The Trump administration has spurred a professional exodus at the State Department office focused on international law, which could make it harder for the government to assess if the administration is breaking the law or committing war crimes, former department officials told HuffPost.
The Office of the Legal Adviser at State, known as “L,” is the U.S.’s core instrument for considering whether government policies and actions comply with international law. But that office has shriveled under President Donald Trump, meaning such expertise may now play a smaller role in decision-making about major international issues — like the administration’s lethal attacks on boats in the Caribbean Sea, which lawmakers and experts are increasingly expressing alarm about, calling the campaign illegal and an abuse of power.
This year, more than 60 staff members have left the office, whose ranks usually comprise between 200 and 300 people, according to Christina Sanford, who was among them. She concluded her service there in November after nine years as an assistant legal adviser, which meant she oversaw one of L’s 23 sections covering various State Department branches. She told HuffPost the losses include seven of L’s senior executives, five of whom were at her senior level — at which there were already some vacancies — and two of whom were at the more senior rank of deputy legal adviser, which only four officials hold. Two additional staffers moved on from L just this week, she said.
HuffPost spoke with six former U.S. government officials about the departures and how they might affect whether policymaking includes a thorough consideration of international law.
Staff have felt increasingly overwhelmed by their workload as a result of the departures, Sanford said, and political appointees in the Trump administration have wielded an unusual level of power.
“The process, I think, is a little bit broken,” said Sanford, who worked at the State Department for 24 years. “Things that normally took us a considerable amount of time were being compressed into ‘You have a couple of days’ or a couple hours — it doesn’t feel like the quality of work that we are capable of and want to produce.”
Appointees appeared to be “going around us,” Sanford continued, “which happens in every administration, but usually the lawyers are a little immune to that … our political [leaders] will normally ensure they have all the information from the working level.”
The upheaval at L has come amid the Trump administration’s effort to shrink the State Department.
As part of that process, the administration disbanded the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice, another body that addressed cross-border legal issues and possible U.S. culpability for violations of global standards. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told legislators in May that its work would be covered by L.
Rubio has significantly cut personnel at the department through two voluntary resignation programs — which offered separation packages, especially appealing to veteran staff close to retirement — and mass layoffs. (Some of the latter are being challenged in court.) The policies have spurred broad dissatisfaction and fear among agency staff who are meant to guide U.S. foreign policy.
“In less than a year’s time, a quarter of the workforce has departed. Morale is dangerously low,” the American Foreign Service Association, comprised of career diplomats, said in a report published Wednesday. “In the present environment, speaking truth to power is being turned into an occupational hazard.”
The initial resignation offer, referred to as the “fork in the road,” came soon after Trump took office. The other was issued later in the spring, at which point the administration’s aggressive approach to governing and resistance to internal dissent had become clearer. To Sanford’s knowledge, far more L staff took the second offer. Few have been publicly clear about their motivations for leaving, and many have only indicated they did so by announcing new jobs.
“President Trump has led the most transformative foreign policy in a generation,” Tommy Pigott, a spokesperson for the State Department, argued to HuffPost in an email.
“His leadership has resulted in historic peace deals, stronger national security, and a State Department that has been overhauled to put America first. If former State employees did not want to carry out the effective policies of the duly elected President, then we’re pleased they left government service,” Pigott wrote.
The growing discussion of whether Trump’s Caribbean offensive is legal is directly related to the question of L’s effectiveness.
Since September, the policy has killed at least 87 people, including the 11 deaths in the initial Sept. 2 “double tap” strike during which some observers argue U.S. forces illegally targeted a shipwreck. The administration has claimed the U.S. is defending itself in a war with drug smugglers, and that all of its attacks were therefore legal. But the administration has provided slim evidence that those targeted were linked to drugs or were threatening the U.S., or pursued a formal declaration of war through Congress. At the same time, its designation of a new category of “narco-terrorists” has been challenged by legal scholars. (The ship attacked on Sept. 2 was not even heading to the U.S., CNN reported Friday, citing anonymous sources familiar with a conversation with lawmakers.)
Many former lawyers from the military and other national security agencies have publicly condemned the attacks, with some arguing the entire campaign — not just the strike now drawing attention — is unlawful.
“U.S. strikes on suspected drug traffickers at sea are extrajudicial killings… arbitrary deprivations of the right to life under international human rights law (IHRL), an obligation that the United States acknowledges applies extraterritorially,” legal scholars Tess Bridgeman, Michael Schmitt and Ryan Goodman recently wrote.
It is unclear whether L attorneys have internally questioned the justifications for the campaign or highlighted to Rubio, Hegseth or other administration leaders how international principles apply in the Caribbean context. In October, Defense Department official Charles Young told Congress that the State Department participated in the working group that developed the classified legal justification for the boat strikes.
“State L has a huge role to play here — these are big questions of international law,” Sarah Harrison, a former Defense Department attorney now at the Crisis Group think tank, told HuffPost.
Turmoil among State’s lawyers could hurt their ability to effectively probe policies from the Caribbean campaign to the various high-stakes global diplomatic efforts Trump is pursuing — contributing to the overall lack of legal advice underpinning the administration’s plans. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has fired top military lawyers who questioned policies like deploying troops to support Trump’s deportation spree and mass firings at the Pentagon, while current and former defense officials told CNN that appointing replacements has involved “political litmus tests.”
“Everyone should be pushing back. It’s just a question of whether they’ll succeed, and it’s unlikely,” Harrison said.
“Things that normally took us a considerable amount of time were being compressed into, ‘You have a couple of days’ or a couple hours…”
– Christina Sanford, former State Department lawyer
A former State Department lawyer, who asked to remain anonymous so they could speak frankly, noted that L attorneys both assess if U.S. officials’ plans comply with international law and work on complex documents that are essential to the success of cross-border negotiations, like Trump’s new push for a U.S.-brokered peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.
Such a blow to institutional memory and expertise will likely be felt for years, the former lawyer told HuffPost.
“It’s a loss going forward,” they said. “If there’s a Democratic administration with affirmative goals of doing X, Y, Z with stronger respect for international law, then you’re not going to have the deep bench of lawyers there to help implement it.”
While U.S. officials have for decades questioned various interpretations of international law and sometimes — like during the Bush administration’s use of torture — overruled government lawyers’ assessments of it, a wholesale abandonment of those principles could be dangerous and strategically harmful.
“If the U.S. is getting away with something or says we no longer have to fulfill this obligation, states we may have been pressuring may suddenly be like ‘us too,’” Sanford said. “Complying with international law affects how you’re going to be treated by other countries and if the answer is you can do bad things and nobody cares, then the inclination to violate it or acknowledge you can violate it without consequence seems to grow — and in very vulnerable populations, that’s devastating.”
As the Trump era continues, L could change to reflect the preferences of Reed Rubinstein, the attorney tapped to head the office. Rubinstein previously worked at the conservative America First Legal nonprofit alongside White House adviser Stephen Miller, targeting companies and school districts over diversity and equity policies. He shocked legal scholars this summer with a sweeping threat to harm the International Criminal Court for investigating damaging U.S.-backed Israeli policies in the Gaza war.
“We’ve had advisers before from the private sector, but they’ve often had international law experience or arbitration experience,” Sanford said. “He has very different views.”
During her tenure at the State Department, the leadership office at L has consistently had four career deputies serving under the adviser, she added, but in the Trump administration, that number has dropped to two as political staff take deputy slots.
“In my experience, they were not folks who had a lot of experience in any of the areas they worked on,” Sanford said.
Sanford said she believes her former colleagues “are trying their best,” but she had come to feel she could not do her job “responsibly,” given that her focus was on human rights and refugee work. She chose early retirement at 51, a path she never expected.
“There are frustrations in every administration,” Sanford said. “It just feels amplified now, and the processes by which evaluations are made and decisions are made seems truncated or incomplete. That is to the detriment of the decisionmaker, which is ultimately the secretary [of State]… The U.S. government pays very experienced civil servants with decades of experience and knowledge and training to help decision-makers make the best decisions that they can.”
“If you make decisions without that benefit, it’s like groping in the dark: You’re either not conscious of the risks, pitfalls, legal arguments and legal issues or you’re ignoring them because … the answer is ‘We’re going to do this and we’re not interested.’”
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