Former federal prosecutor Troy Edwards discovered in September that former FBI Director James Comey, his father-in-law, had been indicted by the Division of Justice upon directions from President Donald Trump that he and others imagine had been politically motivated.
“It became obvious to me in that moment that this was no longer the department that I signed up to serve,” Edwards mentioned Tuesday at a panel hosted by the New York Metropolis Bar Affiliation.
“I packed my office … and explained to my children that the president wanted their grandfather to go to prison — and that their father was no longer a prosecutor,” mentioned Edwards, who had been serving in a senior nationwide safety function on the DOJ.
Edwards and Bruce Inexperienced, one other former federal prosecutor and a chair at Fordham College Regulation Faculty, joined three others representing the hundreds of former federal prosecutors who’ve been fired or stop in protest since Trump took workplace. They informed the Metropolis Bar viewers that the DOJ’s credibility and independence have been threatened by the president’s actions — and cautioning freshly graduated regulation college students from leaping at alternatives to affix the division.
One of many many fired consists of Edward’s spouse and Comey’s daughter, Maurene Comey, who was fired in July from her function as an assistant district lawyer within the Southern District of New York. She’s filed go well with towards the Trump administration, arguing wrongful, politically motivated termination attributable to her connection to her father.
“We’re going back to the idea of an enemies list, and that’s not what you’re supposed to use the country’s criminal justice power for,” Inexperienced mentioned.
Former federal prosecutor Troy Edwards speaks on the New York Metropolis Bar Affiliation.Rick Kopstein
When requested for a touch upon their former staff’ remarks, the DOJ informed New York News Regulation it was “restoring law and order [and] cracking down on violent crime.”
“If these former prosecutors take issue with upholding the rule of law, that says more about them than it does the current Administration,” a DOJ spokesperson mentioned in a press release.
Additionally on the Metropolis Bar’s panel was Joseph Tirrell, who labored because the DOJ’s senior ethics lawyer till July 2025, when he obtained discover with little clarification that he had been fired.
“I think the reason why you fire the senior ethics attorney at the Department of Justice is exactly what everyone in this room is thinking: because you want to weaken the ethics process within the Department of Justice,” Tirrell mentioned. “It’s, ‘We want no one to follow the rules. We don’t want anyone to tell us that what we’re doing is wrong.’”
Tirrell helped to steer the prosecution of those that attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and mentioned DOJ attorneys are actually being requested to do issues they don’t agree with that inappropriately weaponize the felony justice system, one thing all of them mentioned as soon as would have been unthinkable.
Edwards mentioned his remaining few months on the division gave him a front-row seat to the ethical dilemma federal prosecutors are going through beneath Trump.
“Previously, people across the Department of Justice had the chance to focus on higher level thinking, to respond to specific defense strategies,” Edwards mentioned. “We could do that because we knew … the facts we were receiving were true. The instructions we were receiving from our bosses were good ones. We knew there were no agendas in the room.”
“The way that they are trying to change that culture is now we have to question whether the folks who are giving us the [instructions] are giving us good ones,” Edwards mentioned. “That just robbed us of the space to think in those upper-echelon, nuanced spaces. We were now thinking, ‘Why are they bringing these cases to us?’ I think that has a devastating effect on the department.”
The Metropolis Bar hosted the panel in honor of the Worldwide Day of the Endangered Lawyer, which, for the primary time because it began in 2009, named the US because the nation of focus, citing retaliation towards authorities attorneys in a 38-page report the native bar affiliation signed onto.
Beforehand, the Worldwide Coalition for the Day of the Endangered Lawyer has centered on international locations like Iran, Belarus and Afghanistan on today, which formally falls on Jan. 24.
“It really is both shocking and, on the other hand, fully justified and certainly a recognition of the threat and the punishment that has been meted out to lawyers over the past year here in the United States,” mentioned NYC Bar Affiliation President-Nominee Mathew Diller. “It really focuses on the attack on the independence of lawyers in the Department of Justice, a subject that’s a preeminent concern to those of us who savor and cherish American democracy.”
The panelists on the Metropolis Bar occasion informed attorneys that it’s as much as each federal prosecutors and the authorized neighborhood at giant to stop the DOJ from slipping too removed from a spot of respect.
“The DOJ’s culture is changing because people are making the choice to do something that’s inappropriate, or unconstitutional or illegal … because they don’t want to lose their job,” Tirrell mentioned.
“We need to blame the administration for putting folks in that position … but we’ve also got to raise expectations and say, ‘You’ve got to hold the line. You’ve sworn an oath to support and defend as an attorney or as a federal employee, and you can’t go beyond that,’” Tirrell mentioned.
Edwards mentioned federal prosecutors have an obligation to talk out publicly and to the press — one thing DOJ staff usually draw back from.
“The folks who are in the department now are the current carbon monoxide detectors,” Edwards mentioned. “If you don’t resign when your red line is crossed, if you don’t speak out in some way … we won’t know about the carbon monoxide that’s poisoning parts of our department. The folks who will leave have to continue to be that detector, and the folks who have already left have to be outside the house shouting, ‘There’s carbon monoxide in the house.’”
Some ex-DOJ prosecutors, like panelist Mary Dohrmann, joined companies just like the Washington Litigation Group, which is mounting courtroom challenges towards the Trump administration’s actions. Dohrmann inspired different federal prosecutors considering of quitting — and new regulation college graduates who might have beforehand needed to affix the DOJ however had been now questioning whether or not it nonetheless aligned with their values — to affix her.
Inexperienced and the ultimate panelist, ex-federal prosecutor Sonia Mittal, are each professors. They mentioned they’ve been cautioning college students towards becoming a member of the DOJ.
“I’ve spoken to law school classes and told students, ‘Go into state government, go into local government,” Inexperienced mentioned. “Now, you have to go in [to the DOJ] prepared to know where your lines are, and to be prepared to say no, and then be prepared to accept the consequences of that. If you’re not ready for that…then you need to go elsewhere before you can go back, hopefully, to a better department in the future.”
Mittal mentioned it’s been “extraordinarily difficult” to advise regulation college students hopeful about getting into the DOJ, because it’s subsequent to unimaginable to inform how the following few years will shake out — and what attorneys could also be requested to do.
“They’re at the beginning of their careers, and their careers will be long and their reputation matters more than almost anything else,” Mittal mentioned. “It’s just unrealistic to think that any lawyer who enters the department is not going to be affected by either the spoken directives that they hear directly, or by the indirect changes in the operation of the department as a whole.”
Regardless of the pessimistic tone the panel forged the vast majority of the night time, all mentioned they had been longing for the longer term.
“The department’s burning,” Edwards mentioned. “I don’t think there’s a way to say it differently. But, there are a lot of architects across this country who are getting together and trying to answer the question of how to fix this.”
He mentioned he didn’t see the present second purely as an issue to be mounted, but additionally as a possibility for established attorneys and younger legal professionals to come back collectively and enhance the division after the Trump administration.
“Three years from now, [law students] will apply to the DOJ Honors Program, and they will become part of the department’s new scaffold,” Edwards mentioned. “The department wasn’t perfect … This is a significant opportunity for our country to build a better department, and we’re going to do that.”
