Bureaucratic partisans be warned: The housecleaning at the Justice Department has begun.
And not a moment too soon.
On Monday, within hours of President Trump taking office, his team got to work reassigning at least 15 top careerists at Justice, shuffling them to less influential roles.
The switch-up included Deputy Assistant Attorney General George Toscas, a top dog at the National Security Division apparently deeply involved in the over-the-top raid on Mar-a-Lago in August 2022.
He and others have been sent to the new Office of Sanctuary Cities Enforcement, tasked with challenging local laws that impede vital immigration enforcement.
Any hard-lefty will surely see that as the equivalent of getting your desk relocated next to the boiler in the basement (If you don’t like it here, McDonald’s is hiring), but it’s perfectly honorable work for the nonpartisan civil servants that these people claim to be.
Thing is, a lot of them aren’t, particularly at the infamously agenda-driven Civil Rights Division, which now stands ordered to suspend most work until Trump pick Harmeet Dhillon gets confirmed to run it.
The last eight years have given Trump ample lessons in how deep the rot goes, and what a mistake it was not to clean house the first time ’round.
Even before he took office in 2017, deep-staters with a political axe to grind (remember Peter Strok and Lisa Page?) had gotten busy “investigating” Russiagate on the basis of absolutely nothing, whipping up a media frenzy that smeared the president as a colluder.
That turned out to be nothing but a massive waste of taxpayer money and government resources, but it served its purpose of being a thorn in Trump’s side.
Meanwhile, one set of FBI hands was sitting on the evidence in Hunter Biden’s laptop starting in 2019 even as another set spent 2020 urging the media (including social media) to watch out for a pre-election “disinformation” dump of dirt on Hunter — setting up the suppression of The Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Then came four more years of pure weaponization of federal law enforcement under President Joe Biden, which unleashed Justice hyperpartisans to gleefully wage lawfare to try to turn public opinion against Trump, if not get him to prison or bankrupt him.
Even as Justice was doing its best not to investigate Hunter and others in the Biden clan for their shameless influence-peddling during Joe’s years as veep.
Not to mention the FBI’s egregious meddling in free speech by pressuring social-media companies to silence dissent on COVID.
Trump can’t afford to spend his second term again being sabotaged by shadowy operators ensconced as “career civil servants.”
And he has a duty to purge Justice of thugs happy to play politics and undermine the rule of law.
Notice that the IRS produced whistleblowers over the Hunter coverup, but no one at Justice spoke out about those abuses, the censorship outrages, the lawfare on Trump or any other betrayal of the department’s mission.
So a shakeup in Justice Department leadership can only be a good start.
Lots more rot will likely need to go before Justice is truly blind to politics and dedicated to serving the law, not those in power.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
