Former President Donald Trump doesn’t hide his desire for revenge against prosecutors he considers his political enemies for bringing criminal charges against him. But how could a reelected Trump use the legal system against those perceived enemies? Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s policy agenda for the next Republican presidency, provides a road map — one that leads to the steps of the Fulton County Courthouse and the Georgia legislature.
Trump has tried to distance himself from the controversial, 900-page document, even though major parts of it were written by officials from his administration. That includes a section that imagines the Justice Department as a partisan agency that would be under the president’s direct control rather than an independent law enforcement bureau. That would give Trump free rein to interfere in local law enforcement and prosecution, and the details of how it might work are ripped from the headlines here in Georgia.
“This is a tax on the notion of democracy and the ability of local folks — primarily Black folks — to govern themselves,” said Cliff Albright, co-founder and executive director of Black Voters Matter.
Project 2025’s proposes retooling the Justice Department in several ways, including:
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expanding federal use of the death penalty (Page 554);
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ending the independence of the FBI by removing the congressionally mandated 10-year term for its director, instead making the FBI director serve at the pleasure of the president (Page 551);
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imposing a federal crackdown on violent crime that “has increased across the United States,” despite evidence that those crimes are in decline nationally since the pandemic era and were in a decades-long downward trend before that. (Page 552);
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inserting the federal government into local policing and prosecutions when the president believes local officials have allowed criminals to evade responsibility (Page 553); and
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prescribing undefined “legal action” against local prosecutors and other officials, “for jurisdictions that refuse to enforce the law against criminals based on the Left’s favored defining characteristics of the would-be offender (race, so-called gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) or other political considerations (e.g., immigration status).” This proposal also opens the door to targeting prosecutors who have quarreled with Trump.
Legal experts who Capital B asked to interpret the proposals said many of them had weak legal premises.
“I thought that this particular part about legal action versus DAs was very weak,” said Jim Fleissner, law professor at Mercer University and former federal prosecutor. He added that there is no legal precedent for the federal government to get involved in a civil case against a local district attorney.
How would Project 2025 give Trump control of the Justice Department?
Since the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, Fleissner said it has been accepted practice by Republican and Democratic presidents that the White House stays out of prosecutorial decision-making. While the final call ultimately rests with an attorney general who is appointed by the president, this still creates a layer of separation between the White House and the DOJ.
Although it isn’t law, the DOJ also has its own set of rules governing communications between department employees and the White House.
“But in the view of this report, because the Department of Justice is part of the executive branch and the president is head of the executive branch, all decisions of the department need to be consistent with the president’s agenda,” Fleissner said.
How would a partisan Justice Department impact Georgia?
Such changes to the Justice Department could leave local prosecutors in Georgia’s blue pockets vulnerable to retaliation from the federal government, including the six DAs who pledged not to prosecute women for seeking abortion care after Roe v. Wade was overturned, or the Chatham County DA who decided not to prosecute anyone for possession of less than an ounce of marijuana.
Some of the Project 2025 proposals mirror laws that passed in the Georgia legislature’s last session, like Senate Bill 332, which revived a prosecutorial oversight commission. The move was interpreted as a way to target Fulton County DA Fani Willis, who indicted Trump and a number of his associates on racketeering charges last year.
State Rep. Dar’shun Kendrick, who represents parts of Gwinnett, DeKalb, and Rockdale counties, said that while she supports prosecutorial oversight, she voted against SB 332 and opposes the Project 2025 plan.
Kendrick, an attorney and the ranking Democrat on the state House Judiciary Committee, pointed out that Republicans balked when Democrats introduced a similar bill after former Brunswick Judicial Circuit District Attorney Jackie Johnson was accused of interfering with the investigation into the killing of Ahmaud Arbery.
“There was never a hearing on that bill because they pointed out to us that there is already a process through the State Bar’s Judicial Qualifications Council to actually get rid of prosecutors,” she said.
Chapter 17 also suggests the DOJ initiate legal action against district attorneys who the administration perceives as being soft on crime.
If there is a prosecutor doing an egregious job that should be removed from office before the next election, Kendrick said the State Bar of Georgia and a well-defined impeachment process already serve as safeguards.
“This [Project 2025] measure, like the Senate bill, is like killing a fly by hitting it with a bazooka in my opinion,” she said.
Will Project 2025 really be activated if Trump wins?
Trump has publicly distanced himself from Project 2025, but the primary author of chapter 17, Gene Hamilton, was a Justice Department and Homeland Security official in Trump’s administration who worked to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and helped to create the family separation policy at the country’s southern border.
Hamilton’s proposal to use federal law enforcement and federal prosecutors to reach into local matters wouldn’t be the first time a Trump administration has used federal law enforcement in jurisdictions it believes are run by the left. In October 2020, then-President Trump bragged about the U.S. Marshals killing a murder suspect in Portland, Oregon.
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