This Is Not Restoring the Way the Justice Department Is Supposed to Work

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Sunday, February 16, 2025

 

This is the second of seven posts on Attorney General Pam Bondi’s “Weaponization Working Group.” (The first is here.)

 

Under the guise of “Restoring the Integrity and Credibility of the Department of Justice,” the AG is implementing the Biden DOJ model of conviction first and trial later — if ever. Standing convicted are Trump’s principal prosecutorial nemeses — Biden DOJ special counsel Jack Smith, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and New York Attorney General Letitia James — and therefore guilty by association are any DOJ and FBI personnel who aided and abetted them. In what crimes, we’re not told — only that Bondi will be “provid[ing] quarterly reports to the White House regarding the progress of the review.”

 

Oh, is there someone at the White House who wanted the “review” and to be apprised of its “progress”? Who knew! Over the past four years. I vaguely remember President Trump’s saying — incessantly, come to think of it — that what made the lawfare against him treasonously corrupt was that President Biden (or whoever was actually in charge) was directing and monitoring it from the White House — a point to which I was sympathetic, even if the treason stuff was over the top.

 

To be clear (and anyone who has followed my work through the Biden years will not need clarity — see, e.g., here, here, here, and here), I agree that Smith, Bragg, and James were overzealous and corruptly partisan (Fulton County DA Fani Willis, too). The same is true of the Biden Justice Department’s upper echelon in much of its decision-making about cases involving the Democrats’ political piñatas — in this regard, Bondi includes January 6 defendants, Catholics, parents disturbed about woke indoctrination in the schools, anti-abortion protesters, and whistleblowers who shed light on corrupt Biden-Harris administration practices. Symmetrically — because that is how lawfare necessarily works — the Biden DOJ labored to shield its friends from the punitive wringer they made of the investigative process: It was a good time to be a radical leftist rioter or a Democratic senator whipping up the rowdies on the grounds of the Supreme Court; and if Hunter Biden’s lawyers had been swift enough to play ball when prosecutor David Weiss was trying to bury the cases against him, he’d have beaten the rap and wouldn’t have needed a paternal pardon.

 

Nevertheless, it does not follow that, because the previous Justice Department was politicized, all of the people it targeted were pure as the driven snow.

 

Trump engaged in serious misconduct, regardless of whether it was actionable misconduct. My personal favorite of the MAGA arrows I catch on social media these days is along the lines of, “Hey, remember, McCarthy’s the guy who used to say Smith’s documents case against Trump was about real crimes!” Well . . . he still says it and never stopped believing it. The fact that Bragg brought an atrocious case, and that Smith’s election-interference case was ill-conceived, meant neither that all the Trump cases were woven out of whole cloth nor that the election-interference conduct wasn’t impeachable, regardless of whether it was criminally prosecutable. I agree that the majority of the voters — a far thinner one than Trump fans acknowledge — decided that Trump’s misbehavior shouldn’t keep him out of the White House in light of the alternative. That doesn’t mean the misbehavior didn’t happen, or that it wasn’t misbehavior.

 

The Mar-a-Lago documents prosecution involved actionable obstruction, even if I would have preferred that it not be charged and believe that, at a minimum, Biden should have pardoned Trump on the classified information charges. Furthermore, hundreds of the J6 defendants — whom President Trump has shamefully pardoned — assaulted cops and damaged property at the Capitol in obstructing a constitutionally mandated joint session of Congress. The facts that the Biden DOJ was oppressive and excessive in its prosecutorial tactics, and that Section1512(c)(2) of the penal code may not have been the right statutory obstruction provision to charge ( a hotly disputed subject we’ll come to later in this series), do not erase the blatant criminality of the riot.

 

News flash: Pam Bondi now represents the Justice Department — in fact, leads it. It is thus her ethical duty to advance whatever good-faith defense there is of the government’s conduct. If she is just going to spout Trump’s grievances without putting the Justice Department’s response to egregious behavior in context, then she’s engaging in partisan law enforcement, exactly the noxious practice she claims to be rooting out.

 

Yes, high-ranking policymakers who made dubious charging decisions and otherwise waywardly exercised prosecutorial discretion should be disciplined — suspended, transferred, demoted, or terminated depending on how culpable their behavior was. The Justice Department does not have to prove that one of its officials engaged in a crime in order to take remedial measures. It does, however, have to prove misconduct, and it can’t do that without something about which it used to be unnecessary to remind the Justice Department: the imperative of a quiet, competent, comprehensive investigation that looks at all sides fairly and impartially, and that doesn’t run off at the mouth until it can actually prove something dispositive.

 

Whatever Bondi’s weaponization directive is, it is not that.

 

The directive certainly is part of a purge. That’s elucidated by the AG’s attempt at damage control after another mess caused by Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general who kept the DOJ seat warm while Bondi’s confirmation was pending. Even before he made a debacle of the political corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams (see the first post in this series), Bove spooked the FBI’s entire workforce with an order demanding that the Bureau name names of anyone who touched the Capital riot cases in any way.

 

If you understand the way the bureau works (which Bove surely does, having been a Southern District of New York prosecutor for several years), you must know that that such a list of names would include something close to all 37,000 employees (13,000 agents and 24,000 support personnel). We’re talking about sundry leads run down in some 1,600 cases. The vast majority of this is scut work, not done by the higher-ups who made and implemented lawfare policy. Bove’s order gave even the administrative clerks who simply received investigative leads from Washington and forwarded them to other bureau field offices across the country reason to believe they were now the subjects of a criminal investigation. Ditto the low-ranking agents who merely took such leads and followed the Washington bosses’ instructions to interview witnesses, chase down phone records, and the like.

 

That is not what Bove intended, but it’s the misimpression he created. Consequently, Bondi’s weaponization directive is, in part, a clean-up on aisle five. The AG writes: “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.” In case it wasn’t clear enough that she is walking back Bove’s order, Bondi reiterates four paragraphs down in the two-page directive (the bold letters are hers):

 

the Weaponization Working Group will examine . . . [t]he pursuit of improper tactics and unethical prosecutions relating to events at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 – as distinct from good-faith actions by federal employees simply following orders from superiors[.]

 

Given her references to the J6 investigation, it is quite remarkable that the attorney general of the United States deemed it unnecessary to describe the behavior that resulted in the J6 prosecutions brought by the Department she now leads — e.g., the violent attacks on police officers that, during her confirmation hearing, she told the Senate Judiciary Committee she was so very upset about. Apparently, Trump’s aforementioned pardons make it unnecessary — or too embarrassing — to dwell on that.

 

The weaponization directive is doing politics, not removing politics from law enforcement. Plainly, the “Weaponization Working Group” exists to settle the president’s scores and rewrite dark chapters of his history — while providing him with quarterly assurances of Attorney General Bondi’s progress on what is now the Justice Department’s core mission.