The DOJ’s Descent into Authoritarian Theater

In time, the US Department of Justice may come to be viewed as a historical caution—compared to the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, or Stalin’s show trials. But with more paperwork. More press releases.

Historians may record it as the unchecked power of well-dressed authoritarians. Its Orwellian name remembered as ironic.

Behind the polished wood and the seal of the eagle, they’ll say, were people who smiled and destroyed lives, methodically.

And when it ends—because it will end—they’ll take down the signs and call it something else. But the memory will stay. Justice once wore a suit and called itself righteous.

There will come a time when people look back and wonder how the Department of Justice became something worse than the darkest days of old Europe. And they’ll talk about the men and women in suits—who didn’t scream, didn’t curse, just filed motions and smiled as they did terrible things.

Cold people in clean suits. Cold like the KGB or Pol Pot’s re-education camps.

History will not be kind to the DOJ. All wrapped in legal language, funded by taxpayers, and executed by people in thousand-dollar suits who mistook power for principle. When the reckoning comes, and the people will understand: the Department of Justice was neither about justice, nor for the people.

Its legacy will not be law, but control. And when the machinery collapses, as all lies eventually do, what will remain is the record: of they who weaponized language and called it justice.

Torquemada with a law degree. Witch trials with Wi-Fi. They didn’t burn books—they redacted them. Didn’t scream—they filed. Psychopaths in suits, playing god with subpoenas. And something more insane than what they did will be how long we let them do it.

The tragedy is not that the Department of Justice became something darker. It is that no one noticed when it did.

When the trials stopped being about guilt and became about design. When the suited prosecutors with quiet smiles did more damage than the mobs of old.

You walk into a courtroom, expecting justice. What you find is a mirror maze, designed by people with titles and no conscience.

The Department of Justice—a name from a different language, where words mean the opposite of what they say. Worse than Salem. Worse than Spain with the stakes and the fire. They’ve got neckties and leather chairs and smirks. Someday, people will remember. Not the suits. Not the paperwork. But the lives they wrecked for sport.

The DOJ—once clean, sharp, feared—will be seen for what it was: a funhouse run by straight-faced sadists with business cards.

It was never the gallows or the stake that made justice cruel. It was the way they made you believe it was deserved. The Department of Justice—polished, silent, relentless—became something darker than history’s worst. A place where guilt was presumed, and innocence was irrelevant.

In some future, the Department of Justice will be regarded as a tribunal of absurdity—an edifice of contradiction. The purges of secret courts. Its process will be studied not for its rigor, but for its illusion of logic. Those who wore its robes and bore its insignia will be remembered not as judges, but as clerks in a cruel game no one could win.

Not because they raised torches, but because they didn’t have to.

Department of Justice? More like Department of Just-Us. And someday, people are going to figure it out.

Frank Parlato

Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist, media strategist, publisher, and legal consultant.

Frank Parlato

Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist, media strategist, publisher, and legal consultant.

See Full Bio