Donald Trump’s first Department of Justice was a bastion of legal and ethical impropriety led by figures seeking to fundamentally collapse the rule of law. His attorneys general sought to gut civil rights, dehumanize immigrants, further militarize the border, and undermine the basic tenets of American democracy.

Some of the worst, or maybe just the most public, drivers of these policies (like those attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and William Barr) have faded from public view. However, other attorneys, policymakers, and advisers from Trump Justice have spent recent years promoting the contagion of Trumpian policies and politics on the nation from power footholds in state-level attorney general appointments, right-wing influence shops, and even Biden’s own DOJ.

Trump 2.0 may well see many of these same figures return to helm the implementation of an even darker vision for the department.

So who are they, and what have they spent the past four years doing?

Top State Attorneys 

Trump’s first DOJ produced a litany of officials who have spent their time after the federal government undermining the Biden administration, and hurting their own constituencies, as obstructionist and hyperpartisan state-level attorneys general.

Drew Wrigley, North Dakota Attorney General

Drew Wrigley, the former U.S. attorney for North Dakota under Trump, is now the state’s attorney general. While a U.S. attorney, Wrigley reportedly sought to aid Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election by suggesting a “last ditch effort” of “demand[ing] statewide recounts of absentee and mail-in ballots in crucial states.” As state AG, Wrigley has doubled down on his utter lack of regard for the law by seeking to undermine the independence of North Dakota’s crime lab by unsuccessfully trying to relocate it under the jurisdiction of the state’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation, defending extreme and overtly unconstitutional abortion laws, and wasting millions in taxpayer dollars by participating in dozens of (often frivolous) suits against the federal government.

Scott Stewart, Mississippi Solicitor General

During his time in the Civil Division as the deputy assistant attorney general for the office of immigration litigation, Scott Stewart was essentially Trump’s top immigration lawyer. As such, he spent his time in office mostly defending that administration’s heinously cruel border policies, including the consequences of family separation and Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy, and denying lawyers to children seeking asylum. Perhaps most notoriously, however, Stewart defended the Trump administration’s efforts to force a 17-year-old to give birth by refusing to allow her access to an abortion. Indeed, Stewart “argued that the immigrant had two choices: deliver the baby or go back to her home country and get an abortion there.” In the time since, Stewart has become the solicitor general of Mississippi, leading the successful charge to end Roe v. Wade and overturn the constitutional right to an abortion, all while defending his state’s extreme abortion ban.

Influence Shops 

Trump DOJ alumni have also found footholds beyond state office, and they’ve made no secret of their plans to continue building on their appalling records under the first Trump administration. We don’t need to guess what some of them might do with renewed access to the resources and reach of the federal government—they’ve told us themselves.

Gene Hamilton, America First Legal (General Counsel & VP)

Gene Hamilton is a former counselor to Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who “authored the memo that gutted DACA under Trump, was instrumental in ending protected status for immigrants from Sudan and South Sudan, and was a key player in implementing family separation at the United States’ border” while at the DOJ. After the administration, Hamilton transitioned to be vice president and general counsel at America First Legal, the hyperlitigious faction of ultraconservative incubator network the Conservative Partnership Institute. AFL, like CPI’s other partner orgs, has continuously fought to ensure the continuation of Trump policy ideals and political goals by suing for ever-increasing cruelty at the border and trying to disenfranchise swaths of the American electorate.

Of course, Hamilton is also the literal author of the DOJ section of Project 2025, wherein he advocates for the department to be turned into a conservative bludgeon against political dissent and minorities as well as a partisan shield for extreme far-right actors and their political allies.

Jeffrey Clark, Center for Renewing America (Director of Litigation)

Jeffrey Clark, Trump’s notorious former head of the DOJ’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, who is now facing disbarment for his role in attempting to overturn the 2020 election, is a senior fellow and director of litigation at another CPI affiliate, the Center for Renewing America. CRA is itself a Project 2025 partner, and a hard-right think tank run by “Russell Vought, Donald Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget and a diehard Christian nationalist.” (Trump is also nominating Vought to return to that role during his second term.)

Katharine Sullivan, Texas Public Policy Foundation (Senior Fellow)

Others, including Katie Sullivan, have transitioned to other far-right influence shops, such as the Texas Public Policy Foundation. TPPF is one of the most notorious influence shops in Texas, infamous for its success in pushing extreme right-wing policy platforms, and one of the biggest allies of longtime Trump sycophant Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general. This makes sense, given that Sullivan spent her time in office reportedly authorizing the weaponization of anti-human-trafficking grants away from charities with policy positions unfavorable to the president, and toward charities with extremely questionable missions and records. Sullivan has also appeared in Project 2025 training videos advocating for the “removal of all the equity plans” in the federal government and for the “noxious tenets of critical race theory and gender ideology [to] be excised from curriculum in every single public school in this country.”

Patricia Nation, America First Policy Institute

Patricia Nation formerly served in the Trump administration as “senior counsel in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and then as the director of Civil Rights Civil Liberties at the Department of Homeland Security.” Trump’s first Civil Rights Division was notoriously dysfunctional, perverting the mandate of the office and instead actively undermining the basic tenets of equal justice under the law. On everything from the gutting of consent decrees for abusive police departments, the endorsement of discriminatory voting-ID laws, and its vocal support for the end of affirmative action, Trump’s Civil Rights Division continuously elected to support and defend the targeting and abuse of marginalized people across the country. Following her time in the Trump administration, Nation landed at the America First Policy Institute, a hugely influential right-wing think tank stacked with Trump loyalists and an institutional giant in the staffing and direction of the Trump transition team.

Other Parts of Government 

Ryan Newman, Florida Governor’s Office (General Counsel)

During the Trump administration, Ryan Newman was a “Counselor to the United States Attorney General for national security and international affairs, Deputy General Counsel (Legal Counsel) for the Department of Defense, and Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Policy at the Department of Justice.” In the years since, he has spent his time largely as Gov. Ron DeSantis’ general counsel. Under DeSantis, Newman has allegedly intimidated state employees into suppressing political speech in the state, defended the governor’s attempts to gut the state’s available housing for minors lacking permanent legal status, and argued in favor of DeSantis’ politically motivated removal of a state attorney.

Lawrence Keefe, Florida Governor’s Office (Public Safety Czar)

The list of Trump alumni who transitioned to public positions in Florida also includes Lawrence Keefe, formerly the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for Florida’s Northern District. Following the Biden transition, Keefe eventually began working in DeSantis’ office as the governor’s public safety czar. Though Keefe has since resigned, the Tampa Bay Times reports that the role “included the coordination of Florida’s controversial migrant flight program,” which involved lying to immigrants to coerce them onto flights to other parts of the country as part of a cruel, and potentially illegal, political stunt.

Curtis Gannon, U.S. Deputy Solicitor General

Curtis Gannon was a principal deputy assistant attorney general in Trump’s Office of Legal Counsel and a member of Trump’s “beachhead” or “landing” team at the DOJ during his transition into office. Though his time at the DOJ preceded the Trump administration, Gannon certainly made his mark by being the department’s representative of record responsible for approving Trump’s so-called Muslim ban in 2017. Gannon was also a frequent face representing the Trump White House in Congress during the lead-up to Trump’s eventual (first) impeachment.

In August 2020, Gannon transitioned to be a deputy solicitor general, a position in which he has (inexplicably) remained throughout Biden’s own term. While there, Gannon sided with Nestlé USA Inc. and Coca-Cola, over international law scholars, the Constitutional Accountability Center, Nuremberg Scholars, and others, to argue that formerly enslaved children who were kidnapped and forced to work on cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast lacked standing to sue U.S. companies for their complicity in (and support of) the slave trade.

Trump’s (latest) nominee to lead the DOJ, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, is sure to garner significant attention from the media and the public. Yet Bondi will not be the only one implementing the worst that Trump Justice 2.0 will have to offer, just as Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions weren’t the only ones responsible for the havoc wreaked via Trump’s DOJ the first time around.

These individuals, should they reprise their roles within the administration, or their successors should they not, will in some ways be even more impactful on the consequences of what the day to day under Trump will look like, and they deserve our collective scrutiny for it.