Trump’s Justice Department in Crisis as Thousands of Lawyers Quit

The Justice Department is running out of attorneys.

The nation’s largest law office has repeatedly asked for delays in arguing its myriad cases, and in doing so has accidentally divulged a massive staffing crisis raging underneath the surface.

In an obscure civil lawsuit dug up by independent journalist Scott MacFarlane, a Justice Department attorney revealed that “the Appellate Section has lost over 40 percent of its attorneys since February 2025, due to retirement, resignation, or temporary transfer.”

“At this time, it is not possible for me to assign this case to yet another attorney, who would need to devote time to learning the issues,” she wrote in a filing dated February 19.

The overwhelming stress inside the agency has seeped through the cracks in other ways, as well. In early February, a lawyer volunteering with the short-staffed office on ICE-related cases in Minnesota begged a judge to put her in contempt of court so that she could “get 24 hours of sleep.”

“The system sucks, this job sucks, I am trying with every breath I have to get you what I need,” said attorney Julie Le when pressed as to why the government had failed to follow judicial orders. Since then, Le was removed from the temporary position and reshuffled back to ICE. She has since leveraged the notoriety of her remarks to launch a congressional bid for Minnesota’s 5th congressional district.

The DOJ’s appellate staffs vary in size but altogether account for more than 150 positions, according to a 2012 write-up in Scotusblog by Al J. Daniel Jr., a former DOJ appellate attorney.

Yet that’s just the tip of the iceberg for the department’s staffing woes. There were an estimated 10,000 attorneys working across the Justice Department before Donald Trump returned to the White House. By September 2025, that number had been nearly halved: Justice Connection, an advocacy group that tracks DOJ departures, estimated that around 5,500 people (not all of them attorneys) had left the department, either by their own volition, by accepting the Trump administration’s buyout, or by being fired.

Just a fraction of those experienced employees have been replaced, causing a massive backlog of work. The immigration court system—which has been placed under tremendous pressure as a result of Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda—has been particularly hampered, experiencing a backlog of more than 3.3 million cases by the end of February 2026, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. That means that the lives of more than three million people are effectively on pause as they await legal decisions that determine whether their future will be spent inside or outside of the United States.

The Justice Department’s rightward shift toward the MAGA agenda has sparked concern inside the legal community, with former prosecutors and ethics directors arguing that the agency’s recent politicization has undermined public confidence in the country’s legal system.

Donald Trump is lying about the U.S. military’s escalating extrajudicial strikes on vessels in the Caribbean, according to a sweeping report from The Intercept published Monday.

In late January, Trump claimed to reporters in the Oval Office that the Pentagon’s deadly strikes on boats suspected of carrying drugs from South America to the United States had successfully brought down the amount of “drugs entering our country by sea” by 97 percent.

But the Pentagon’s own statements don’t support this outrageous claim, Rear Admiral William Baumgartner, the former commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District, told The Intercept.

“He’s trying to imply that 97 percent of the cocaine that left South America by boat headed to the United States has been stopped,” Baumgartner said. “That’s not true and is contradicted by the administration’s own statements.”

In March, Joseph Humire, a Pentagon official, told the House Armed Services Committee that there had been only a “20 percent reduction of movements of drug vessels in the Caribbean and an additional 25 percent reduction in the Eastern Pacific.” Humire also credited Operation Southern Spear with causing a 20 percent drop in drug overdose deaths as of September 2025—but the strikes on so-called drug boats didn’t start until September.

“I can’t imagine how you could come to some of these conclusions regarding illegal smuggling and drug overdose deaths based on the facts as we know them,” Baumgartner told The Intercept.

As the White House has continued to espouse the strikes’ value as a deterrent against trafficking, there is little evidence that vessels are actually being deterred. Last month, there were eight strikes in the span of 16 days, with five strikes occurring within as many days, according to The Intercept.

Last month, the Coast Guard boasted a record-setting interdiction of cocaine seized in the Caribbean and the Pacific, suggesting that trafficking has not stopped.

Baumgartner pointed to a recent offloading of 1.2 tons of cocaine by the U.S. Coast Guard, which claimed the haul was worth $19.3 million altogether. “This works out to be about a $16,500 per kilogram wholesale price. It doesn’t reflect the major jump in price that you would expect if you really had 97 percent reduction in flow,” Baumgartner said.

It’s also worth noting that the House Armed Services Committee was explicitly told that vessels were not actually transporting fentanyl, according to Representative Sara Jacobs and five other government officials who spoke to The Intercept.

“They had some convoluted reason why it was still impacting fentanyl that was hard to follow and I did not buy,” Jacobs told the outlet, before pointing out that statistics suggest that 99 percent of the drugs that enter the United States come through legal ports of entry, brought by U.S. citizens and permanent residents.

Baumgartner also easily dismantled Trump’s outrageous claim about how many lives he’s saved: about 25,000 per boat, the president claimed.

“The claim that sinking each cocaine smuggling boat saves 25,000 lives makes no sense,” said Baumgartner. “That would probably be more than the number of cocaine deaths in the last five decades combined.”

President Trump is directly ordering Senate Republicans to attempt to turn embattled Democratic Senator John Fetterman to their side to ensure that they maintain their slim Senate majority.

Politico has reported that if Fetterman does turn Republican, it will be because of Trump’s lobbying, the endorsement and “financial windfall” he’s apparently being promised, and the influence of Republican Senators Dave McCormick and Katie Britt, whom he is close with. One anonymous source claimed that Fetterman was open to the idea of switching sides.

Fox News host Sean Hannity gave up the game to Fetterman while he interviewed the Democrat on his show in March.

“I did talk to President Trump last night, and I told him you were gonna be on the show,” Hannity told Fetterman. “And he said ‘OK. I wanna give you a job. Your job is to tell him: He’s gonna be run as a Republican, he’s gonna have our full support, more money than he ever dreamed of, and he’s gonna win big.’”

But Fetterman says he remains steadfast in his commitment to the Democratic Party—at least publicly.

“I’m not changing,” he told Politico in an interview published Monday. “I’m a Democrat, and I’m staying one.... I’d be a shitty Republican.”

Some would say Fetterman has been a pretty shitty Democrat too, fueling this Republican effort to get him to switch sides.

Since first running for office as a Bernie Sanders–backed progressive eight years ago, and keeping up the facade in his 2022 Senate campaign, Fetterman has gone out of his way to offer rhetorical and legislative support for President Trump’s agenda while spiting the left flank that helped him secure his Senate seat. He was the very first Senate Democrat to meet with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and has defended the actions of federal immigration agents, saying that any calls to abolish ICE were “inappropriate and outrageous.” He is the only Democrat who voted against curtailing Trump’s war powers in Iran, and he is one of the staunchest supporters of Israel in the Senate. In one conversation last year, he reportedly proclaimed, “Let’s get back to killing,” referring to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. “Kill them all.” Fetterman later denied the account.

Earlier this month, not a single one of his Pennsylvania House counterparts could offer a vote of confidence for his 2028 reelection when asked by Punchbowl News. These admissions, while unsurprising, add yet another layer of contention to Fetterman’s relationship to his own party.

These positions aren’t just unpopular among the Democrats rebuking him, they’re unpopular throughout the entire state. Last month, CNN polling showed that Fetterman’s net approval rating with state Democrats has plummeted a ghastly 108 points since he took office, from +68 in 2023 to -40 in 2026. “He’s down there with the Titanic,” CNN’s Harry Enten said. “There’s no historical analog to his unpopularity.”

With all this in mind, it seems only natural that Trump is now actively courting the man he calls his “favorite Democrat.”

Donald Trump has the reputation of being a bit of a card shark—but apparently, he has no idea what he’s doing at the table.

The president was roasted alive on Sunday after he revealed via a photoshopped image that he doesn’t understand the rules of the popular card game UNO.

The image, first circulated by Trump and then the White House, depicts Trump holding a handful of “wild” cards. It’s unclear what Trump was referring to, but he has said before that he holds “all the cards” when it comes to negotiating with Iran.

“I have all the cards,” Trump wrote—apparently unaware that the goal of the 55-year-old game is to have no cards.

“In Uno that means you are losing,” quipped MeidasTouch editor in chief Ron Filipkowski.

“I bet this goes hard if you’re fucking stupid,” wrote Jamie Bonkiewicz, a political commentator who was allegedly visited by the Secret Service in January after she tweeted about White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

Other social media users had different interpretations of Trump’s empty flex, using the open-format meme to call the president out on his soft spot for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his failed economic strategies against China and Xi Jinping, his various connections to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and the current state of the war with Iran.

“Starting to think all those 3-D chess analogies were off the mark,” wrote X user @RoguePotusStaff.

That same day, in another ludicrous attempt to frame the president as a relentless victor, the White House official account shared an hour-long loop of Trump saying the word “winning” at one of his campaign rallies. “Can’t stop, won’t stop,” the account wrote.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche admitted Sunday that “86 47” isn’t a serious threat against President Donald Trump.

NBC’s Meet the Press host Kristen Welker asked Blanche what he made of the dozens of products being sold on Amazon that use the slogan “86 47,” the same slogan that landed former FBI Director James Comey with his second indictment for allegedly threatening the president.

“Should individuals selling or buying ‘86 47’ merchandise be concerned that they’re going to be prosecuted by the DOJ?” Welker asked.

“This isn’t about a single incident,” Blanche said.

“That’s posted constantly, that phrase is used constantly, there are constantly men and women who choose to make threatening statements against President Trump. Every one of those statements do not result in indictments, of course,” he added.

“Just to be very clear, you are suggesting the seashells themselves are not at the root of this indictment?” Welker pressed.

“No, I am suggesting that every single case depends on the investigation that’s done. And of course, the seashells are part of that case, I mean, that’s what the public sees,” Blanche said.

“But without a doubt—and it should be evident by the fact that it’s been 11 months since the posting and the indictment—there is an investigation that takes place. And the result of that investigation is the indictment that was returned last week.”

A look at the actual indictment suggests that it really is just about the seashells. The indictment alleges that the shells were a “serious expression of intent to do harm” against the president. The document makes no mention of additional materials that supposedly contributed to the legitimacy of that threat. And as Blanche readily admitted Sunday, “86 47” is widely used by Trump’s critics and is not considered to be a serious threat in every case.

So, what made this case different? Blanche didn’t bother to explain, simply pointing to the 11 months it took the DOJ to investigate a highly publicized Instagram post. It seems the only difference is who posted it: someone who Trump has decided is his enemy.