Media Mention

Society Leadership in NYT Mag

October 4, 2024

The Society and several members of leadership were featured in a New York Times Magazine piece addressing potential threats to the rule of law in a second Trump term:

Some conservatives as well as liberals said that an extremist president in general, and Trump in particular, was the biggest threat they saw to the rule of law. Peter Keisler, a founder of the conservative Federalist Society and an assistant attorney general as well as acting attorney general for President George W. Bush, captured how many of our respondents felt. “There is every reason to believe that Donald Trump would seek to use criminal enforcement and the F.B.I. as leverage for his personal and political ends in a second term,” he said. “We don’t know what will happen, but the risk is more concrete, with a higher probability, than in any election in my lifetime.”

During his presidency, Trump scrambled the post-Watergate picture, in which the White House took pains to distance itself from the Justice Department’s decisions about whom to investigate and prosecute. He tried to interfere directly, starting with the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe into ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives. Our colleague Michael S. Schmidt, an investigative reporter covering Washington, found that in 10 cases, the Justice Department cooperated with Trump’s demands to investigate his perceived enemies. Many of our survey respondents pointed to Trump’s pattern of interference as behavior that was entirely out of bounds. “He has normalized into American political culture everything that he has done and said for the past eight years,” said Michael Luttig, a former assistant attorney general and federal judge who was appointed to both positions by President George H.W. Bush. “It’s one way he has corrupted our democracy and rule of law.”

Luttig has long been a close friend of William P. Barr, Trump’s second attorney general, and was consulted by Vice President Mike Pence’s staff for constitutional guidance when Trump pressured Pence not to certify the 2020 election. Luttig has also been one of the most outspoken critics of Trump in a cadre of like-minded prominent Republicans. “We’re the conservative orthodoxy,” said Stuart Gerson, who was an assistant attorney general for President George H.W. Bush and acting attorney general for President Bill Clinton. “The MAGAs are the opposite. They’re not conserving anything.”

Luttig and Gerson helped start the Society for the Rule of Law, a group of conservative and libertarian lawyers and judges founded in 2023 to protect the Constitution from “illiberal forces.” Some members of the society helped prepare a Sept. 18 letter, signed by more than 100 former national-security officials from Republican administrations and former Republican members of Congress, that endorses Harris for president, saying Trump disregards the country’s principles of governance.

The problems with Trump’s first term, for survey respondents like Luttig and Gerson, came to a head in May 2017, when Trump fired the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, for refusing to pledge loyalty to him and for not giving public assurances about the Mueller investigation’s scope. Then Trump ordered his White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, to fire Mueller, according to multiple sources. “He’s the kind of guy who is always testing limits,” Rod Rosenstein, a Trump deputy attorney general, told the journalist David Rohde in his new book, “Where Tyranny Begins.” Rosenstein was referring to pressure he received from Trump, on late-night phone calls, to prosecute adversaries. Rather than fire Mueller, McGahn threatened to resign; Rosenstein held the line, and Trump backed down.

Some respondents noted that the attorney general, whom the president appoints, can handpick teams to carry out sensitive investigations. Barr selected a second special prosecutor, John Durham, to investigate the origins of Mueller’s investigation, testing the premise that it was illegitimate, as Trump believed. “Barr wasn’t a Trump acolyte,” Gerson said. “But their agendas coincided, and each empowered the other.”

Read the story here.

News & Updates

Original Content

Letter Opposing Kash Patel Nomination

February 11, 2025