Pam Bondi is breaking the DOJ
And will take generations to put it back together.
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“If confirmed, I will work to restore confidence and integrity to the Department of Justice — and each of its components,” Pam Bondi vowed during her confirmation hearing in January. “Under my watch, the partisan weaponization of the Department of Justice will end. America must have one tier of justice for all.”
But since her confirmation on February 4, Attorney General Pam Bondi has done exactly the opposite, weaponizing the DOJ against Trump’s political enemies and withdrawing criminal investigations of his allies. The tone was set on her first full day, when she fired off an all-staff memo threatening to fire anyone who raised ethical or legal objections to advancing frivolous arguments in court.
“When Department of Justice attorneys, for example, refuse to advance good-faith arguments by declining to appear in court or sign briefs, it undermines the constitutional order and deprives the President of the benefit of his lawyers,” she wrote.
This warning was also an admission.
For decades the DOJ prided itself on its independence from the White House. In fact, Republicans just spent years accusing President Biden of directing the prosecutions of Donald Trump — something they insisted would be wildly inappropriate if true, which it wasn’t. But now the department is headed by Bondi, who represented Trump in his first impeachment, and Trump’s former criminal lawyers, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove. So now Bondi claims the entire DOJ as “his lawyers.” And anyone who doesn’t like it should GTFO.
For my friends everything …
Less than a week after Bondi was sworn in, her office ordered the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York to drop the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. But Danielle Sassoon, the lawyer leading SDNY, refused to endorse an explicit quid pro quo wherein the DOJ would dismiss the charges without prejudice, allowing the Trump administration to wield the threat of re-indictment as a cudgel to get the mayor to obey their immigration dictates.
Bondi and Bove’s dirty deal in the Adams case generated massive publicity, but it’s certainly not the only one where the DOJ subordinated the interests of justice to the White House’s political demands.
Prosecutors have been working for months to disappear the conviction of Alexander Smirnov, a supposedly smoking gun witness who claimed to have evidence of Hunter and Joe Biden taking millions in Ukrainian bribes. Smirnov’s claims were entirely concocted, which is why he pled guilty in December to making false statements to the FBI along with tax evasion and was sentenced to six years in prison. But framing the former president and his son is not a disfavored activity in the current regime, and so the DOJ has been doggedly trying to spring Smirnov from lockup pending his appeal of the plea deal he himself agreed to.
In the first Trump administration, Bill Barr blew up the prosecution of Mike Flynn, even after he’d pled guilty to lying to the FBI. But even Bill Barr didn’t try to vacate a case post-conviction! For Bondi, though, it was just the beginning.
Last week she dropped fraud charges against Dr. Michael Moore and his Plastic Surgery Institute of Utah, who were indicted in January 2023 for running a fake covid vaccination scheme. The office destroyed $28,000 of medicine and sold fake vaccine cards for $50 a pop, netting almost $100,000. They even injected saline into the arms of kids who wanted the shots, at the behest parents who opposed them.
The case was set to go to trial this week, and a jury had already been selected. But then Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote Bondi a letter calling Moore “a hero for refusing to inject an experimental vaccine into the arms of patients who did not wish to subject themselves or their children to a human experiment.”
“The charges brought initially by the corrupt Biden Justice Department against Dr. Moore are a blatant attempt to punish dissent and silence those who question the safety of experimental vaccines,” she went on, demanding that the DOJ “immediately drop all charges.”
The DOJ also worked to vacate a jury verdict against former LA County sheriff’s deputy Trevor Kirk, who was convicted of using excessive force after he pepper sprayed and body slammed a woman outside a supermarket in 2023. Kirk has become another right-wing cause célèbre, and received a highly unusual post-conviction plea deal after his allies lobbied the Trump administration.
Indeed, lobbying the administration can be quite lucrative, as Pam’s brother Brad is finding out. He currently represents Carolina Amesty, a former Florida legislator who allegedly scammed half a million dollars in covid relief funds by filing loan applications of behalf of businesses that either did not exist or were not as she described them. After filing a criminal complaint in January, the government had 30 days to indict Amesty. But since then, Brad Bondi and the DOJ have filed four requests for an extension “in the interests of justice.” Whether this is an attempt to work out a settlement or run out the clock is not entirely clear, but there’s no mistaking that Bondi is selling his services as a conduit to the federal agency run by his sister.
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And the DOJ’s advocacy for Trump allies extends into the civil context as well. In June, the DOJ dropped a lawsuit against White House econ crank Peter Navarro, who flatly refused to turn over his emails to the National Archives after leaving office in 2021. In March 2023, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly granted summary judgment in favor of the government, ordering Navarro to cough up government records stored on his encrypted Proton mail account. Navarro was so squirrelly from there that he eventually wound up with a magistrate judge appointed to sift through his messages and ensure that he turned them over.
But now that Trump and Navarro are back in the White House, the same people who brayed for Hillary Clinton to go to email jail are suddenly uninterested in where officials store government records.
For my enemies, the law
In contrast, the DOJ has aggressively pursued Trump’s political enemies. In February, Bondi announced the she was filing “charges” against New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Tish James.
In fact, Bondi was filing a civil suit against the state alleging that it violates immigration law, as she’s done against both Illinois and the city of Los Angeles.
But the DOJ did charge Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and Rep. LaMonica McIver in connection with their May 9 visit to an ICE facility in their district. And the US Attorney’s Office in New Jersey, which is currently being run by Alina Habba, another of Trump’s personal lawyers, is now threatening New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy as well.
The DOJ also charged Wisconsin state Judge Hannah Dugan for the “crime” of letting a defendant leave the courtroom via a side door.
US attorneys working under Bondi have issued threatening letters to multiple members of Congress, including Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Robert Garcia, and tried to spin up criminal charges against non-profits for receiving congressionally allocated environmental funds.
Burning down the house
The Justice Department was once the premiere law enforcement agency in the world, but under Bondi it is a mere shadow of its former self.
She presided over a purge of lawyers who worked on former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigations. She banished dozens of experienced prosecutors for the sin of working on the January 6 cases. Other DOJ “lifers” like Erez Reuveni and August Flentje were booted for daring to tell the truth in court filings in the immigrant rendition cases — for which they were labeled Democratic saboteurs. Reuveni filed a whistleblower complaint in which he alleged that Bove instructed attorneys to say “fuck you” to court orders, which (again) they did. And this week Bondi dispensed with all pretense and fired her chief ethics advisor.
The Civil Rights Division, which once protected victims of discrimination, is helmed by yet another former Trump lawyer, Harmeet Dhillon, a culture warrior who brags about outsourcing her prosecutorial discretion to Twitter randos.
Per the Wall Street Journal:
Harmeet Dhillon, head of the civil-rights division at the Justice Department, wakes up around 6 a.m. and begins her workday scrolling through X, searching for claims of discrimination.
A lot of them, Dhillon said, regard universities. After spotting “a list of new horrors,” she said, “I text my deputies, and we assign cases, and we get cranking.”
Dhillon’s office is busily undoing consent decrees with local police departments in which the cops agreed not to violate the civil rights of the very people they are supposed to be protecting. A reported 70 percent of lawyers in Dhillon’s unit made a beeline for the exit.
And things are no better in the Federal Programs Branch, which is responsible for defending the president’s policies in court. Reuters reports that two-thirds of the lawyers there left rather than be complicit in dismantling birthright citizenship, the separation of powers, and the federal bureaucracy itself.
The Department of Justice is no longer in the business of justice at all, and has squandered the presumption of regularity it once enjoyed with judges. One of the bulwarks of American civil society is functionally MIA — a massive blow to state capacity. And once you’ve lost institutional legitimacy, it can be well nigh impossible to get it back again. (Paging Chief Justice John Roberts ...)
AG Bondi came into office promising to get the Justice Department out of the weaponization business. But in reality, she’s broken it, perhaps irreparably. In its current degraded state, the agency is purely reactive, capable only of defending the policies of an aging demagogue and targeting his enemies for retribution. In short, Bondi presides over a department of weaponization and nothing else.
That’s it for today
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Typically a pardon is granted when a conviction comes as the result of misconduct in the court, and a decision not to pursue charges comes after new evidence comes to light. Neither of these have happened over the past 6 months. Instead, the common thread is being a supporter of the Convicted Felon. That alone has destroyed the credibility of the DOJ and I’m glad a majority of lawyers have GTFO’d rather than been a party to this sullying of justice.
Well written summary of the extent the DOJ has been corrupted by Bondi. I don't agree that it's lost to us forever. The day we regain power we will start its repair and I hope the author is wrong in saying it will take generations. If she's correct, then that's a very scary prospect. A quick, although highly cynical, fix might be to use the same RIF tactics employed at the DOE and State by the Trump administration. Terminate the employments of the administration that Bondi brought in, then replace them with people who are less ethically challenged. If someone appealed their termination and it got up to the Roberts Court how could the latter reverse then what they've allowed now?