliation itself was not a significant factor after accounting for economic conditions and other variables.

Higher presidential and congressional approval ratings were associated with a greater likelihood that respondents said crime was staying the same or declining, according to the report.

Local conditions, meanwhile, were more closely linked to personal fears than to perceptions of crime overall. The researchers found that neighborhood factors, such as poverty and youth population, were associated with whether people said they were afraid, but did not generally influence whether they believed crime was rising locally or nationally.

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Trump Administration regularly defies court decisions

When a federal judge shot down a Trump administration policy of holding immigrants without bond last December, it seemed like a serious blow to the president’s mass deportation effort, reported The Associated Press.

Instead, a top Justice Department official insisted the ruling wasn’t binding, and the administration continued denying detainees around the country a chance for release.

By February, the district court judge, Sunshine Sykes, was fed up. Sykes, a nominee of President Joe Biden, accused Trump officials in a ruling that month of seeking “to erode any semblance of separation of powers,” adding that they could “only do so in a world where the Constitution does not exist.”

Hardly isolated, the case illustrates a broader pattern of defiance of lower court decisions in President Donald Trump’s second term.

The failure of Trump officials to follow court orders has been highlighted most notably in individual immigration cases. But a review of hundreds of pages of court records by The Associated Press also shows an extraordinary record of violations in lawsuits over policy changes and other moves.

In the second Trump administration’s first 15 months in office, district court judges ruled it was violating an order in at least 31 lawsuits over a wide range of issues, including mass layoffs, deportations, spending cuts and immigration practices, the AP’s review of court records found. That’s about one out of every eight lawsuits in which courts have at least temporarily blocked the administration’s actions.

The Republican administration’s power struggle with federal courts — which is testing basic tenets of U.S. democracy — reflects an expansive view of executive authority that has also challenged the independence of federal agencies, a president’s ethical obligations, and the U.S.’s role in the international order.

President Donald Trump walks from Marine One to board Air Force One at Ocala International Airport, in Ocala Fla., Friday, May 1, 2026, after speaking at an event in The Villages, Fla. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Judges find widespread noncompliance

The violations in the 31 lawsuits are in addition to more than 250 instances of noncompliance judges have recently highlighted in individual immigration petitions — from failing to return property to keeping immigrants locked up past court-ordered release dates.

Legal scholars and former federal judges said they could recall at most a few violations of court rulings over the full four-year terms of other recent presidential administrations, including Trump’s first time in office. They also noted previous administrations were generally apologetic when confronted by judges; the Trump administration’s Justice Department has been outright combative in some cases.

“What the court system is experiencing in the last year and a half is just qualitatively completely different from anything that’s preceded it,” said Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University who studies federal courts and is tracking litigation against the Trump administration.

Though Trump officials eventually backed down in about a third of the 31 lawsuits, legal experts say their treatment of court orders poses serious dangers.

“The federal government should be the institution most devoted to the rule of law in this country,” said David Super, a constitutional law scholar at Georgetown University. “When it ceases to feel itself bound, respect for the rule of law is likely to break down across the country.”

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