President Donald Trump has been trying to use the Department of Justice as his personal law firm. Under Trump’s DOJ, cases are dropped for personal political reasons or built without evidence. The DOJ has also sought to prosecute Trump’s adversaries and political foes, including James Comey, the former FBI director, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general whose office filed a civil lawsuit against Trump in 2022.

Those cases have faced some challenges: On Monday, a federal judge threw out the government’s charges against Comey and James.

But Trump’s attempts to use the Justice Department for political ends are leaving their mark inside the department as well. Emily Bazelon, a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine, spoke to some of the thousands of DOJ attorneys who have resigned or been fired since January. Through their stories, she navigated us around the turmoil happening at the department, the pushback to Trump’s directives, and where it all leaves us.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Let’s go back to the beginning. It is day one of the new Trump administration, and what is going on at the DOJ?

On the very first day, Trump first of all makes it clear that lawyers who are personally loyal to him are going to be in charge of the Justice Department. That starts with the attorney general, Pam Bondi, but there are other people he puts in place as well. And then the other thing he did was that he pardoned all of the people accused of rioting and violence on January 6th in the insurrection at the US Capitol.

This was the biggest investigation in the history of the Justice Department. They felt really strongly that this was a really important signal to send – that the US government would not tolerate the kind of violence and disruption that could have derailed the peaceful transfer of power........

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