Reagan-appointed judge resigns citing Trump’s ‘assault on the rule of law’

A federal judge appointed by a Republican president resigned last Friday, and published a scathing letter in The Atlantic on Monday explaining why.

“The White House’s assault on the rule of law is so deeply disturbing to me that I feel compelled to speak out,” wrote Mark L. Wolf, a former U.S. district judge in Massachusetts. “Silence, to me, is now intolerable.”

In the letter, Wolf accused the Trump administration of corruption, using the law for partisan purposes and activating the Department of Justice as a tool for “targeting his adversaries while sparing his friends and donors from investigation, prosecution and possible punishment.”

Quoting the then Sen. Robert F. Kennedy speaking about apartheid South Africa in 1966, Wolf wrote, “‘Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.’”

He added that, “Enough of these ripples can become a tidal wave.”

A White House spokesperson told The New York Times that judges who “inject their own personal agenda into the law have no place on the bench.” Adding that, “any other radical judges that want to complain to the press should at least have the decency to resign before doing so.”

Ronald Reagan appointed Wolf to the federal bench in 1985.

How did he justify such accusations?

As evidence, Wolf alleged how some of the Trump family’s business deals and partnerships have coincided with those groups and individuals receiving direct access to the White House or full pardons from the president.

Wolf singled out the case of Justin Sun, a Chinese national who was the largest donor for the crypto dinner President Donald Trump held earlier this year, spending more than $10 million. It is illegal for non-U.S. citizens to donate to politicians, but following the event a fraud suit against Sun was paused pending the outcome of an ongoing settlement negotiation.

Wolf suggested that such indicators of corruption would normally have sparked investigations from government employees tasked with seeking out such behavior. But the president removed 18 inspectors general from various federal agencies whose job was to investigate corruption and misconduct, and so no known reviews are underway. The public corruption section of the FBI has also been eliminated, he explained, and the DOJ’s public integrity division used to staff 30 lawyers and now has five.

One of Wolf’s primary concerns, however, was Trump’s efforts to indict adversaries to his person or to his ideas. Those include New York Attorney General Letitia James, who secured a fraud conviction against Trump, and the two others whom he instructed U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to indict via a social media post. His urging to indict former FBI director James Comey, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and James was despite other federal lawyers not finding what they believed to be sufficient evidence to do so.

There are those who accuse James, in particular, of doing the exact same thing in the way she pursued Trump over the years. She has sued or helped sue Trump and his administration scores of times — at least 67 — over a variety of issues. That scale of attention, critics have suggested, implicates her politics more than it does the law.

James even made prosecuting him a primary talking point in her campaign to become New York’s attorney general and, once elected, said she was going to shine “a bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings, and every dealing, demanding truthfulness at every turn.”

In his list of opponents whom Trump has used the legal system to antagonize, Wolf included judges who have ruled against several of the president’s executive orders. He said that he believes that several of those judicial orders were ignored, while others have sparked the administration to call for the judges to be impeached.

Harkening back to the American government in place at the time Wolf started his career in public service, he said the current administration was somewhat reminiscent of the Nixon era, but with one key difference.

“What Nixon did episodically and covertly, knowing it was illegal or improper,” he wrote, “Trump now does routinely and overtly.”

Who is Mark L. Wolf?

Wolf served as federal judge in Massachusetts for 40 years, including six years as chief judge. He has had a storied career, working on high-profile criminal and corruption cases as a prosecutor, a special assistant to the U.S. attorney general during the Ford administration and then later as a judge.

He began his career in the ashes of the disgraced Department of Justice following Richard Nixon’s resignation and the Watergate scandal. In that time, one of Nixon’s attorneys general went to prison and another was convicted of contempt for lying about ending an anti-trust lawsuit after Nixon received a $400,000 donation.

Wolf was hired by the DOJ during Gerald Ford’s presidency and organized the induction ceremony for its second attorney general, Edward Levi. At that event, Levi said that “nothing can more weaken the quality of life or more imperil the realization of the goals we all hold dear than our failure to make clear by word and deed that our law is not an instrument of partisan purpose.”

It was a principle that Wolf wrote he always held dear throughout his career.

In 1981, Wolf returned to Massachusetts where he was involved with successful convictions in over 40 corruption charges, he participated in the James “Whitey” Bulger trial and the subsequent FBI informant misconduct that resulted in $100 million in damages paid out to the families of people the FBI failed to properly protect.

Now, however, Wolf wrote that his best and highest use is helping others who are speaking out against what they describe as “efforts to undermine the principled, impartial administration of justice and distort the free and fair functioning of American democracy.”

In short, that’s why he resigned and wrote the letter.

“As I watched in dismay and disgust from my position on the bench, I came to feel deeply uncomfortable operating under the necessary ethical rules that muzzle judges’ public statements,” Wolf wrote. “I can now think of nothing more important than ... doing everything in my power to combat today’s existential threat to democracy and the rule of law.”