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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.
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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.
