New book says Trump turned Justice Department into a political weapon

Devlin Barrett’s new book, The Department of Revenge: How Trump Took Control of American Justice, pushed the Justice Department’s internal clashes into public view when Barrett said in a June 11 PBS NewsHour interview with Amna Nawaz that President Donald Trump had used the department “as a tool to settle political scores.” Barrett, a New York Times reporter who has covered the Justice Department and the FBI for more than two decades, built the book from inside-the-department accounts and Simon & Schuster published it, with an audiobook from Simon & Schuster Audio and Audible.

The book arrived after a March 4 Axios sneak peek and quickly entered a wider media circuit that included Lawfare, Morning Joe on MS NOW and bookstore events. A promotional blurb tied to the project called it a cautionary tale about how a president can accumulate power that future presidents may never relinquish, a warning that reaches beyond Donald Trump and into the structure of the department itself.

The clearest case study is the Eric Adams matter. In February 2025, Justice Department leadership ordered Manhattan federal prosecutors to drop the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and more than half a dozen government attorneys resigned in the aftermath. Danielle Sassoon, then the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, quit rather than carry out the directive, and the department later asked a judge to dismiss the case after seven prosecutors resigned in protest.

That sequence showed how personnel changes and case decisions can work together to pull a law-enforcement agency toward presidential priorities. Within days of Trump returning to office, the administration had fired prosecutors who had worked on cases against him and reassigned other career officials, breaking with the post-Watergate expectation that charging decisions stay insulated from White House pressure. Barrett’s argument is that those changes are not just a conflict over one indictment or one mayor: once the internal guardrails are weakened, the same machinery can be used by future presidents to reward allies and punish opponents.