The page numbers provided link directly to the relevant sections in the Project 2025 document.
Department of justice
Project 2025 Will Politicize Every Component of the DOJ
Project 2025 provides a detailed plan to overhaul the Executive Branch to vastly limit the role of government and place all federal agencies under a “unitary presidency”, ensuring that the execution of statutes and regulations adhere to a right-wing ideology. The authors of Project 2025 claim the DOJ, and by extension, the FBI, have lost the American people's trust [545, 549]. To remedy this ill-perceived idea, Project 2025 proposes placing the Justice Department squarely under Donald Trump’s authority, doing away with any traditional independence that we usually see for the Justice Department and the Attorney General, and states the conservative administration should eliminate any office within the FBI that it has the power to eliminate without Congressional authority [551]. The Verdict, Legal Analysis and Commentary from Justia, July 12, 2024, Jon May; Interview between Laura Barrón-López, White House Correspondent for the PBS News Hour and Amna Nawaz, Co-Anchor of PBS News Hour
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. If Donald Trump is reelected, the Department of Justice will become an instrument of a right-wing agenda, employing lawful and unlawful means to punish state and federal public officials who refuse to obey its commands. Ali Velshi, MSNBC
As Donald Trump was leaving the New York Supreme Court on October 18, 2023, where he was on trial for (and subsequently convicted of) 34 counts of civil fraud he said, “And I will direct a completely overhauled DOJ to investigate every radical out-of-control prosecutor in America for their illegal, racist and reverse enforcement of the law.”
Donald Trump told a CPAC crowd in Maryland: "In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution." Annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), March 3, 2023.
Project 2025 Will Limit or Remove Prosecutorial Discretion
Project 2025 intends to prepare a plan to immediately end any policies, investigations, or cases that run contrary to law or Administration policies. [557] Ultimately, all calls to the Department’s litigation must be consistent with the President’s policy agenda and the rule of law. [557] To this end, the DOJ leadership must be prepared to impose disciplinary action as necessary. [569] 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.” Donald Trump has said plainly, clearly, and without equivocation, “I will direct a completely overhauled DOJ to investigate every radical out-of-control prosecutor in America for their illegal, racist, and reverse enforcement of the law.”
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.”
Project 2025 Will Seek to Terminate Any Consent Decree It Deems Unnecessary or Outdated
The Justice Department typically hands down consent decrees to local jurisdictions after investigating police wrongdoing — think of them like court-ordered improvement plans. It typically leads to enforceable agreements between local officials and the Department of Justice known as consent decrees. This investigative approach has been used to look into abusive policing in Ferguson, Missouri, Minneapolis, and dozens of other departments since the mid-1990s — often after high-profile police violence. Closing Argument, The Marshall Project, July 20, 2024. These decrees usually compel jails to improve their conditions or police departments to consider their tactics and report back to the Justice Department. Furthermore, Project 2025 wants the DOJ to intervene in matters settled years ago where consent decrees or settlements continue in force and effect today [558]. Intervention by the DOJ may well upset years and years of previous improvements.
Not all consent decrees involve jails and policing. Currently, the State of Oklahoma is engaged in negotiations for a consent decree involving a lawsuit where a violation of due process rights is alleged by failing to provide timely court-ordered competency restoration services for some pretrial defendants deemed incompetent to stand trial. According to Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, this consent decree is the only feasible way to ensure justice while saving Oklahoma taxpayers untold millions of dollars.