Trump fired Bondi because he wants a more unjust Justice Department

President Trump, who treats the Justice Department as if it were his personal law firm, fired Attorney General Pam Bondi because she failed to weaponize the department sufficiently. He wanted her to vindictively prosecute his enemies as effectively as he demanded, and she failed. She also failed to make the Jeffrey Epstein scandal go away.

Trump refuses to accept that the job of the attorney general is to represent the government and people of the U.S., upholding the law and the interests of justice on a nonpartisan basis, independent of the president.

The president insists that his attorney general launch politicized prosecutions and lawsuits that serve his interests, creating an unjust Justice Department.

Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions in 2018 for not sufficiently corrupting the Justice Department. He has now fired Bondi for the same reason.

Bondi did her best to please Trump, carrying out his orders and frequently lavishing praise on him, bordering on buffoonery. Consider the time she absurdly called him “the greatest president in American history” at a House Judiciary Committee hearing in February.    

To further curry favor with Trump, Bondi fired many experienced Justice Department lawyers whom she considered insufficiently loyal to the president or who had been involved in investigations of Trump under Special Counsel Jack Smith.  

In addition, during Bondi’s first six months as attorney general the Justice Department dropped investigations of more than 23,000 criminal cases to focus instead on Trump’s obsession with immigration enforcement.

Similarly, FBI Director Kash Patel fired FBI agents who had worked on investigations of Trump and reassigned nearly 3,000 agents to work on immigration enforcement.

The firings and reassignments of prosecutors and FBI agents, along with the departure of others who quit, have dangerously weakened America’s ability to protect our country against terrorists and other criminals.

Unfortunately for Bondi, Trump wanted her to do even more to please him and tasked her with an impossible mission. He expected her to win criminal convictions against current and former government officials who have angered him, even when they apparently committed no crimes.

As a former New York state prosecutor, I know from experience that facts and evidence are essential to convict someone of a crime. For this reason, it would be difficult at best for Bondi to have successfully prosecuted former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, six Democratic members of Congress who told members of the military they don’t have to carry out illegal orders, and dozens of others Trump targeted for prosecution on trumped-up charges without evidence of wrongdoing.   

Trump has also ordered the Justice Department to file frivolous lawsuits that have little chance of success, but force the targets to spend big money on legal fees or to settle the cases before trial.

Moreover, Trump wanted Bondi to protect him by stopping Congress from investigating and further publicizing the horrific crimes against women and girls committed by Epstein, the late convicted sex offender and former Trump friend. Bondi was unable to stop the release of the Justice Department’s Epstein files, which mention Trump thousands of times. Trump has denied any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.

In addition, the president keeps wasting taxpayer dollars and manpower by using the Justice Department to try to prove his lie that he won the 2020 presidential election, which numerous recounts proved Joe Biden actually won. Bondi could not show that Trump was reelected in 2020.

When he fired Bondi for not being effective enough in carrying out his unrealistic politicized campaign of retribution against people who investigated him or refused to do as he wanted, Trump replaced her on an acting basis with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was Trump’s personal defense attorney in three criminal cases before he began his second term.

It’s not known if Trump will nominate Blanche to replace Bondi or if the president will nominate someone else. Whoever gets the job should not be the president’s Roy Cohn, the ruthless attorney who had been chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) in the 1950s and served as Trump’s personal lawyer before Trump entered politics.

If senators care at all about restoring the Justice Department to become what it was before Trump became president — America’s most respected and professional law enforcement agency, dedicated to the fair administration of justice — they will refuse to confirm Blanche or another nominee more loyal to Trump than to the U.S.

America needs an apolitical attorney general and Justice Department, where prosecutors and FBI agents don’t fear losing their jobs whenever the presidency changes hands between political parties, and where prosecutorial decisions are made based on facts and the law.

Republicans should remember that someday — perhaps as soon as 2029 — we will have a Democratic president. If they don’t want him or her to weaponize and politicize the Justice Department in the future, they should stand firm to stop Trump from doing so now.

Dictatorships weaponize justice. Democracies administer it fairly, without regard to politics.

A. Scott Bolden is an attorney, NewsNation contributor, former chair of the Washington, D.C. Democratic Party and a former New York state prosecutor.

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