Donald Trump's promises to prosecute his enemies if he wins re-election have "alarmed" the vast majority of current and former prosecutors, according to a New York Times survey.
Trump, who himself has claimed to be politically prosecuted in his various criminal cases, has vowed to charge his enemies with crimes if he wins the election. A huge number of prosecutors, including some appointed by the former president, reportedly told the NYT that they are worried about how that could ultimately play out.
"We contacted about 160 of these insiders, including every living U.S. attorney general and many of their top deputies, dozens of former U.S. attorneys (including most of those Trump appointed), every White House counsel and a few retired judges and career prosecutors who worked for multiple administrations. Of those, a group of 50, evenly split between Democratic and Republican appointees, took a survey we designed," the outlet wrote on Thursday. "Together they have served every president since Ronald Reagan. Some of them spent their careers in public service. Others moved in and out of the private sector. We spoke to many of them for follow-up interviews."
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As far as what the review found, the NYT said that "an overwhelming majority of our respondents told us that they are alarmed about Trump’s potential impact on the Justice Department, many to a degree that they don’t think the public conversation reflects."
"Forty-two of the 50 former officials said it was very likely or likely that a second Trump term would pose a significant threat to the norm of keeping criminal enforcement free of White House influence," the outlet reported. "Thirty-nine of the respondents (all but one of the Democratic appointees and most of the Republican ones) said it was likely or very likely that if re-elected, Trump would follow through on ordering the Justice Department to conduct a specific investigation. (Six more said it was possible.)"
NYT noted, "Some conservatives as well as liberals said that an extremist president in general, and Trump in particular, was the biggest threat they saw to the rule of law."
"There is every reason to believe that Donald Trump would seek to use criminal enforcement and the F.B.I. as leverage for his personal and political ends in a second term... We don’t know what will happen, but the risk is more concrete, with a higher probability, than in any election in my lifetime," said Peter Keisler, a founder of the conservative Federalist Society and an assistant attorney general as well as acting attorney general for President George W. Bush, the report states.
