And it could complicate law enforcement across the globe.
Donald Trump’s second term in office has been marked by a series of unprecedented and highly controversial law enforcement decisions — everything from mass pardons to an immigration crackdown that has pushed, if not blown right through, the most basic constitutional constraints. Recent public polling suggests that a growing number of Americans are rattled by what they have seen and are increasingly concerned about the future of the country’s law enforcement apparatus and legal system. The news on Friday that the FBI raided the home of John Bolton, a former Trump official turned critic, is not likely to help matters.
Now those concerns are going global.
Senior officials in some of America’s closest European allies are quietly fretting about the law enforcement priorities of the Trump administration and even the conduct of the Justice Department, according to four European diplomats who are stationed in Washington and who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive trans-Atlantic diplomatic and law enforcement matters.
Their concerns run the gamut from the administration’s approach to specific issues — including immigration, free speech and international drug trafficking — to broader and more structural questions about the integrity of the U.S. legal system and the potential erosion of the rule of law.
The atmosphere has gotten so bad that some of the diplomats I spoke to now worry the Trump administration has complicated, and could eventually undermine, their countries’ ability to cooperatively work with the Justice Department on critical diplomatic and law enforcement initiatives.
“Our formal position is that we don’t care who the [U.S.] president is,” one of them told me, but the Trump administration’s actions on various legal fronts have prompted serious “concerns about what’s happening here” and how it may impact the international legal community.