“I was wrong” is one of those phrases that can save relationships. Refusing to make the admission when it is true can, over time, poison the soul. One Office of Legal Counsel attorney from the Obama administration found that her strategy of staying on as “a last line of defense against the [Trump] administration’s worst instincts” was a mistake.
“Watching the Trump campaign’s attacks on the election results,” Erica Newland writes, “I now see what might have happened if, rather than nip and tuck the Trump agenda, responsible Justice Department attorneys had collectively — ethically, lawfully — refused to participate in President Trump’s systematic attacks on our democracy from the beginning. The attacks would have failed.”
Thankfully, Trump’s use of “second-rate lawyers” to challenge election results doomed that effort to failure, she writes. Even Trump-appointed judges were having nothing of it.
If Justice Department attorneys had left en masse earlier in Trump’s presidency, his efforts to hollow out the republic might have been left to similarly incompetent lawyers. Harms that will now take years to repair might have been stillborn. Newland is doing some soul-searching over her participation:
Before the 2020 election, I was haunted by what I didn’t do. By all the ways I failed to push back enough. Now, after the 2020 election, I’m haunted by what I did. The trade-off wasn’t worth it.
In giving voice to those trying to destroy the rule of law and dignifying their efforts with our talents and even our basic competence, we enabled that destruction. Were we doing enough good elsewhere to counterbalance the harm we facilitated, the way a public health official might accommodate the president on the margins to push forward on vaccine development? No.
No matter our intentions, we were complicit. We collectively perpetuated an anti-democratic leader by conforming to his assault on reality. We may have been victims of the system, but we were also its instruments. No matter how much any one of us pushed back from within, we did so as members of a professional class of government lawyers who enabled an assault on our democracy — an assault that nearly ended it.
We owe the country our honesty about that and about what we saw. We owe apologies. I offer mine here.
Newland’s confessional reminded me of the title of a McCarthy-era film, I Was a Communist for the FBI. Wikipedia describes the film and radio show as “artifacts of the McCarthy era, as well as a time capsule of American society during the Second Red Scare. The purpose of both is partly to warn people about the threat of Communist subversion of American society. The tone of the show is ultra-patriotic, with Communists portrayed as racist, vindictive, and tools of a totalitarian foreign power, the Soviet Union.”
The analogy is unsettling while hardly perfect. The Soviet Union is gone, but…. The self-described patriots supporting the Trump administration are the subversives in this case. But “racist, vindictive, and tools of a totalitarian foreign power” is way to close to reality for comfort and creepy as hell, as are some among Trump’s inner circle. Newland admits her role was not the heroic one she might have imagined. She worries she helped more than she hindered.
But confession they say is good for the soul.
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