Whole Hog Politics: Bondi beached 

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I’m not aware of any Justice Department in any administration that wasn’t accused of political corruption and that, to at least some degree, there wasn’t some there there.

The disappearing, reappearing Hunter Biden prosecution. The pardon bonanza of the first Trump administration. Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch and her tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton amid his wife’s prosecution for mishandling state secrets. The U.S. attorney sackings of the George W. Bush presidency. The Rose Law firm records scandal of the Clinton administration. Caspar Weinberger’s last-minute pardon by President George H.W. Bush. Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese and the dubious loans. The Carter Justice Department’s treatment of the president’s top aide, Bert Lance. By then, you’re in the Ford and Nixon years, and Nelly bar the door. 

We could go on and on, back to the beginning of the 20th century, when the Justice Department went from being something like the legal office for the federal government to being the sharpest arrow in the quiver for projecting federal power domestically. As the number of federal laws increased exponentially in the Progressive Era and the department got its own dedicated police force in the FBI to enforce the failed experiment of Prohibition, things changed quickly. The attorney generalship changed right along with it

Two of the worst — Woodrow Wilson’s henchman, Mitchell Palmer, and Warren Harding’s bag man, Harry Daugherty — helped seal the agency’s reputation for politically motivated thuggery and corruption with back-to-back, bipartisan abuses. 

Which is all to say that in more than a century of what Washingtonians have long called “the Department of Political Justice,” nothing being said about former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s tenure is particularly pathbreaking. Yes, the alleged misdeeds of some of her predecessors looks quaint in comparison to some of her actions, but she doesn’t look so different from the heavies of the past like Palmer, Daugherty, Robert F. Kennedy Sr. or Richard Nixon’s enforcer, John Mitchell. What made Bondi’s tenure unsustainable, though, was that unlike their bosses, President Trump wanted not just someone to carry out his political agenda, but to do so in an explicit way. He wanted the brass knuckles out for everyone to see, not hidden under a velvet drape. 

In September, when the president apparently mistakenly posted what was supposed to be a private message to Bondi on his social media platform, his frustration with the niceties of prosecutorial procedure were evident as he complained with a number of posts on the platform about a lack of prosecutions of high-profile Democrats.

In essence, Trump wanted her to conduct herself in the way that he claimed Democrats functioned toward him during the many criminal investigations during his first term and the 2021-2025 interregnum. While Republicans certainly have a strong point to make about the institutional drift of career Department of Justice (DOJ) officials, it did not seem to occur to Trump that the individual prosecutors working these cases believed they were doing the right thing. When Trump celebrated the death of former FBI Director Robert Mueller, it put an exclamation point on the idea. Lost on Trump was the fact that, in the end, it was Mueller’s probe that finally put to bed the idea of active collusion between Trump and the Kremlin — something that wouldn’t have happened without a respected investigator on the case. 

What Bondi tried to offer Trump was what he lacked in the first........

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