How Politicization Is Weakening the Justice Department’s National Security Cases
Rithvik Hari
Over the past year, federal judges, grand juries, and career prosecutors have been raising questions about how the Department of Justice (DOJ) decides whom to charge. For generations, the department’s authority has rested on one assumption: cases are brought based on the evidence and the law, not because of who the defendant is and what relationship the defendant has to the President of the United States. Today, that assumption is almost non-existent. The central question for policymakers is whether the Justice Department can still carry out national security prosecutions when political considerations are shaping which cases get built and who is left to build them.
This is a break from the Justice Manual, the department’s own rulebook. The manual states “a prosecutor may commence or recommend federal prosecution only if he/she believes that the person will more likely than not be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by an unbiased trier of fact and that the conviction will be upheld on appeal” (Justice Manual § 9-27.220). It also bars prosecutors from being influenced by a person’s political association, activities, or beliefs (Justice Manual § 9-27.260). The evidence now shows those standards giving way, and that the national security docket is where the damage is easiest to see.
The most striking example is the collapse of both the James Comey and Letitia James prosecutions. In November 2025, a federal judge dismissed both indictments after finding that the prosecutor who brought them, Lindsey Halligan, was not lawfully appointed. Halligan was the lone prosecutor to present both cases to the grand jury and the lone prosecutor to sign the indictments (ABC News, November 2025). Her predecessor, Erik Siebert, had been forced out amid pressure to file charges against Comey and James (NPR, September 2025). The cases fell apart on procedure before anyone reached the evidence. These cases are the perfect example of the failure the Justice Department has seen since the politicization of its ranks.
Recent trends underscore the problem. A National Security Division section that works espionage cases reported a 40% drop in prosecutors (PBS/AP, April 2026). Justice Connection, a watchdog group run by former Justice Department lawyers, counts about half of the division’s counterintelligence attorneys gone, along with about 300 FBI agents who worked national security cases (Justice Connection, March 2026). The department should not be asking whether it can afford to lose this expertise. It should be asking how it ever convinced itself that it could.
An independent Justice Department is justified for a number of reasons. First, federal prosecution depends on independence. Without it, a charging decision is just a political preference with a courtroom attached. In October 2025, an overhaul of the Eastern District of Virginia office that prosecuted the president’s foes drove out the national security supervisors of what was the department’s premier destination for counterterrorism and espionage cases (Bloomberg Law, October 2025). Prosecutors who worry about their jobs cannot be expected to weigh evidence honestly.
Second, career prosecutors are a safeguard, not an obstacle. Their job is to prosecute cases that have the evidence to support the charges. Prosecutors tell the department when a case is not ready, and that is exactly what a justice system needs. Yet a senior Justice Department official reportedly warned supervisors that prosecutors risked being fired if they declined fraud cases referred by the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security. A department spokesperson refuted the claim, stating that he “never said anyone would be fired” (Democracy Docket, September 2026). The message from the department leadership was clear: the guardrails that exist for the protection of our judicial system are being picked apart every single day. Reuters reports that the National Security Division has lost over 38% of its staff
Third, politicization leads to weaker cases. Grand juries twice refused to indict Letitia James and declined to charge six Democratic members of Congress. Several district courts have begun tracking these rare refusals out of growing doubt that prosecutors bring only strong cases in good faith (Bloomberg Law, July 2026). The Comey and James cases and the case against the six Democratic members of Congress are just a few examples of the cases that have been mismanaged by the Department of Justice.
Fourth, dismissals and losses are institutional failures, not just courtroom losses. The perfect example of this is the case against former ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton. Bolton was indicted on 18 counts of retaining or disseminating classified information and ultimately pleaded guilty to one count (Department of Justice, June 2026). Some experts see this as an outlier among the prosecutions of the president’s critics, and the charges had real substance (NPR via Houston Public Media, June 2026). Every prosecution that looks political makes it harder to bring the next legitimate classified information case.
The prosecution of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores is the hardest test of this argument, and it deserves a fair reading. Unlike the cases against the president’s critics, it did not begin with a presidential demand. Maduro, Flores, and others were first indicted in the Southern District of New York in March 2020 (Department of Justice, March 2020) on narco-terrorism and cocaine importation charges, and a co-defendant, former Venezuelan military intelligence chief Hugo Carvajal, pleaded guilty in June 2025 (Department of Justice, June 2025). This is what a case built by career prosecutors over years looks like, and it is the strongest evidence for the argument that independent professionals are what make national security prosecutions work. Maduro and Flores have pleaded not guilty, and the judge has set a June 1, 2027 trial date (ABC News, July 2026).
Even so, the Maduro case is exposed to exactly the weaknesses the politicization magnifies. The defense has asked the court to dismiss the case on head-of-state immunity grounds, and the government’s answer rests largely on the president’s 2019 decision to withdraw recognition of Maduro, which prosecutors say deserves “absolute deference” from the courts (JustSecurity, January 2026). Maduro’s lawyers are also expected to argue that his capture by U.S. special forces was unlawful (CNN, March 2026). When then Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche was asked whether the Office of Legal Counsel had advised on the operation’s legality, he had declined to discuss it, though he insisted there was “no doubt what we did was legal.” In the same interview, he said the government does not bring charges it does not believe it can win, a claim NBC noted sits uneasily beside the Comey and James cases, which were brought despite warnings from some prosecutors that the evidence was thin (NBC News, January 2026). Legal experts have also cautioned that prosecutors will have to prove Maduro’s direct involvement in drug trafficking, which could be hard if he insulated himself from decisions (Reuters, January 2026). Additionally, this week prosecutors filed a superseding indictment adding a charge of conspiracy to commit torture against Americans and others (New York Times, October 2026).
The argument here is not over whether the Maduro case is strong or weak. It is that a department whose credibility has been spent elsewhere has less room for error in the cases that matter most. A court weighing the immunity and capture motions will start from a presumption that prosecutors are acting in good faith and the judges who have watched grand juries refuse to indict. Public declarations of how the case will end, including former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s January promise that Maduro and his family would face “the full wrath of American justice” (NPR, January 2026), only add material for the defense. The Maduro case also cannot be rescued by anyone else. Like espionage, it is a federal prosecution of a foreign defendant, with no state counterpart to come to the rescue.
When federal prosecution falters, accountability shifts. California officials have stressed that state and local law enforcement can investigate state-law crimes committed by federal officials (Just Security, 2026). However, national security cases are much different. Espionage and classified information offenses have no state counterpart, so when the Department of Justice does not bring these cases, or brings them badly, they simply go unprosecuted.
The administration should not abandon aggressive national security enforcement. It should protect it. The Attorney General should publicly restore the independence of career prosecutors in national security matters and rebuild the counterterrorism sections. Congress should require an investigation into the staffing shortages of the National Security division, and the congressional intelligence and judiciary committee should examine the staffing shortage as a security risk, not only a personnel matter. Doing so would show the courts, the intelligence community, and the public that the department is bringing cases that rest solely on the evidence, not political bias.
A Department of Justice that cannot be trusted cannot protect national security. Every dismissal and collapsed case tells adversaries and allies alike that the department’s word cannot be taken at face value. Restoring independence is not a favor to the department’s critics. It is the only way to make its cases stick.
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