Taking the Justice Out of the Justice Department
How Jake Tapper's "Race Against Terror" Showed Me What We've Already Lost
A few weeks ago at the Texas Tribune Festival, I did what any rational person would do: I went for the brisket and stayed for the existential crisis about the Department of Justice.
The festival is hosted by the Texas Tribune — a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom covering Texas policy and government — and every year it brings together journalists, lawmakers, and big thinkers for sharp, in-depth conversations.
This particular session took place at Austin’s world-famous Franklin Barbecue, and if someone offers you a private event there where you don’t have to wait in the infamous three-hour line, you go.
Onstage, editor-in-chief Matthew Watkins was interviewing. Jake Tapper — CNN’s Anchor and Chief Washington Correspondent — about his new book, Race Against Terror (Atria Books, 336 pages). I was deep in a brisket-and-jalapeño-cheddar-sausage coma. I zoned out during the brief discussion of Tapper’s earlier book on President Biden’s decline. I’m pretty sure he called the reaction a “shit show” but stood by his reporting.
Then the conversation moved to his new book, and something broke through my haze:
“This book is an ode to a Justice Department that no longer exists.”
That line snapped something into focus. I’d been following the DOJ collapse in real time — listening to “Strict Scrutiny” and “Amicus,” which not only give you smart, precise reporting but serve as group therapy. Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. is amazing and her “Notes from the Front” on Substack is a must-read.
I’d been caught up in the nonstop, real-time chaos — the almost unimaginable cases built on flimsy law and thinner facts, coming fast and furious. The judiciary was doing its job, issuing rulings and quietly building a record of what was really happening. I knew the Department of Justice was being dismantled in plain sight. But hearing the story of what it used to be made me equal parts proud and heartsick.
What Federal (Correct, Federal) Judges Are Saying
Federal judges are documenting the collapse of candor inside the Department of Justice bluntly. These judges’ rulings don’t just critique the arguments. They indict the conduct of the attorneys and the honesty of the government’s evidence itself. It’s like the judges have become insult comics.
“The ‘administrative record’ is a sham… [government counsel’s] chicanery… ersatz evidence.”
AFGE v. OPM — The court found DOJ had manipulated evidence, splicing an email into a fabricated context.
“A sham… You are not helping me get at the truth.”
AFGE v. OPM — DOJ withdrew a sworn declaration when the judge ordered the witness to appear for live testimony.
“This Court takes clear offense… Respondents have no evidence.”
Sanchez Puentes v. Garite — DOJ admitted it had no evidence while urging the court to sanction the petitioner anyway.
“Short on both the law and the facts… crumbled like a house of cards.”
L.G.M.L. v. Noem — DOJ told the court unaccompanied minors weren’t being removed to Guatemala. The Guatemalan government confirmed 56 of 57 families did not want their children returned.
One judge summed up the crisis of candor: “Highly misleading, if not intentionally false… little confidence that the defense can be trusted to tell the truth about anything.” (National Treasury Employees Union v. Vought)
In Abrego Garcia v. Noem, one DOJ attorney was put on administrative leave and later fired. His crime? Refusing a superior’s order to argue that an illegally deported man was an MS-13 member and a terrorist — claims never proven in court. The lawyer’s own words drew the ethical line the current DOJ crossed: “That is a lie. And I cannot sign my name to that brief.”
How Do You Prosecute the Unprosecutable?
So what did a functioning Justice Department actually look like? Tapper’s book tells that story.
Race Against Terror is a deeply reported procedural about the U.S. prosecution of Ibrahim Harun (Spin Ghul), a Nigerien-Saudi al-Qaeda fighter who gift-wrapped his own arrest.
In 2011, on a repurposed Italian cruise ship evacuating civilians from Libya during Gaddafi’s fall, Harun walked up to an officer, showed him his torture scars, and said: I am al-Qaeda. I killed Americans. Take me in.
It was the kind of confession that was legally radioactive: wrong country, wrong jurisdiction, wrong decade, wrong everything. Evidence was scattered across continents. The key events — the deadly ambush that killed Private First Class Jerod Dennis and Airman First Class Raymond Losano — took place on an Afghan battlefield eight years earlier. Tapper reports on the lives of Dennis and Losano, their childhoods, their families after their deaths, with precision and empathy.
Harun was about to be released by Italian authorities into the general populace if the U.S. couldn’t act fast. What followed was a frantic yet methodical, multinational relay to build a case that could survive a U.S. civilian court. The Italians weren’t releasing him to be tried in a military one.
This case required exactly the kind of institutional expertise we are now losing.
Fingerprints on a Quran in Afghanistan (And Other Impossible Tasks)
Take the identity problem alone: Harun had no documents. Prosecutors had to verify he was who he claimed to be using battlefield intelligence reports from 2003, biometric data, and key evidence like fingerprints lifted from a Quran recovered at the original ambush site. All of it had to be declassified, sanitized, translated, and made admissible under U.S. rules of evidence.
The 2003 firefight happened in a remote Afghan compound. The scene had long since been destroyed. Witnesses were scattered across Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan (some cooperative, some hostile, some dead). Italian authorities had custody of Harun and controlled access to him. Every interview, every document, every piece of physical evidence required navigating multiple governments, security clearances, and legal systems that don’t map onto each other.
This is what competence looks like: Career prosecutors who knew which international partners could actually deliver evidence. Investigators who understood exactly how foreign intelligence collapses in U.S. courts. Attorneys who had the institutional memory to tell political appointees, “No, we can’t do that; it’ll free the terrorist on appeal.”
Tapper portrays them as smart, exhausting, and maddeningly thorough. They knew what they were doing.
And Then There’s Lindsay Halligan
Now compare that meticulousness to the new normal.
Lindsay Halligan is now the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia — one of the most important prosecutorial offices in the country. She has no prosecutorial experience. In the James Comey grand jury case, she made what a federal judge called “fundamental misstatements of the law,” incorrectly instructing jurors about Fifth Amendment rights. In a normal DOJ, this would be a career-ender.
Now, the danger is that this is simply the cost of doing political business.
What Happens When Competence Leaves the Building
In the end, Race Against Terror isn’t just about the prosecution of one terrorist. It’s about the machinery of justice America tried to construct after 9/11. It was improvised and ambitious. It asks: What counts as a battlefield? Who counts as a combatant? How do you try a case born in the fog of a forgotten war?
And it makes the argument that the people inside the DOJ mattered as much as the legal theories they pursued.
Those people are gone. The expertise is gone. The institutional memory is gone. We are left with political appointees violating the Fifth Amendment while federal judges write the word “chicanery” in their opinions.
Read Race Against Terror. It’s a field guide to a DOJ that used to know what it was doing. But here’s the real danger: it’s not just that Trump’s DOJ is making mistakes today. It’s that the institution is losing the people who know how to fix them tomorrow.
And ask yourself this: Why would the best and brightest lawyers choose to work in the no-longer-hallowed halls of justice for a fraction of what they’d make in private practice — especially when “doing the right thing” now gets you fired?