ICYMI: Two New Chilling Reports on Efforts to Weaponize DOJ Against Perceived Political Enemies
ICYMI: Two New Chilling Reports on Efforts to Weaponize DOJ Against Perceived Political Enemies
In just the past 24 hours, two major publications have sounded the alarm about how the sitting administration is turning the Department of Justice from an independent law enforcement agency into a political weapon. The New Yorker’s profile of Attorney General Pam Bondi and The New York Times’ exposé on Ed Martin’s “Weaponization Working Group” both underscore the same disturbing reality: federal law enforcement is being reshaped to settle political scores, punish critics, and reward allies.
Just yesterday, The New Yorker published a revealing profile of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, describing her tenure as a sharp departure from traditional legal independence. The article paints a striking image of Bondi personally removing portraits of the previous administration—“Don’t you people realize who won the election?” she demanded—and using those portraits as a pretext for a sweeping purge within the DOJ. It portrays a Justice Department transformed “into a pure and unfiltered tool of politics and revenge,” one that has aggressively reversed policies, attacked judges deemed “rogue,” and embraced controversial initiatives including the elimination of birthright citizenship. Critics warn that Bondi’s actions amount to a politicization of justice—a willingness to wield prosecutorial power for partisan ends.
That disturbing dynamic is echoed in The New York Times, which exposes how Bondi’s “Weaponization Working Group,” led by Ed Martin, has launched aggressive investigations into political figures such as New York Attorney General Letitia James and Senator Adam Schiff—underscoring a troubling trend of using DOJ authority to target critics and consolidate loyalty. Combined with earlier examples Americans Against Government Censorship has documented— pressuring Citibank to reverse their restrictions for its clients that sold firearms and retaliation against a Goldman Sachs economist—the pattern is unmistakable: federal power is being bent toward punishing dissent, not upholding justice. These actions are neither isolated nor defensible. They carry a grave blowback risk—once weaponized, institutions may never fully recover the impartiality they sacrificed.
Turning the government’s vast powers into a weapon isn’t just wrong—it’s reckless. These tactics all but guarantee blowback the next time power changes hands, normalizing political retribution as a governing tool. The American people deserve institutions that rise above partisan vendettas. Until leaders reject this corrosive approach, the legitimacy of our democracy will remain at risk.
Read key excerpts from both profiles below:
New Yorker: Pam Bondi’s Power Play
During the past six months, Bondi has presided over the most convulsive transition of power in the Justice Department since the Watergate era, and perhaps in the hundred-and-fifty-five-year history of the department. No Attorney General has been as aggressive in reversing policies or firing personnel. None has been as willing to cede the department’s traditional independence from the White House. In Trump’s second term—“Season 2,” Mizelle called it—“the handcuffs are taken off,” he said. “We actually get to do everything that the President wants us to do, everything that Pam wants us to do.”
Bondi’s Justice Department has vigorously defended even the most extreme elements of Trump’s agenda, including the deportation of migrants to Central American prisons and the elimination of birthright citizenship. Bondi has embraced the President’s most outlandishly unqualified nominees—such as Alina Habba, his choice to be the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, who previously served as his private lawyer and has never worked as a prosecutor—and attacked “rogue judges” who stand in her way, filing misconduct complaints against them and urging that they step aside from cases. Most alarming, Bondi’s Justice Department has demonstrated a willingness to use criminal law to exact revenge against Trump’s political enemies. Bondi has reportedly ordered up a grand-jury probe into the Obama Administration’s analysis of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, a subject already thoroughly investigated. Trump proclaimed himself “happy to hear” the news, though he was perhaps not totally satisfied. Asked about Ukraine at a news conference last week, Trump invoked Hillary Clinton’s role in the “Russia, Russia hoax,” and, pointing at Bondi, said, “I’m looking at Pam, because I hope something’s going to be done about it.”
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One of the driving convictions of the Bondi Justice Department is that its predecessor, acting at the direction of the White House, improperly pursued Trump. Numerous prosecutors who worked on the criminal cases against Trump have been fired. “Obviously, you cannot have the people who were prosecuting the President of the United States still working for the President of the United States,” Mizelle said. “I mean, we would be stupid, right?” (For department veterans, that is not at all obvious. The career prosecutors assigned to work on the Trump cases were following legitimate instructions from the political officials in charge, much as Bondi has demanded of the career staff that reports to her.)
Bondi has created a “weaponization” working group to examine what Trump has called the “unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.” Whether it will produce the actual indictments—not to mention convictions—that Trump craves is far from clear, but its activities have ramped up. Early this month, Bondi reportedly authorized Ed Martin—a former Stop the Steal activist who heads the new working group—to open criminal investigations into Senator Adam Schiff and New York’s attorney general, Letitia James. Schiff, as the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, had helped lead the 2020 impeachment proceedings, and James had successfully brought a civil fraud case against Trump. The New York Times also reported that the acting U.S. Attorney in Albany was investigating whether James’s office had violated Trump’s civil rights in pursuing its fraud suit.
Jared Wise, a former F.B.I. agent who was criminally charged with encouraging the January 6th insurrection, recently joined the department to work on weaponization. According to his indictment, Wise told D.C. police officers at the Capitol that day, “I’m former law enforcement. You’re disgusting. You are the Nazi. You are the Gestapo.” As officers were knocked to the ground in front of him, Wise, according to body-camera footage, yelled, “Yeah, fuck them! Yeah, kill ’em!” The jury in Wise’s case was about to begin deliberating when Trump took office and ordered such prosecutions dismissed. In a statement, a department spokesperson called Wise “a valued member of the organization,” adding, “We appreciate his contributions.”
Under Bondi, perceived weaponization has produced the real thing. But Justice Department officials bristle at the suggestion that her actions are anything beyond a necessary response to Biden Administration overreach. “I don’t think you will be taken seriously,” Mizelle warned me, “if you don’t acknowledge that prosecuting the former President of the United States was the single greatest shift toward weaponization that the Department of Justice ever could have undergone. And so any sort of notion that anything she does is even comparable to that just can’t be taken seriously. It’s laughable.”
This raises the unsettling question of what happens when a Democrat is elected President. Does one purge beget another? Once the criminal-justice system is deployed against political enemies, can that cycle be broken? I was haunted by my conversation with Sauer, the Solicitor General, who praised Bondi’s “absolute sense” of the “strategic judgment calls” that must be made in litigation. “When is it time to show judgment and restraint?” Sauer asked. “When is it time to be creative and aggressive . . . in taking a legal position that will advance the President’s agenda?” I suggested that it was hard to discern much restraint in the legal positions the department has advocated under Bondi. The Solicitor General laughed. “We view it,” he said, “the opposite way.”
New York Times: In Pursuing Trump Rival, Weaponization Czar Sidesteps Justice Dept. Norms
Edward R. Martin Jr. did not waste any time. Days after Mr. Martin, a Trump-aligned activist, was tapped by the Justice Department to investigate the New York attorney general, Letitia James, he wrote a letter to her lawyer saying he would take it as an act of “good faith” if she were to resign.
Mr. Martin followed up this breach of prosecutorial protocol by showing up outside Ms. James’s Brooklyn home, clad in a trench coat and posing for pictures for The New York Post.
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Each of Mr. Martin’s actions violates Justice Department rules and norms: Prosecutors are barred from making investigative decisions based on politics; they are asked not to comment on specific cases; and they are supposed to avoid turning their investigations into public spectacles.
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Mr. Martin’s conduct is part of an emerging pattern from Mr. Trump’s administration over the past two months in which top officials seek to use the federal government’s vast intelligence gathering and law enforcement authority to cast the specter of criminality on Mr. Trump’s enemies without demonstrating that they might have committed crimes that rise to the level of an indictment.
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Though he courts the press more aggressively than most, he is hardly unique among law enforcement and intelligence officials in the administration.
Officials — including the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, Ms. Gabbard and Mr. Ratcliffe — have declassified several documents in recent weeks related to the inquiries into ties between Russia and Mr. Trump’s first presidential campaign, suggesting that they show a pattern of misconduct, even lawbreaking, by Obama-era officials. Instead of keeping the documents under wraps for use in an investigation, many of the documents have been publicly released and given to Congress.
And the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal watchdog agency, this month eagerly confirmed that it was investigating Jack Smith, the federal prosecutor who twice indicted Mr. Trump. The inquiry, into whether Mr. Smith violated a law that prohibits federal workers from using their government jobs to engage in political activity, appears to be theater, given that the most severe penalty is dismissal from federal employment. Mr. Smith left government at the start of the year.