A federal judge appointed to the bench in 1985 by President Ronald Reagan announced his resignation over the weekend in a damning public letter, excoriating the Trump administration for its assault on the rule of law.

U.S. District Court Judge Mark L. Wolf didn’t hide behind niceties in the missive, published by The Atlantic on Sunday, instead stating his opinion bluntly.

“President Donald Trump is using the law for partisan purposes, targeting his adversaries while sparing his friends and donors from investigation, prosecution, and possible punishment,” he warned.

“This is contrary to everything that I have stood for in my more than 50 years in the Department of Justice and on the bench. The White House’s assault on the rule of law is so deeply disturbing to me that I feel compelled to speak out. Silence, for me, is now intolerable.”

Wolf proceeded to detail numerous abuses of the law by Trump and his appointees, describing the blatant corruption of justice as an “existential threat to democracy and the rule of law.”

That includes Trump’s social media post directing U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to indict his political adversaries despite lacking a legal basis to do so. Bondi dutifully followed through and has targeted New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey with what appear to be spurious suits.

“What Nixon did episodically and covertly, knowing it was illegal or improper, Trump now does routinely and overtly,” he wrote.

Mark L. Wolf, senior judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, listens to opening statements during a Senate Judiciary Hearing on May 17, 2023, in Washington, D.C.

Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Trump’s also dismantled the internal offices that investigate government corruption, noted Wolf:

And while he spent his first term calling cryptocurrency a “scam,” Trump has since embraced it wholeheartedly, leading to what Wolf charitably suggests is the “unlawful influence of money on official decisions.”

Trump disbanded the DOJ’s cryptocurrency-enforcement unit after he launched his own cryptocurrency, $TRUMP. The top purchaser of the currency, Justin Sun, is a foreign national, observed Wolf, who has spent around $85 million on $TRUMP and other cryptocurrencies controlled by Trump’s family.

“Ordinarily, the Department of Justice would investigate this sort of situation,” wrote Wolf. “Rather, a few months after Sun started purchasing tokens from the Trump-family cryptocurrency company, the Securities and Exchange Commission paused its fraud suit against Sun and his companies pending the outcome of settlement negotiations.”

Critically, the 78-year-old judge noted that his successor was appointed in 2013, long before the Trump administration, so his resignation will not create a vacancy for Trump to fill.

He told The New York Times that he now plans to speak out on the Trump administration’s attacks on due process, which he couldn’t ethically do as a judge.

“I hope to be a spokesperson for embattled judges who, consistent with the code of conduct, feel they cannot speak candidly to the American people,” he said.

In a statement to Fox News, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson seemingly welcomed Wolf’s resignation. She said that judges who “want to inject their own personal agenda into the law have no place on the bench.”