GOP candidates vary on Justice Department role
Divided on relationship to White House
Donald Trump has promised that if he wins back the presidency he will appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family.
But he’s not the only Republican running for president who appears to be abandoning a long-established norm in Washington: presidents keeping their hands out of specific Justice Department investigations and prosecutions.
Trump, who leads the GOP field by around 30 percentage points in public national polls, wields such powerful influence that only a few of his Republican rivals are willing to clearly say presidents should not interfere in such Justice Department decisions.
After Trump’s vow to direct the Justice Department to appoint a “real” prosecutor to investigate the Bidens, The New York Times asked each of his Republican rivals questions aimed at laying out what limits, if any, they believed presidents must or should respect when it comes to White House interference with federal law enforcement decisions.
Their responses reveal a party that has turned so hard against federal law enforcement that it is no longer widely considered good politics to clearly answer in the negative a once uncontroversial question: Do you believe presidents should get involved in the investigations and prosecutions of individuals?
Trump’s closest rival, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, has flatly said he does not believe the Justice Department is independent of the White House as a matter of law while leaving it ambiguous where he stands on the issue of presidents getting involved in investigation decisions.
DeSantis’ spokesperson, Bryan Griffin, wrote in an email that comments the governor made on a recent policy call “should be instructive to your reporting.”
In the comments, DeSantis said that “the fundamental insight” he gleans from the Constitution is that the Justice Department and FBI are not “independent” of the White House and that the president can lawfully exert more direct control over them than traditionally has been the case.
Trump has portrayed his legal troubles as stemming from politicization, although there is no evidence Biden directed Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Trump. Under Garland, Trump-appointed prosecutors are already investigating Biden’s handling of classified documents and on Tuesday secured a guilty plea from Biden’s son, Hunter, on tax charges.
In the spring of 2018, Trump told his White House counsel, Don McGahn, that he wanted to order the Justice Department to investigate his 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, and James Comey, the former head of the FBI. McGahn rebuffed him, saying the president had no authority to order an investigation, according to two people familiar with the conversation.
Later in 2018, Trump publicly demanded that the Justice Department open an investigation into officials involved in the Russia investigation. The following year, Attorney General William Barr indeed assigned a Trump-appointed US attorney, John Durham, to look into the investigators — styling it as an administrative review because there was no factual predicate to open a formal criminal investigation.
Where Trump’s first-term efforts were scattered and haphazard, key allies have been developing a blueprint to make the department in any second Trump term more systematically subject to direct White House control.
Against that backdrop, Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the long-shot GOP challengers, has pledged to pardon Trump. He said that as a constitutional matter, he thinks a president does have the power to direct prosecutors to open or close specific criminal investigations. But he added that “the president must exercise this judgment with prudence in a manner that respects the rule of law in the country.”
Two Republican candidates who are both former US attorneys unequivocally stated that presidents should not direct the investigations or prosecutions of individuals. Tellingly, both are chasing votes from anti-Trump moderate Republicans.
Chris Christie, a former New Jersey governor who was a US attorney in the George W. Bush administration, said he knew “just how important it is to keep prosecutors independent and let them do their jobs.”
And Asa Hutchinson, a former Arkansas governor and congressman who served as a US attorney in the Reagan administration, said “preserving an independent and politically impartial Department of Justice in terms of specific investigations is essential for the rule of law and paramount in rebuilding trust with the American people.”