Iâm Haunted by What I Did as a Lawyer in the Trump Justice Department
No matter our intentions, lawyers like me were complicit. We owe the country our honesty about what we saw â and should do in the future.
By Erica Newland
Dec. 20, 2020
 Credit.Doug Mills/The New York Times
I was an attorney at the Justice Department when Donald Trump was elected president. I worked in the Office of Legal Counsel, which is where presidents turn for permission slips that say their executive orders and other contemplated actions are lawful. I joined the department during the Obama administration, as a career attorney whose work was supposed to be independent of politics.
We were complicit : Lawyer who worked for Trump administration pens op ed apologising to US independent.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from independent.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
New York Timesop-ed about her work for President
Donald Trump’s administration, saying that while she had good intentions, she now feels they enabled Trump’s “assault on our democracy” and is “haunted” by guilt.
Erica Newland worked for the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel from 2016-2018, originally joining during the end of President
Barack Obama’s term. She stayed on, she explains, because she “believed she could better serve our country by pushing back from within,” but now regrets that decision.
As Newland describes, she and the other DOJ attorneys made Trump’s executive orders “less destructive” and more likely to survive judicial scrutiny.
If Trump pardons himself, Biden should un-pardon him
In 1974, President Richard M. Nixon’s own Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion stating that Nixon could not pardon himself, based upon “the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case.” Likely for that reason, Nixon never pardoned himself.
If Trump were to try to take that step, presumably under the theory that Democrats will retaliate against him, Biden should first refer the question to the Office of Legal Counsel. If the OLC in 2021 concurs with the precedent of that office in 1974 which is highly likely this legal opinion would constitute a second piece of guidance shoring up the position that self-pardons are inherently unconstitutional. It would provide a basis for President Biden to then issue an executive order nullifying Trump’s action.