U.S. Department of Justice
What is the role of the U.S. Department of Justice?
Who are some noteworthy attorneys general?
What changes occurred in the Department of Justice after the Watergate scandal?
What controversies has the Department of Justice faced in the 21st century?
News •
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has been referred to as the world’s largest law firm, employing more than 10,000 attorneys charged with enforcing the country’s laws. Founded in 1870 and led by the U.S. attorney general, the DOJ has played historic roles in combating the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction, enforcing the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s, and investigating Pres. Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal. But it also oversaw the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and was given increased and at times controversial surveillance powers in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. In the 21st century the department has been at the center of the Epstein files scandal.
Creation and early history
- Antitrust Division
- Civil Rights Division
- Criminal Division
- Federal Bureau of Prisons
- National Security Division
- U.S. Marshals Service
While the Justice Department wasn’t officially formed until 1870, the United States has had an attorney general as its chief legal officer since Edmund Jennings Randolph became the country’s first attorney general following the passage of the Judiciary Act of 1789. While expecting a one-man department to handle the growing country’s legal affairs was clearly untenable, early attempts to expand the office by presidents including George Washington, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and Franklin Pierce failed to pass through Congress.
It wasn’t until 1870, in the wake of the American Civil War, that Congress finally relented and created a Department of Justice that could hire attorneys on staff and would be responsible for federal law enforcement as well as criminal and civil lawsuits involving the United States. The Justice Department officially came into existence on July 1, 1870. The first attorney general to actually have a staff reporting to him was Amos Akerman, appointed by Pres. Ulysses S. Grant. Akerman, who had served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, faced two enormous challenges: policing the westward expansion of railroads and enforcing laws meant to protect the rights of recently freed African Americans.
" height="20" alt="HEW Logo">
Those two seemingly disparate tasks would become inextricably linked as Akerman incurred the wrath of railroad tycoons by insisting that they live up to agreements before being granted land. After the Civil War Akerman joined the Republican Party and became a proponent of rights for African Americans. In his role as attorney general, he doggedly pursued cases against the Ku Klux Klan, which was terrorizing and seeking to deny formerly enslaved people their constitutional rights. Akerman’s campaign led to the arrests of hundreds of Klan members and largely ended the first incarnation of the terror group. Of Akerman, historian William McFeely wrote: “Perhaps no attorney general since his tenure…has been more vigorous in the prosecution of cases designed to protect the lives and rights of Black Americans.” But not everyone supported Akerman, and Grant was pressured by Secretary of State Hamilton Fish as well as railroad interests to get rid of him. In 1871 Grant asked Akerman for his resignation.
The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 gave the Justice Department enforcement power over its key provisions, including the prevention of price-fixing and monopolies. But it wasn’t until the beginning of Pres. Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency in 1901 that “trust-busting” became a key priority for the Justice Department, as shown through its pursuit of cases against Northern Securities, Standard Oil, and American Tobacco.
DOJ expansion in the 20th century
“As the only agency in our federal government that bears the name of a value, the Justice Department has a unique charge.” —Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, 2021
The power and influence of the Justice Department grew beyond its antitrust purview throughout the 20th century, with its mission often aligning with the political goals of the president in office at the time.
In 1908 Attorney General Charles Joseph Bonaparte (grandnephew of the French emperor) created a new investigative unit that would be called the Bureau of Investigation. Beginning in 1924, it was led by J. Edgar Hoover, and in 1935 it was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). What started as a small force of just 34 agents has grown into the largest division of the Justice Department.
The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.
SUBSCRIBE
Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt used the Justice Department to defend some provisions of his New Deal, though not always successfully, as some aspects were struck down by the Supreme Court. In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the U.S. into World War II, the Justice Department and the War Department (later Defense Department) became engaged in a battle over civil liberties and national security that would play out again in the 21st century. The War Department prevailed, and thousands of Japanese Americans were detained at internment camps. Despite its initial opposition, the Department of Justice ran internment camps during the war.
The linkage of politics and justice was perhaps never more pronounced than when, in 1961, Pres. John F. Kennedy named his brother Robert F. Kennedy as his attorney general. During the height of the civil rights movement, the Kennedy Justice Department prosecuted cases involving the murders of civil rights workers and enforced the integration of the University of Mississippi by James Meredith, but the FBI was still run by Hoover, who was deeply suspicious of the activities of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and RFK authorized secret recordings of King.
The Department of Justice’s greatest crisis, however, came in the 1970s during the Nixon presidency’s Watergate scandal. Nixon’s attorney general for much of his first term was his longtime confidant John Mitchell, who resigned in March 1972 to run the Committee for the Re-Election of the President (with the unfortunate acronym CREEP). It would later be proven in court that Mitchell conspired to plan the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate apartment complex in Washington, D.C. He also committed perjury in his attempt to cover up the affair, which between June 1972 and August 1974 became an all-consuming national scandal.
On October 20, 1973, in what would become known as the Saturday Night Massacre, Nixon ordered his then-attorney general, Elliott Richardson, to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor who was investigating Watergate. Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused to follow the president’s order and resigned. Ultimately, Solicitor General Robert Bork carried out Nixon’s demand, though he would later appoint another special prosecutor to investigate Watergate. A federal district court subsequently ruled that Cox’s firing was illegal.
In the wake of the president’s resignation on August 9, 1974, faith in the federal government and particularly the Justice Department was in upheaval. Pres. Gerald Ford chose Edward H. Levi to serve as attorney general from 1975 to 1977, during which time he won bipartisan praise for his intellect and integrity in restoring credibility to the Justice Department. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who worked under Levi at the DOJ, told The New York Times “there couldn’t have been a tougher job in Washington where the whole executive branch was in disarray after Watergate.” In his 2000 obituary The Times noted that Levi “has been regularly cited by political scientists and lawyers as the model of a modern attorney general.”
In the wake of Watergate the role of attorney general and the Justice Department as a whole were seen as more autonomous and even independent. While still appointed by the president, the attorney general was viewed as the country’s attorney as opposed to the president’s general counsel. Initially, Congress enacted laws allowing the establishment of “independent counsels” to investigate executive branch corruption independently. (They have evolved into Justice Department “special counsels.”) Much of the last two decades of the 20th century involved a balancing act of independence versus accountability for Justice investigations.
The 21st century
- Janet Reno: In 1993 the Miami-born prosecutor became the first woman U.S. attorney general. She served during the entire eight-year administration of Pres. Bill Clinton and was responsible for the highly controversial order to end the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas, in 1993, which resulted in more than 70 deaths.
- Eric Holder: Holder, who was appointed by Pres. Barack Obama, became the first Black attorney general in 2009 and served until 2015. During his tenure he was known to spar with Republican members of Congress, and in 2012 he became the first sitting attorney general (and first sitting cabinet member) to be held in contempt of Congress.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, the United States found itself in a similar position as it had been on December 7, 1941: shocked, stunned, and saddened by a seemingly out-of-the-blue attack on the homeland. As it had 60 years earlier, the government weighed national security against civil rights.
With the passage in October 2001 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the Justice Department, and particularly the FBI, gained significantly expanded surveillance authority, including greater access to communications and broader ability to conduct searches. While aspects of the law were criticized as unconstitutional in some quarters, its provisions—and therefore the Justice Department’s expanded powers—were renewed by Congress several times. In 2015 the USA FREEDOM Act replaced the USA PATRIOT Act, placing limitations on data collection in response to the revelations made by whistleblower Edward Snowden, who in 2013 revealed the mass collection of communications records owned by the government.
In May 2017 former FBI director Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel to oversee the Department of Justice’s investigation into whether Russia had influenced the U.S. presidential election of 2016—in which Republican Donald Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton—and whether Russian officials had colluded with members of Trump’s campaign. Over the course of nearly two years, Mueller indicted 34 people, 7 of whom pleaded guilty. Among them were several Trump confidantes who were implicated in having ties to Russia, as well as Russian nationals and organizations who were charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States. In March 2019 Mueller submitted what would come to be known as the Mueller Report to William P. Barr, the U.S. attorney general. Barr subsequently released a letter summarizing the report’s findings, saying that “the investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia” during the 2016 election. Concerning obstruction of justice, Barr quoted Mueller, who stated that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” In the end Barr determined that there was not enough evidence to prove that Trump was aware of the illegal activity and had knowingly obstructed justice.
The politicization of the Justice Department took center stage again in 2022, when Attorney General Merrick Garland named career prosecutor Jack Smith to lead two ongoing investigations into possible criminal activity by former Pres. Donald Trump. In naming Smith, who had experience prosecuting government officials, Garland said he was trying to avoid the appearance of political bias by the Democratic administration of Pres. Joe Biden against his Republican predecessor. He declared:
Such an appointment underscores the [Justice] Department’s commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters. It also allows prosecutors and agents to continue their work expeditiously, and to make decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law.
Despite such statements, Trump considered the investigations political retribution and targeted Smith repeatedly while campaigning for a second term. With Trump’s reelection in 2024, Smith issued a final report, requested that the charges against Trump be dropped while he was president, and resigned.
In Trump’s second term the Justice Department found itself at the center of one of the most fraught political scandals in recent memory, as calls for the release of the so-called Epstein files became a national rallying cry in 2025 and 2026. The handling of the release—which was mandated by the Epstein Files Transparency Act—was criticized by Democratic and Republican lawmakers as well as survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse as slow, sloppy, and incomplete. In March 2026 Attorney General Pam Bondi was subpoenaed by the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee to testify about the release of the documents. Trump fired her shortly thereafter and nominated her deputy and his former personal attorney Todd Blanche to succeed her.
In addition to the Epstein files investigation, the Justice Department under Trump has been accused of seeking retribution against some of Trump’s political enemies, pursuing cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. The DOJ has also used its subpoena power in unprecedented ways against journalists, including reporters from The Washington Post and The New York Times.