Professor Bruce Green co-authored an article for the Alabama Law Review about the power of the president and the Department of Justice. The article, titled “Can the President Control the Department of Justice?,” was recently featured in the Washington Post.
Mr. Trump’s suggestion that Obama-era officials may have abused their investigative authority to spy on his campaign for their own political purposes complicates his demand for the Justice Department to investigate itself now. Still, senior law enforcement officials appointed by Mr. Trump already knew what steps the department took in 2016 and had not previously deemed those facts a sufficient basis to open an investigation, noted Bruce Green, a Fordham University law professor who wrote the article with Ms. Roiphe.
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The article by Ms. Roiphe and Mr. Green documented several scattered early examples of presidents who got directly involved in case decisions. George Washington, they wrote, ordered the prosecution of people involved in the Whiskey Rebellion by distillers in western Pennsylvania who rose up against the federal whiskey tax and threatened its enforcers. Washington later ordered that case shut down.
But such cases were rare and typically involved foreign affairs, Ms. Roiphe and Mr. Green wrote. And because the presidents’ involvement went unchallenged, the Supreme Court never weighed in about its legitimacy. The federal law enforcement system evolved over time; Congress created the Justice Department in 1870.