United States Department of Justice

• 1. Introduction

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  The United States Department of Justice sits at the corner of Constitution and Pennsylvania Avenues in Washington, D.C., inside a building that holds over a million square feet of space. Above the door of the ceremonial rotunda, just outside the Attorney General's office, an inscription reads: "THE UNITED STATES WINS ITS POINT WHENEVER JUSTICE IS DONE ITS CITIZENS IN THE COURTS." That sentence is not a mission statement drafted by a committee. It was carved into the wall of a place where the power to charge, prosecute, imprison, and pardon lives under one roof.

  The Department was born in 1870, during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, but its roots reach back to 1789 and the very first Congress. How did a department that began as a single attorney with a staff of six grow into an agency commanding a budget measured in tens of billions of dollars? And what does it mean when an institution built to serve justice becomes entangled in the politics of the president it serves? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. A Small Office, A Large Problem

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  Edward Bates, attorney general under President Abraham Lincoln from 1861 to 1864, ran the nation's chief legal office with a staff of just six people. Bates had no authority over U.S. Attorneys spread across the country. Federal court business was parceled out to the Department of the Interior, and financial claims against the government fell under the Department of the Treasury. Lincoln's cabinet was stocked with experienced lawyers who rarely felt the need to seek Bates's opinion, and Lincoln himself never gave him special assignments or asked his advice on Supreme Court appointments.

  The salary of the attorney general had been set by statute at less than what other Cabinet members earned, a situation that held until 1853. Early attorneys general made up the difference by continuing to run private law practices, sometimes arguing cases for paying clients before the very courts they nominally supervised on behalf of the government. The arrangement was not a scandal so much as a structural gap: the federal government was growing, and the legal apparatus meant to hold it together had not kept pace.

  Efforts to fix this came in waves. Proposals in 1830 and then again in 1846 to make attorney general a full-time post both failed. It took Congressman William Lawrence and the House Committee on the Judiciary, convening an inquiry in 1867, to finally move the idea forward. Lawrence introduced a bill on the 19th of February 1868, calling for a new "law department" headed by the attorney general. President Grant signed it into law on the 22nd of June 1870.

• 3. Fighting the Klan

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  Grant appointed Amos T. Akerman as attorney general and Benjamin H. Bristow as America's first solicitor general in the same week the Department of Justice formally came into existence. Their immediate mandate was to preserve civil rights, and the threat they faced was concrete: domestic terrorist groups using violence and litigation to undermine the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.

  Akerman and Bristow directed the new department against the Ku Klux Klan. In the first few years of Grant's first term, the DOJ secured around 1,000 indictments against Klan members and won over 550 convictions. By 1871, the numbers had grown to roughly 3,000 indictments and 600 convictions. Most defendants served only brief sentences, but the ringleaders were imprisoned for up to five years at the federal penitentiary in Albany, New York. Violence in the South dropped sharply as a result.

  Akerman, in his private correspondence, credited Grant directly. He told a friend that no one was "better" or "stronger" than the president when it came to prosecuting terrorists. George H. Williams succeeded Akerman in December 1871 and pressed on with Klan prosecutions through 1872 and into the spring of 1873. But the department was overwhelmed. The volume of Klan cases outstripped the DOJ's capacity, and Williams eventually placed a moratorium on further prosecutions because the office simply did not have enough lawyers to continue. The department's first great enforcement effort had exposed the limits of the institution it was still becoming.

• 4. Building the Institution

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  The Act that created the Justice Department did more than give the attorney general a staff. It stripped other departments of functions they had accumulated by default, handing supervision of all U.S. Attorneys to the DOJ, along with responsibility for prosecuting every federal crime and representing the United States in court. The use of private attorneys by the federal government was barred outright. The law also created the office of Solicitor General, whose specific duty was to supervise and conduct government litigation before the Supreme Court.

  Physical infrastructure followed. Control of federal prisons transferred to the new department in 1884 from the Department of the Interior. A penitentiary at Leavenworth opened in 1895, and a federal facility for women was established at Alderson, West Virginia, in 1924. The Three Prisons Act of 1891 had already created the federal prison system itself; Congress formalized the Federal Bureau of Prisons as its own agency in 1930, signed into law by President Hoover on the 14th of May of that year.

  The investigative arm grew on a separate track. On the 26th of July 1908, a small investigative force was created inside the Justice Department under Attorney General Charles Bonaparte. The following year, Attorney General George W. Wickersham named it the Bureau of Investigation. It would not take its current name, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, until 1935, the same year the Department's headquarters building was completed from a design by architect Milton Bennett Medary.

• 5. A Seal and Its Motto

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  Carved onto the Justice Department's seal is a Latin phrase, Qui Pro Domina Justitia Sequitur. No one knows exactly when it first appeared on the seal, or when the original seal itself was adopted. The DOJ's own most authoritative reading translates the phrase as referring to the attorney general, and by extension the whole department, as the one "who prosecutes on behalf of justice (or the Lady Justice)." The question of its original intended meaning has never been fully resolved.

  The English inscription above the Attorney General's rotunda door, first mentioned at the opening of this documentary, does the same conceptual work in plainer language: the government wins not when it secures a conviction, but when justice is served. The building carrying that inscription was renamed in 2001 in honor of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. It is commonly referred to in government circles as "Main Justice." The Latin motto on the seal and the English inscription inside share a single claim about the nature of legal power, that the prosecutor is the servant of justice, not the master of it.

• 6. Agencies Under One Roof

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  The Drug Enforcement Administration was created in 1973 as part of the war on drugs, assembled from enforcement units that had previously been scattered across the Justice Department, the Treasury Department, and the Food and Drug Administration. Its mandate is the Controlled Substances Act and the interdiction of foreign drug trafficking. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives traveled a longer road to the same address: ATF and its predecessor bureaus spent more than two hundred years inside the Treasury Department before a 2003 transfer under the Homeland Security Act moved the agency to Justice. Treasury kept the tax-and-trade functions under a new bureau; DOJ got the enforcement side.

  The U.S. Marshals Service traces its origins to the Judiciary Act of 1789, but it was organized as a formal agency in 1969 and elevated to full bureau status within the DOJ in 1974. The National Institute of Corrections, founded the same year, operates under the Federal Bureau of Prisons and carries a legislatively mandated mission to assist state and local correctional institutions.

  In October 2021, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco announced the formation of a Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team at the Aspen Cyber Summit, a reminder that the roster of enforcement responsibilities has never been fixed. The department also maintains a U.S. National Central Bureau for INTERPOL, connecting domestic law enforcement to the international network.

• 7. Independence Under Pressure

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  In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order consolidating under the DOJ all federal responsibility for prosecuting crimes against the government, defending claims against it, and supervising U.S. attorneys and marshals. The order gathered into one place functions that had been spread informally across the executive branch.

  The Watergate scandal produced a different kind of reckoning. Reforms that followed, including the Ethics in Government Act, were designed explicitly to put distance between the Justice Department and direct presidential influence. For roughly the next fifty years, attorneys general across administrations reinforced the principle of DOJ independence as an institutional norm.

  Under the second Trump presidency, the source material states plainly that the department's "independence and impartiality has shattered." The DOJ was used to target the president's political opponents. Trump reportedly demanded $230 million in compensation from the department, and an investigation into a $50,000 payment received by Tom Homan was ended, raising ethical concerns. Separately, the DOJ sought voter roll data from more than thirty states and initiated the 2025 Texas redistricting as part of efforts connected to disrupting voting after the 2024 presidential election. The National Security Division, the youngest of the department's eight formal divisions, was established only in 2006; the Civil Rights Division, created in 1957, now operates in an environment its founders did not anticipate. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche currently serves as acting attorney general.