Former Trump attorney Ty Cobb publicly criticized his one-time client this week, accusing the administration of issuing pardons to violent criminals and steering federal law enforcement away from its traditional responsibilities.

Cobb, a veteran white-collar defense lawyer who served as a White House lawyer for President Donald Trump during his first term and managed the administration’s response to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation before departing in 2018, has repeatedly warned that the Republican is planning to steal the 2026 midterm elections and to revive his $1.8 billion slush fund for insurrectionists. He made the remarks during a national television appearance on Thursday.

“They’ve pardoned people who assaulted police officers, who almost killed police officers, and not just drug dealers,” Cobb told MS NOW anchor Ari Melber. “Authoritarian figures around the globe, in prison for bringing tons and tons of propane and other drugs into the United States, have gotten pardons under circumstances that are still under investigation but clearly suggest that money was exchanged.”

The remarks come against a concrete backdrop: on his first day back in office, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of roughly 1,500 people charged in connection with the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, including defendants convicted of assaulting police — clemency that drew public objections from major law enforcement organizations, among them the Fraternal Order of Police and the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

Addressing the leadership of the Justice Department, Cobb added: “And the administration of the rule of law under Bondi and Blanche — they say they’ve ‘backed the blue.’ The only two instances I can see where that has actually happened in this administration are the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, for whom no justice has been forthcoming and no investigation is even underway. So I don’t think we have anything to hang our hat on to suggest that justice is coming back.”

He concluded: “In fact, security matters, civil rights matters, and major crimes have been redirected into immigration cases, which have proliferated in a federal program in a way they never have historically — not making us safer. And many talented, longtime civil servants who had great reputations in the judiciary, who were trusted by judges, have been fired.”

Cobb is not alone among attorneys in arguing that Trump has made the country less safe and eroded trust in the Justice Department. Earlier this week, attorney and CNN legal analyst Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan, made a similar point.

“Ordinarily, the first order of business would be restoring DOJ’s political independence and restoring DOJ’s credibility in the courts, but it doesn’t seem like Blanche is super interested in either of those,” Honig told CNN anchor Brianna Keilar, referring to Todd Blanche, Trump’s newly-confirmed attorney general. “Those are the two biggest issues facing the department right now — the fact that they have undertaken and are still in the midst of several prosecutions aimed at people, in large part or entirely, because they are political enemies of the president.”

Both names now atop the department carry long histories with the president: Bondi is a former Florida attorney general who served on Trump’s first impeachment defense team, and Blanche was Trump’s personal defense lawyer in the New York criminal case that ended in his 2024 felony conviction before joining the department’s leadership.

“That’s something we’ve never seen before,” Honig continued. “I don’t expect Blanche to change that, because he’s been one of the drivers of it.”

The independence Honig invokes has deep institutional roots: since the Watergate era, the Justice Department has operated under written policies restricting White House contact about specific criminal matters, a firewall designed to keep prosecutorial decisions insulated from political pressure.

Honig also said that “DOJ has a credibility crisis right now in the courts. We have seen federal judges across this country say, essentially, ‘I can no longer trust DOJ, take what they tell me as a given, as I have for the past several decades, because DOJ has made several false representations in court.’”

“So those, to me, are the two biggest crises facing the department right now, but Blanche has really been more a contributor to those problems than a solution,” Honig concluded. “We’ll see if that changes when he gets the official title, but his history does not suggest he will.”

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