Thread by @aaronlmorrison

NEW: The nation’s top federal prosecutors have become more white under President Donald Trump than under his three predecessors, the @AP found in an analysis of demographic data that goes back to the Clinton admin. (from @JZBleiberg, @JimMustian and me) bit.ly/34wI6w2

Our findings reveal a persistent lack of diversity in the ranks of U.S. attorneys has reached a nadir in the Trump administration. White men lead 79 of the 93 U.S. attorney’s offices in a country where they make up less than a third of the population. bit.ly/34wI6w2

Nine current U.S. attorneys are women. Just two are Black, and two are Latinx. A few are Asian. That means Trump has left white men overwhelmingly in charge at a time of national demonstrations over racial inequality and the fairness of the criminal justice system.

That has big implications for public trust and legitimacy in the DOJ. This summer, we heard that consistently from former U.S. attorneys, asst. prosecutors, DOJ officials & families of police brutality victims whose killers were let off the hook by local criminal justice systems.

I focused on how the lack of diversity affects perception of fairness among families of people killed by cops. After her son #EricGarner died after a 2014 chokehold arrest, Gwen Carr saw federal prosecutors reviewing the case become whiter between the Obama and Trump admins.

“There was a different administration and this is why I believe that justice didn't prevail,” Carr told @AP. She said her family met with DOJ officials three different times over five years, and with what seemed like a different group of people each meeting.

Federal prosecutors “were saying that they just wanted to make a just decision...wanted to look under every rock. They were just spinning us, I think, especially in the last round,” Carr said.

I asked Carr who delivered the news that feds would not charge officers involved in her son’s chokehold arrest. She couldn’t recall the exact demographics of the officials, but said, “White people are always in charge, when it comes to something like that.”

The mother of #PhilandoCastile, who was gunned down by police in 2016 during a traffic stop in suburban Minneapolis, said she had hope that DOJ would deliver some sense of justice to her family after a local jury acquitted her son’s killer.

The DOJ is “our last hope, when these little towns ... don’t want to do what’s right,” Valerie Castile told @AP. Ultimately, she felt that help didn’t come. “They want to tell you…’We can’t make a case.’ Yes, you can! You change things as you want to.”

The family of #WalterScott, who was shot in the back in 2015 by a cop in North Charleston, South Carolina, had an entirely different experience. The DOJ under Obama secured a 20-year federal prison sentence on criminal civil rights charges against the officer.

The white former prosecutor who handled the case, “showed so much compassion and he took on my brother’s case as if it was his own family,” Anthony Scott, Walter’s older brother, told @AP. “We still speak to this day.”

Why does all of this matter? As people cast ballots in the upcoming general election, they’re choosing leaders who shape the way the system looks and functions. Diversity is not just about putting faces of color in top leadership.

It’s about having people who reflect the lives and experiences of the communities being served. “There's already a lot of distrust in these systems…” John Matthews, former asst. U.S. attorney for Puerto Rico, told @AP. “I think you also potentially have an empathy problem.”

Our investigation builds on what @BuzzFeedNews noted about the Trump administration in late June. For us, it was important to measure Trump’s prosecutor diversity against the Obama, Bush and Clinton years. bit.ly/2F62cVf

What we didn’t explore as fully was the impact the lack of diversity at DOJ may be having on how law enforcement polices itself. Here, @propublica looks into that. bit.ly/3jHvSY4

@propublica Please read and share: "Trump’s top federal prosecutors are overwhelmingly white men" (via @AP) bit.ly/34wI6w2