Pam Bondi should’ve known it would come to this. The President – the man who put her in office as attorney general and now can remove her – would insist on indictments of his political enemies, evidence be damned. The attorney general is in an impossible bind, and she put herself there when she took the job in the first place.
Now Bondi has been served with a public ultimatum. Trump posted on Truth Social a demand addressed directly to the AG (“Pam:”) that she indict three longtime political antagonists: “What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia???” The President cited “over 30 statements” (whatever that means) to support his claim that “They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.” Trump pointedly reminded the AG that he had pushed out Erik Siebert, his own nominee as U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, for refusing to charge New York AG Letitia James with mortgage fraud (“A Woke RINO, who was never going to do his job”). And the President closed with an initialed decree: “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!! President DJT.”
The good news for Bondi is that the next move is hers: Indict (or seek to indict) or decline. The bad news is she’s screwed either way.
If Bondi refuses to charge the targets on Trump’s hit list, she risks her job and political future. Trump made a point to remind the AG that he already had tossed out Siebert, and he even hinted at a potential successor (or role model) for the top job: Lindsey Halligan, Trump’s former personal criminal defense lawyer and ardent political loyalist, who has now been installed in Siebert’s old job, and likely will do what Siebert refused and indict James. “Lindsey Halligan is a really good lawyer, and likes you, a lot. We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” Trump wrote, suggestively.
If Bondi doesn’t believe Trump will kick her to the curb, she needs a refresher on recent history. After Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, the President turned his own AG into a human piñata. Trump publicly flayed Sessions as “disgraceful,” “scared stiff and Missing in Action,” “our beleaguered A.G.,” and “mixed up and confused.” Trump announced the AG’s departure by a two-sentence tweet at 2:44 p.m. the day after the November 2018 midterm elections, while final vote counts were still pending in several races. Even after Sessions was booted as AG, Trump kept up the barrage, calling him a “total disaster,” not “mentally qualified” to be attorney general, “very weak and very sad,” and an “embarrassment to the great state of Alabama.” Two years later, Sessions ran for his old Senate seat in Alabama, and lost in a Republican primary to his Trump-endorsed opponent.
Even Bill Barr – who spent most of his tenure as attorney general dishonestly protecting Trump’s flank and propping up his political talking points – had his limits. When Barr publicly undermined Trump’s false claims of fraud after the 2020 election, he, too, was ushered out the door, despite his pre-election support for Trump’s bogus narrative about the risk of massive election interference. Trump has since demeaned Barr as a “slob,” a “stupid person,” and a “gutless pig.”
If Bondi thinks she’s somehow invulnerable to the Sessions / Barr treatment, she’s sorely mistaken. And we’ve seen nothing to indicate she has the courage or integrity to stand up to the President, at the risk of personal and political humiliation.
Which means Bondi is more likely to take her second available option: Indict away. But if the Attorney General chooses to greenlight Trump’s wishlist of vengeance-driven prosecutions, she’s going to find herself with a mess of a case, or three.
Trump concludes in his social media post, surely after careful deliberation, that “there is a GREAT CASE, and many lawyers, and legal pundits, say so” against James. Days before, Trump announced (somewhat non-specifically) that James was “very guilty of something.”
But all indicators are squarely to the contrary. Siebert, an accomplished career DOJ prosecutor who was chosen by Trump himself to be U.S. attorney, declined to charge the case and resigned in protest (though Trump claims he was fired). Even Deputy U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche – who defended Trump at his criminal trial and recently argued that the women who heckled Trump in a seafood restaurant could be charged with racketeering – reportedly objected to indicting James for mortgage fraud.
If Bondi does seek to salvage her standing with Trump by charging James, the case will fail in court, eventually. While prosecutors hold enormous power to decide who to investigate and whether to indict, our criminal justice system does impose substantial guardrails. Yes, it’s remarkably easy to get a grand jury to indict – take it from this former prosecutor, the old “ham sandwich” adage is pretty darn accurate – but I suspect that even a grand jury, with its low burden of proof, might refuse to charge this dog of a case.
If Bondi does somehow indict James, then a judge might dismiss either for lack of evidence or selective prosecution; James is being singled out for political reasons, her defense team surely will argue, and Trump himself has given them plenty of ammo with his public statements to precisely that effect. In the unlikely event that the case reaches trial, DOJ will have to convince twelve jurors unanimously of her guilt, beyond a reasonable doubt. And any defendant has the right to appeal after a conviction.
But that’s little solace to James, or to anyone else who finds themselves on the receiving end of an overtly, aggressively political prosecution. Any investigation, even without more, can be extraordinarily expensive, and can damage careers, families, reputations, and political prospects. Those defendants who go to court and win often lose much in the process.
Trump’s Truth Social post is an ugly watershed: a President openly calling on his Justice Department to prosecute shaky cases (at best) specifically targeted at political opponents, for the explicit purpose of payback. This is a primary theme of my new book, When You Come at the King: Inside DOJ’s Pursuit of the President, from Nixon to Trump – that Trump, like no president before him (including his own first-term self) has weaponized the Justice Department to settle personal scores.
This is the type of corruption that ordinarily would be subject to speculation: “Oh come on, we know the AG is just doing what the president wants, but of course neither of them is going to say it out loud.” Even those presidents who have stepped over the line that historically separates the Justice Department from White House political influence have at least pretended to honor DOJ’s independence, or tried to camouflage their intentions. But now there’s no need to guess. It’s all right out there in the open.
