President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Pam Bondi as attorney general has caused a stir, particularly among leftists who fear the novel administration will target Justice Department officials involved in the politically motivated effort to prosecute Trump. were involved.
If current signs are any indication, they have every reason to be afraid.
During an interview with Fox News last year, Bondi said that if Trump wins the election, “the Justice Department, the prosecutors will prosecute, the bad guys.”
Bondi accused the officers of being part of a “deep state” conspiracy and said: “They are no longer hiding in the shadows… they can all be investigated.”
A former senior Justice Department official said this NBC News that they would “expect [Bondi] She must do exactly what Trump wants her to do,” noting that members of Jack Smith’s special counsel team, which prosecuted Trump in the case of the secret documents and alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, “are very concerned and talk to lawyers.”
Trump reportedly plans to fire Smith and his team as one of his first acts as president The Washington Post. Two sources close to the president-elect’s transition team said his goal was to “weed out the bad guys.”
The person noted that the idea of assembling investigative teams of federal agents and prosecutors in battleground states is less sophisticated and “not at the top of the list” — contrary to the president-elect’s oft-stated desire to spotless up the Justice Department. Trump reiterated that goal Thursday after his first nominee for attorney general, former congressman Matt Gaetz, withdrew from consideration.
“For too long, the partisan Justice Department has been used as a weapon against me and other Republicans,” Trump wrote as he announced his novel pick, longtime ally Pam Bondi, in a post on Truth Social. “No longer. Pam will refocus the DOJ on its intended purpose of fighting crime and making America sheltered again.”
Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) agreed with these feelings during an appearance on “Meet the Press.”
“First and foremost, the people involved should be fired immediately,” he said, arguing that “there must be accountability for these types of abuses.”
So let’s pull out the political crystal ball and see if we can glimpse the future when Trump and his team spotless up the Justice Department. If the president-elect follows through on his promise, many in the agency have every reason to be concerned.
In recent years, the Justice Department has been used as a weapon not only against the president-elect, but also against conservatives. Agents have targeted pro-life protesters and even Catholics. Hopefully Trump’s cleanup efforts aren’t confined to those who personally persecuted him. If he does expand the effort, it would go a long way toward destroying the administrative state embedded in the DOJ. Even with Trump in office, it would become more complex for the agency to continue targeting right-wing populists.
The response from Democrats and the media is so predictable that you don’t need a crystal ball to predict the resulting national meltdowns. In fact, there was already mass hysteria on the left when Trump nominated Bondi. They will claim that Trump is using the Justice Department to further his own political agenda, a claim that could conjure up images of pot and cauldron. We can also expect to hear the word “fascist” more often than we did even in the 2024 presidential campaign.
To put it simply: They will blame Trump for what they did. But if Trump plays his cards right, it won’t matter. While I’m not entirely convinced that efforts to root out corruption at the Justice Department and FBI will be completely successful, there’s always the possibility that Trump could prove me wrong. That’s what it means to hope, right?
