The Department of Justice May Not Survive Pam Bondi
At her confirmation hearing in January, Attorney General Pam Bondi tried to reassure senators about the job she would do as the nation’s top federal law-enforcement officer. Her “overriding objective,” Bondi said, would be to “return the Department of Justice to its core mission of keeping Americans safe and vigorously enforcing the law.”
Her stated priorities were standard fare: stopping violent criminals, gangs, child predators, drug traffickers, and “terrorists and other foreign threats.” Bondi also pledged to return the Justice Department to defend the “foundational rights of all Americans” and to “make America safe again.” “Lastly, and most importantly, if confirmed, I will work to restore confidence and integrity to the Department of Justice—and each of its components,” Bondi said. “Under my watch, the partisan weaponization of the Department of Justice will end. America must have one tier of justice for all.”
By any reasonable standard, including her own, Bondi’s tenure has been a cataclysmic failure. Her first year as attorney general has seen the Justice Department hollowed out by waves of firings and resignations. Her political appointees have misled federal judges, botched high-profile criminal cases, and embarrassed the Trump administration on multiple occasions. Whatever reputation the department once had for competence and integrity is now in tatters.
Bondi’s tenure began with a ham-fisted plot concocted by her underlings and Tom Homan, the White House’s “border czar,” to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in exchange for his help with federal immigration enforcement. So cartoonishly obvious was this scheme that a federal judge only granted the department’s motion by dismissing the charges with prejudice, meaning that they couldn’t use the threat of refiling them as illicit leverage. Multiple top prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan resigned rather than take part in the chicanery. Adams’s political career ended in disgrace and New Yorkers elected a new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who refused to cooperate at all.
The Adams plot came after Bondi had issued a department-wide memo pledging to “restore the integrity and credibility” of the department after the supposed abuses of the Biden era. “No one who has acted with a righteous spirit and just intentions has any cause for concern about efforts to root out corruption and weaponization,” she claimed.
