Pam Bondi's Department of Justice seeks Trump's revenge

While President Trump flamboyantly signs executive orders banning young trans girls from playing softball and celebrates his inane order to have the Army Corps of Engineers dump millions of gallons of water into a California flood plain, man Friday Elon Musk and his cyberpunk gang have taken a sledgehammer to the federal government. Systematically infiltrating one agency after another (the latest being the Social Security Administration!), Musk and his crew are fulfilling the Project 2025 blueprint to smash everything they come in contact with.

It's only been two and a half weeks and they've already accessed the Treasury Department and are fooling around with the computer system that pays America's bills. They've destroyed the Office of Personnel Management and USAID. Now they are reportedly working on Medicare and Medicaid, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Energy Department, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Department of Education. There are surely more on the menu that just haven't come to light yet. The boys are working with no supervision other than Musk and a handful of henchmen, allegedly under the authority of the addled president who spends his days screaming at clouds.

Meanwhile, the Senate on Thursday confirmed the original mastermind of this slaughter, Russell Vought, as the director of Office Management and Budget. Vought was the main author of the Project 2025 plot to annihilate the federal government and turn the country into a Christian Nationalist paradise. That he somehow got two wealthy libertines to do his dirty work for him is a true testament to the power of his vision. He's been "advising" behind the scenes already so it shouldn't make too much difference now that he'll be in the office. In any case, Musk has been given the go-ahead to wreck whatever he can get away with. The only thing that might stop him are judicial orders — but, since everything is so secretive, we really don't know if they're following them.

Still, for all of Vought's and DOGE's ability to feverishly slash and burn, they really can't do it all. Luckily for them, they don't have to.

The Senate this week also confirmed Pam Bondi, Donald Trump's former defense attorney at his first impeachment trial, as the attorney general of the United States. At the swearing-in ceremony, led by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (of course), Trump said: "I'm supposed to say she's going to be totally impartial when it comes to Democrats but I'm just going to say that she'll be as impartial as a person can be," so that was reassuring.

Adopting the patented Trump-Musk shock and awe technique, Bondi hit the ground running. Working with her two top deputies, former Trump personal criminal defense lawyers Emil Bove and Todd Blanch, she has issued a flurry of orders demonstrating that she is on a mission from Dear Leader. The Washington Post reported that on her first day:

Despite pledging during her confirmation hearing that “politics will not play a part” in her decision-making, Bondi, within hours of taking office,created a “Weaponization Working Group” to review instances of what she described as “politicized justice” — starting with the federal criminal cases brought against Trump by special counsel Jack Smith.

She also ordered an examination of what she alleged was federal cooperation in the criminal and civil investigations of Trump in New York — even though they were carried out by state authorities, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

She wrote, "these steps are required because, as President Trump pointed out following his second inauguration, ‘[t]he prior administration and allies throughout the country engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.'" She added, “No one who has acted with a righteous spirit and just intentions has any cause for concern about our efforts to root out corruption and weaponization." I'm sure that was very reassuring.

At least one employee almost surely is very happy with this edict. The acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin, a former Stop the Steal lawyer, is so committed to ending partisan weaponization that he posted the following letter on X addressed to Musk. "Dear @elon, Please see this important letter. We will not tolerate threats against DOGE workers or law-breaking by the disgruntled," Martin wrote.

Martin has a very bright future in the Trump Justice Department.

Chris Geitner at Lawdork reported on another Bondi memo effectively ending any remaining norm that the Department of Justice would operate as an independent arm of the government, answerable only to the law and the Constitution. Bondi demanded from federal prosecutors "zealous advocacy" of Trump's agenda and threatened that dissent would not be tolerated:

“Any attorney who because of their personal political views or judgments declines to sign a brief or appear in court, refuses to advance good-faith arguments on behalf of the administration, or otherwise delays or impedes the Department’s mission will be subject to discipline and potentially termination, consistent with applicable law"

She issued yet another order titled, “Ending Illegal DEI and DEIA Discrimination and Preferences" and ordered a report from the Civil Rights Division on the private sector's "illegal" use of DEI for potential criminal investigation. (This tracks with a group of red state attornies general, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, threatening COSTCO for keeping its DEI policies in place.)

There's more. Trump has long advocated the repeal of corruption laws pertaining to bribery of foreign players, so it's unsurprising that one of Bondi's first moves was to scale back "enforcement of laws governing foreign lobbying transparency and bribes of foreign officials.") But the real tell is the announcement to end the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative started in 2010 to end international corruption and return the ill-gotten gains to victims, as Rolling Stone reported:

The former Florida attorney general and legal counsel to President Trump during his first impeachment trial, who spent the last several years as a corporate lobbyist, also closed the KleptoCapture task force, created under AG Merrick Garland in 2022 to target Russian oligarchs violating U.S. economic sanctions imposed because of Russia‘s invasion of Ukraine. Through the initiative, the DOJ has prosecuted frauds worth billions, recovering embezzled funds and seizing assets like megayachts and luxury condos.

That's got to make some of the world's oligarchs very happy. In fact, one might even call it the first legal foreign bribe under the new Trump administration. One can only wonder if anyone's getting something in return.

All in all it's been a very productive week so far for the new attorney general. She's yet to weigh in on the anticipated purge of the FBI, but I think we can be assured that she's for it.

After Bondi's deputy, Emil Bove, fired the Jack Smith prosecutors, on Trump's personal order, and put a number of others on notice that they were to be demoted if they refuse to resign, it's very clear that Bondi and her henchmen are turning the Justice Department into Trump's personal law firm. Since all three of the top officials have actually been Trump's defense attorneys, that makes a lot of sense. He's finally got his Roy Cohn.