By Sarah N. Lynch
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -President Donald Trump’s administration has ordered U.S. Justice Department employees not to post anything on social media related to their government work, after a wave of new political appointees took to cheerleading Trump and castigating his opponents online.
The directive, which was emailed to U.S. Attorneys’ offices late on Monday, appears to prohibit the types of social media posts that Trump’s political appointees routinely make on their official government accounts.
The change was made by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who has become frustrated by some of the rhetoric being posted by political appointees, according to one person familiar with the matter.
A Justice Department spokesman did not have an immediate comment on the new policy or the reasons behind it.
While the department has always placed restrictions on social media use by employees, such as prohibiting them from discussing non-public investigations or making politically-charged statements that could damage the department’s impartiality, the new policy is much broader.
It restricts employees from including their department titles on any social media activity or even reposting official government information such as press releases.
Employees must not use any social media “in a way that damages the efficiency of the department,” the policy says.
Stacey Young, a former department civil rights attorney who recently left to create a DOJ employee advocacy organization called Justice Connection, said the policy could chill employees’ speech.
“The new policy represents another unwarranted attack on DOJ employees – one that stifles their free speech in their private lives and creates new ways for the administration to oust career public servants who don’t toe the party line,” said Young.
Many of the department’s top Trump-appointed leaders in recent weeks have posted messages that would have run afoul of the policy, which tells them to avoid “injecting their political views into the work they perform” and refrain from making comments “in reckless disregard for the truth” about any person the department engages with, including judges.
It also says they cannot post anything that might prejudice a proceeding or “heighten condemnation of an accused.”
Leo Terrell, a senior counsel in the Civil Rights Division who is leading its antisemitism task force, for instance, makes near-daily posts on X about his support for Trump. “Democrats are jealous of President Trump!” he wrote on X on April 12.
Last month, Terrell shared a post on his X account from Patrick Casey, a white nationalist who ran the now-defunct Identity Evropa, that said that Trump could “revoke someone’s Jew card.”
Aaron Reitz, the department’s head of the Office of Legal Policy, in an April 8 post on social media accused “Dem-appointed judges” of siding with cartels to usurp Trump’s “authority to conduct foreign policy.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi, in a March 27 post on X, claimed that law enforcement had arrested a “top MS-13 national leader,” referring to the street gang MS-13.
The criminal complaint against the suspect, 24-year-old Henrry Josue Villatoro Santos, made no such claim, stating instead that investigators had found only “indicia of MS-13 association.”
The department has since moved to drop the charges and have him deported.
(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Scott Malone and Alistair Bell)
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