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This is an adapted excerpt from the July 28 episode of “Velshi.”
Project 2025’s chapter on the Justice Department begins with a bit of a tell: “Not reforming the Department of Justice will also guarantee the failure of that conservative Administration’s agenda in countless other ways.”
A common misconception held by Donald Trump while he was president was that the Justice Department worked for him, not for the American people. Chapter 17 seeks to make that misconception true.
Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and architect of Project 2025, is already on board with Trump’s perspective. In January, he told The New York Times, “[W]e just disagree wholly that the Department of Justice is independent of the president or the executive branch.”
A common misconception held by Donald Trump while he was president was that the Justice Department worked for him, not for the American people.
Now, Project 2025’s 922-page blueprint for a second Trump term isn’t an easy read. The words and sentences are deliberately confusing. But make no mistake, Project 2025 calls for a Justice Department working in lockstep with a potential Trump administration.
That means if Trump is re-elected, the branch tasked with independently and impartially upholding the rule of law will be in the hands of a man convicted of 34 felony counts, who has promised revenge and retribution against his personal enemies.
What could possibly go wrong?
Let’s start with Project 2025’s plans for the FBI, which is a branch within the Justice Department. While president, Trump was supremely frustrated by his inability to control the FBI. He wanted desperately for the agency to drop its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
So it follows that Project 2025 would encourage the next conservative administration to place the FBI under more “politically accountable” leadership — code words for “loyal to the president.”
It also wants the FBI to stop investigating online misinformation, a new initiative that feels more important than ever.
The agency wouldn’t investigate police misconduct, either. Another hidden detail in Chapter 17 is the call to “Promptly and properly eliminate … all existing consent decrees.”
The Justice Department typically hands down consent decrees to local jurisdictions after investigations into police wrongdoing — think of them like court-ordered improvement plans. These decrees usually compel jails to improve their conditions or police departments to consider their tactics and report back to the Justice Department.
Project 2025 argues the Justice Department should “disclaim” its ability to hand down consent decrees.
Another target of this chapter is local and state attorneys who use their own discretion to pursue or not pursue prosecution. Project 2025 calls for the Justice Department to “initiate legal action against local officials—including District Attorneys—who deny American citizens the ‘equal protection of the laws’ by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions.”
This would be a radical departure from the norm, and it goes against the very purpose of local district attorneys.
As the Marshall Project’s Jamiles Lartey explains, “Choosing which cases to pursue and which to drop is a core responsibility of prosecution, and one of the arguments for the local election of district attorneys is that communities may have different priorities on how these choices get made.”
But no such quarter would be given in a second Trump term.
Project 2025’s new-era Justice Department would cement long-standing grudges Trump holds against the various legal guardrails he crashed into during his four years in office.
If you’d prefer a Justice Department that will defend and uphold voting rights, I have bad news for you: Project 2025 would reorient the federal government’s role from upholding voting rights to suppressing them. It takes specific aim at so-called mail-in ballot fraud and other types of voting and registration that became targets of The Big Lie:
“With respect to the 2020 presidential election, there were no DOJ investigations of the appropriateness or lawfulness of state election guidance. … The Pennsylvania Secretary of State should have been (and still should be) investigated and prosecuted for potential violations.”
That paragraph explicitly targets a specific official whom Trump blames for his 2020 election loss.
Again, what could go wrong?
If implemented, Project 2025’s new-era Justice Department would cement long-standing grudges Trump holds against the various legal guardrails he crashed into during his four years in office and in the years since, and it would mutate the Justice Department into nothing more than a crude beating stick for Trump and his allies to use against their perceived enemies.
Allison Detzel contributed.
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