Ordinary men
By 
Most people “slip” into the roles society provides them, [and we should dismiss] any implication that “faulty personalities” are the cause of human cruelty. . . .the exception—the real “sleeper”—is the rare individual who has the capacity to resist authority and assert moral autonomy but who is seldom aware of this hidden strength until put to the test.
Christopher Browning, “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland”
I was a bit taken aback by a comment from a lawyer yesterday, in response to Scott’s post about the ludicrously abusive investigation by the Department of Justice of E. Jean Carroll, one of the women Donald Trump has raped, for purported perjury in the course of her successful civil lawsuit against Trump. The comment was to the effect that while of course this investigation was a terrible thing — the purported perjury certainly wasn’t perjury as a matter of law, and in any event Carroll’s statement that her lawsuit wasn’t being financed by a third party had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that Trump raped Carroll — we shouldn’t judge the lawyers working in the prosecutor’s office conducting the investigation harshly, unless it turns out that the investigation actually goes somewhere legally, as opposed to being just an empty symbolic gesture by the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois (Andrew Boutros).
To the contrary, we should judge every lawyer working in that office, and in every other office in the DOJ, on the following basis: You have found yourself in a position where you are working as an attorney not for the United States of America, which is the job you thought you signed up for, but rather for Donald Trump, because the DOJ is now Donald Trump’s personal law firm. Do you want to be Donald Trump’s lawyer, which means being a mob lawyer for a mob boss, doing mob lawyer things? No? Then quit. Today.
Michelle Goldberg, (gift link) on the dismissal of the indictment of the Broadview Six:
One career prosecutor, the assistant U.S. attorney Sheri Mecklenburg, was accused of “vouching,” essentially leveraging her own credibility with the grand jurors to convince them to trust her evidence, a prohibited practice. Then, when Judge April Perry of Federal District Court asked to review grand jury transcripts, prosecutors provided her with redacted versions that covered up their apparent misconduct.
Last week, after Perry finally reviewed the unredacted transcripts, she said she was “incredibly shocked” by what she’d discovered, exclaiming, “I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.” All charges against the Broadview Six have been dismissed, and defense attorneys in the case are now seeking sanctions that would let their clients recover some of their legal fees. Mecklenburg had since been reassigned to work with Democrats on the Judiciary Committee; last week Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat, announced she’d been let go. . . .
One puzzling thing about the case is that Mecklenburg was a longtime career prosecutor, not a MAGA apparatchik. Yet she seems to have been willing to behave in ways that have astonished legal observers.
There’s nothing in the least bit astonishing about it, as anybody who has studied the group dynamics that lead ordinary people to participate in extremely evil behavior that they, as individuals, would never commit absent those dynamics will recognize. (Christopher Browning’s book quoted at the beginning of this post is a classic and extraordinarily harrowing description of this process).
Working as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer — and again, that’s what you’re doing when you’re working for the DOJ in May of 2026 — isn’t as bad as machine gunning women and children on the edge of a trench in Poland in 1942, but “not as bad as taking part in the Holocaust” shouldn’t be a standard of personal conduct for a DOJ lawyer, or anybody else. Working as Donald Trump’s lawyer is plenty bad enough, and anybody who chooses to do so should be judged accordingly going forward.
As for Andrew Boutros, he and the rest of the people at the top of Trump’s perversion of the legal system should all be permanently disbarred, and then prosecuted and sued until they are living under bridges and stealing their bread. But just because you’re not one of them, and are therefore just following orders, that doesn’t mean you aren’t choosing to participate in the travesty of justice of world historical proportions that is the Trump administration.