The Department of Justice
The United States went its first 81 years without a Justice Department — and the one Congress finally created in 1870 was deliberately designed to be the government's lawyer, not the president's enforcer.
The Department of Justice as Political Weapon
How the institution designed to be the nation's independent law enforcement arm — insulated from White House political direction — has been repeatedly turned against political opponents, and why the structural conditions that make it possible have never been fixed.
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DOJ Independence
The wall between the White House and the Justice Department's prosecutorial decisions is not a law — it is a norm, enforced by nothing except the political cost of violating it, which has proven to be an unreliable constraint.
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The Saturday Night Massacre
On October 20, 1973, Richard Nixon ordered his attorney general to fire the special prosecutor investigating him — and both the attorney general and his deputy resigned rather than comply, in the most explicit test of DOJ independence in American history.
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Special Counsels and Independent Prosecutors
The United States has tried three different legal mechanisms for appointing a prosecutor the president cannot immediately fire — and each version has been weaker than the one before it.
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COINTELPRO
From 1956 to 1971, the FBI ran a secret program to surveil, infiltrate, discredit, and destroy American political organizations — including civil rights groups, anti-war movements, and socialist parties — using methods the Senate later called 'a sophisticated vigilante operation.'
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Prosecutorial Discretion
Federal prosecutors cannot charge every crime they could prove — and the power to decide who gets investigated, who gets charged, and how hard the government fights determines who goes to prison and who goes free, long before a jury is seated.
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Contempt of Congress
Congress can vote to hold executive officials in contempt — but the only way to enforce that contempt citation is to ask the Justice Department to prosecute them, and the Justice Department answers to the president the officials are defying.
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The Unitary Executive Theory
A theory developed in Reagan-era law offices holds that the president has total, exclusive control over every officer in the executive branch — a reading of the Constitution that, if fully adopted, would make DOJ independence not just politically fragile but constitutionally impermissible.