AG's Campaign Role Erodes Post-Watergate Justice Department Norms

For half a century, an unwritten compact has governed the Justice Department: that the power to prosecute must never become an instrument of electoral ambition. The current attorney general's open campaigning for Republican candidates breaks that compact in ways no legal statute can repair, because the compact was never law — it was culture, built deliberately from the wreckage of Watergate. What is being lost is not a rule but a shared understanding that some offices must stand apart from the partisan contest if the public is to trust their judgments at all.