On Tuesday, Politico came out with a piece by former Obama Justice Department spokesman, Matt Miller, entitled, "Will Trump Take Revenge On The Justice Department?" In the article, Miller predicted that the Donald Trump Jr. email controversy will eventually result in Trump attacking and destroying his own Justice Department. He based this claim on the President’s previous behavior towards the agency and decried him for treating it as "his own personal fiefdom, answerable to him in the same way he expected subordinates in his business empire to operate."
He further wrote:
Since the Comey firing and the subsequent appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller, Trump has turned to subversion to weaken the Justice Department. He has publicly questioned whether Mueller is fair—repeatedly calling his investigation a witch hunt and casting doubt on his impartiality because he has hired prosecutors who have previously contributed to Democrats. His attorney Jay Sekulow has gone even further, making far-fetched and misleading claims that Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe should recuse himself because of conflicts of interest and arguing that Comey broke the law in publicly disclosing memos documenting his conversations with the president, an argument Trump himself echoed on Monday. (“Fox & Friends,” which aired the false accusation against Comey, issued a correction—but the president did not.)
He also cited recent studies showing Republican distrust towards the media and academia to blast right-leaning media as destructive:
Over the years, the Republican Party has perfected a formula of using the right-wing media to wage similar campaigns against the credibility of climate-change scientists, academia, government experts and other elite institutions whose independent voices challenge conservative orthodoxy. Those campaigns have worked. For example, the Pew Research Center found last month that 58 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents now say that universities have a negative effect on the country. The GOP built a Death Star to destroy the news media, then turned it on other targets. Trump is now pointing it squarely at the Justice Department.
Despite all his talk of upholding the good name and integrity of the Justice Department, at no point did Miller bother to mention any of the past controversies that occurred while he was there alongside former Attorney General Eric Holder. These included, among others, the Fast and Furious scandal, surveillance of news organizations and reporters, and the politicization of hiring DOJ officials. Miller's attempt to accuse Trump of destroying the Justice Department is laughable considering the fact that he was part of what killed it in the first place.
