On her first day as attorney general, Pam Bondi launched an investigation of the Biden-era investigators of President Donald Trump that will report its progress directly to the White House. It’s a crossing the Rubicon moment for DOJ independence that is compounded by the fact that Trump has made Stephen Miller the point person on the administration-wide effort to exact retribution for the criminal investigations of the president.
Bondi created what she has dubbed the “Weaponization Working Group” as part of her sweeping implementation of President Trump’s executive order, with its own Orwellian title: “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government.” She cites the executive order in her memo announcing the working group.
Bondi charged the working group with reviewing “the activities of all departments and agencies exercising civil or criminal enforcement authority of the United States over the last four years” – language that mirrors Trump’s executive order – for evidence that it improperly targeted Trump, the Jan. 6 rioters, and other MAGA hobbyhorses.
At the top of Bondi’s list is Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecutions of Trump, but it also targets Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for his prosecution of Trump, and New York Attorney General Letitia James for her civil actions against Trump, his family, and his businesses.
Bondi has ordered the Justice Department to provide quarterly progress reports on the working group’s review directly to the White House in what experts tell TPM is a dramatic and unprecedented blow to the Justice Department’s independence.
“Trump 2.0 has let it be known that the Justice Department answers to the political objectives of the White House,” Stephen Gillers, law professor at New York University, said in an interview with TPM. “Now, it’s quite clear that the Trump administration is prepared to see the DOJ as subservient to the political goals of the White House.”
Making matters worse, Trump’s executive order to investigate the investigators directs the attorney general to submit her report to him via his deputy chief of staff for policy. That person is not named in the executive order, but it is Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s longest-serving, most controversial, and aggressive aides.
Neither the Department of Justice nor the White House responded to TPM’s request for clarification on Miller’s involvement.
Trump’s executive order also instructed his director of national intelligence to launch a similar investigation of the investigators and report back to his deputy chief of staff for policy, which again is Miller. Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination as DNC is still pending in the Senate, but she is expected to be confirmed after narrowly winning the Senate Intelligence Committee approval this week.
“The fact that the DOJ is reporting to someone in the White House itself crosses a rubicon,” noted Gillers, who did not have independent knowledge of Miller’s apparent role. “That’s a major shift. The fact that the person who’s getting the reports is Miller is, in my view, dangerous because of his ideological beliefs.”
Gillers further explained that Miller’s involvement would only aggravate the breach of DOJ independence simply because of how inflammatory he is.
Bondi’s working group and Trump’s executive order both explicitly target people who were simply “doing their jobs successfully and following the law based solely on the political context and considerations,” Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, told TPM.
“This is going to politicize the Department of Justice,” said Weiser. “This is going to chill and undermine the rule of law in really unprecedented ways.”
The impact of these very public and targeted counter-investigations will have a chilling effect on the federal workforce, Weiser said, giving them the impression that they will face dire consequences for simply upholding the law.
“There was no question that laws were violated in really flagrant and dangerous manners, that lives were lost and property was damaged and our constitutional order was attacked in violation of federal laws,” Weiser said of the first Trump term and its aftermath. “But more broadly, this is clearly part of a program of political retribution.”
