Annals of Law The quandary faced by government lawyers who think that the Trump Administration is subverting justice. On March 7, 2025, Celia Cohen, a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, was finishing up a meeting at 26 Federal Plaza, in lower Manhattan, when she learned that a federal marshal had arrived on the premises and wanted to see her. She was soon led to a conference room where the marshal served her with a letter from Todd Blanche, then the Deputy Attorney General, informing her that she and Andrew Rohrbach, another prosecutor at the S.D.N.Y., were being investigated and placed on administrative leave. After Cohen collected her personal belongings, the marshal escorted her out of the building.

In 1970, Harvard University Press published “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty,” by a German-born economist named Albert Hirschman. The book examined the ways that social actors can respond to dysfunction and decline in organizations, from businesses to political parties and governments. One option is to protest from within—to exercise “voice.” Another is to vote with one’s feet and “exit” the situation. A third response is “loyalty”—to stick around in the hope of preserving what remains of the organization’s core values.

In a new book, “The Department of Revenge,” Devlin Barrett, a reporter at the , catalogues the damage that the Trump Administration’s weaponization of the Justice Department has caused. Numerous attorneys have been pushed out or fired after refusing to prosecute such Trump enemies as the former F.B.I. director James Comey and the New York attorney general Letitia James. When these vindictive prosecutions eventually fell under scrutiny in courtrooms, they didn’t fare well. It is extremely rare for grand juries to dismiss charges brought by federal prosecutors, but the case against James, who was accused of committing mortgage fraud, has been rejected twice. Indictments of James and Comey were initially secured by Lindsey Halligan, a lawyer and a former beauty-pageant contestant whom Trump had appointed as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, even though she’d had no experience as a prosecutor. But a magistrate judge subsequently reprimanded her for a “disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps,” including repeatedly misstating the law to grand jurors. Another judge then dismissed both cases, ruling that Halligan had been appointed unlawfully. “Trump’s quest for revenge was ending careers, destroying reputations, forcing an exodus of legal experience, and killing the credibility of the Justice Department,” Barrett concludes. “In many instances, the people whose reputations it was tarnishing were not Trump’s intended targets, but rather those willing to carry out his angry orders.”

Jack Smith—the former special counsel who oversaw the criminal investigations into Trump’s role in the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol and into his alleged mishandling of classified documents—resigned shortly before the President returned to office. Yet, in an interview this summer on MS NOW, Smith praised D.O.J. prosecutors who’d stayed at the agency. “What I tell friends who are still in the department is ‘Serve as long as you can,’ ” he said. “Our country needs the Justice Department to do its job.”

In May, the columnist Michelle Goldberg asked, of the Justice Department, “How long can decent people continue to work for such a corrupted institution?” Many decent people still work there, Stacey Young, of Justice Connection, told me. “There are some extraordinarily brave people on the inside who are taking enormous risks to do the right thing,” she said. The bravest, she thought, were those trying to hold the line in units, such as the Civil Rights Division, where the corruption and the pressure to conform are most intense: “The real heroes are the ones who do terrible work and make sure they do it as ethically as possible.” In July, I met with Dena Robinson in Washington, D.C. Robinson joined the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in 2020. This unit, which was created in 1957, has long been regarded as the D.O.J.’s crown jewel. It is supposed to enforce anti-discrimination laws in housing, voting, education, and other sectors, to help fulfill the promise that all Americans are granted equal protection under the law.

Ironically, Robinson and other former Justice Department lawyers may be better positioned than their peers on the inside to engage in another form of protest that Albert Hirschman described in his book: voice. In Hirschman’s account, voice is presented as an alternative to exit, one exercised mainly by insiders who “kick up a fuss” from within, through mechanisms such as “individual or collective petition to the management” or an “appeal to a higher authority with the intention of forcing a change in management.”

Until we met last spring, Celia Cohen hadn’t spoken publicly about the Eric Adams case and the circumstances that led her to leave her job. She had, however, exercised voice. On the day she resigned, she and her colleagues sent a letter to Todd Blanche. It was co-signed by Andrew Rohrbach, the prosecutor who had also been placed on leave, and by Derek Wikstrom, another Assistant U.S. Attorney at the S.D.N.Y. who’d worked on the Adams prosecution. “We will not confess wrongdoing when there was none,” they wrote in response to the Justice Department’s demand that they apologize for prosecuting Adams and failing to comply with orders. “We have served under Presidents of both parties, advancing their priorities while pursuing justice without fear or favor. . . . Now, the Department has decided that obedience supersedes all else, requiring us to abdicate our legal and ethical obligations in favor of directions from Washington. That is wrong.”