Donald Trump’s next attorney general must meet two job requirements. One is easy and in plentiful supply; the other is impossible. Anyone who takes the job is doomed to fail.
The first job requirement – the abundant one – is unyielding fealty to Trump and his political agenda. Our recently-dispatched Attorney General, Pam Bondi, had this part aced. “The greatest president in U.S. history,” she gushed during her self-debasing House testimony in February. Days later, she draped over the DOJ headquarters building a stories-high banner bearing the President’s visage atop the Justice Department’s official seal — a schmaltzy hosanna from the toadyish AG and a desecration of DOJ’s longstanding tradition of independence.
Beyond the kowtowing, Bondi tried her darnedest to make Trump’s prosecutorial revenge fantasies come true. She aimed the Justice Department’s prosecutorial firepower at a succession of prime targets on the President’s enemies list: Letitia James, James Comey, Senators Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin, and Jerome Powell. Bondi’s prosecutors failed at every turn, their transparently vindictive cases rejected by judges and grand juries alike. (The John Bolton indictment is different, as the investigation reportedly predated the current Trump administration, and the charges appear sound.) Other Trump payback investigations remain pending, but their outlooks are no brighter. It’s unclear whether Bondi actually cared about all the losing, but plainly her first priority was the performative display of prosecutorial loyalty: “Hey boss, I tried.”
We’ve come to take it as a given that Trump demands absolute political allegiance from all his appointees, but this is pointedly and historically aberrant for the Justice Department. No modern attorney general has been entirely above the occasional appearance or accusation of partisanship, of course: Eric Holder called himself “the president’s wingman;” Bill Barr twisted facts and law to clear Trump on the Mueller investigation; Merrick Garland waited until after Trump declared his 2024 candidacy to launch Jack Smith, a “heat-seeking missile” (as described by Democratic power lawyer Abbe Lowell) with an established record of prosecutorial overreach, against the past-and-future President.
But nobody has done any president’s bidding nearly as aggressively as Bondi did (or tried to do) for Trump. At least prior AGs typically landed in some gray area and disputed accusations that they acted on political motivations; Bondi flaunted hers, in a sweaty effort to impress the Commander-in-Chief.
Then we come to the second job requirement for Trump’s next attorney general, the impossible one: Actually winning. Trump fired Bondi not for any lack of enthusiasm for retributive prosecutions, but for her failure to win them. But the next AG won’t fare any better.
The hard reality is that no prosecutor, no matter how great, can make a case where there is none to be made. You can combine Pat Fitzgerald with Arhchibald Cox with Eliot Ness with Robert Mueller with Thomas Dewey with the real-life incarnation of Jack McCoy – and still fail if there’s no validly prosecutable crime to begin with.
How exactly will the next attorney general fulfill Trump’s fantasy for a successful prosecution of Barack Obama for “treason”? How will our hypothetical successor AG indict and convict Powell when one of Bondi’s prosecutors already acknowledged in court that DOJ has found no evidence of criminality? For what crime might the next AG indict former cyber expert Chris Krebs and former Homeland Security advisor Miles Taylor – the high crime of “Pissing Off Trump”? Who’s going to bring a successful prosecution against Joe Biden for felonious use of an autopen? Who will indict and convict James after one judge and two grand juries already have thrown out cases against her? Why would any grand juror indict (or trial juror convict) the U.S. Senators who made a 90-second internet video reminding service members that they can defy illegal orders, after a grand jury rejected charges against Kelly, Slotkin, and other Democratic officials?
Sure, a shady prosecutor might hoodwink a grand jury (with no judge or defense lawyer present) into finding just enough evidence to support a probable-cause indictment. But after the unilateral portion of the proceedings conclude, the going gets tougher. Indeed, judges and juries across the country are onto DOJ’s shenanigans and have shown that they will swiftly reject Trump’s bad faith prosecutions.
There will be no shortage of aspirants to replace Bondi who share her capacity for cringey public displays of fealty to the President, and her eagerness to take action on even his most outrageous retributive requests. Let’s run down some top candidates.
Jeanine Pirro, the acting U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C., is always eager to fire away on Trump’s behalf. And she already has helmed the failed efforts to take down Kelly, Slotkin, and Powell. After a judge blocked her subpoenas in the Powell investigation, Pirro called a scream-therapy press conference to yelp Trump’s favorite catchphrases (“activist judge!” “we have cleaned up this city!”) and stake her claim for a higher job at DOJ. Pirro promises to be another Bondi, in angrier packaging.
Trump has called EPA Administrator (and 2020 election denier) Lee Zeldin, reportedly in the running for the AG position, his “secret weapon.” It’s unclear why the relatively milquetoast Zeldin – who has little prosecutorial record (he was a military lawyer for four years, including some time as a line-level prosecutor) – would succeed where others have failed. The attorney general job, were he to get it, would be his first as a prosecutor anywhere near this level. Count me skeptical that he’d find some magical way to convict high-profile political targets based on sketchy (at best) evidence.
And then there’s Todd Blanche, Bondi’s former Deputy and current Acting Attorney General, who is gunning for the permanent job. In a press conference this week, Blanche made the wild assertion that Trump has not only the right but “the duty” to influence targeted prosecutions of “men, women, and entities the President in the past has had issues with” – sweet enticement to a President hellbent on personal revenge. Blanche also meets the sycophancy requirement; he proclaimed that, if Trump chooses not to make him the permanent AG, he’ll respond simply but sweetly, “Thank you very much. I love you, sir.”
Blanche has been a prosecutor and a criminal defense lawyer for two decades. He started at the Southern District of New York in 2006. (We overlapped and were colleagues and friends there.) On one hand, Blanche has a strong prosecutorial pedigree as an outstanding violent crimes prosecutor in New York. But Blanche made his name at the SDNY by bringing valid criminal cases supported by actual evidence against real criminals – not the baseless political nonsense that defined his tenure as Deputy AG. All of Bondi’s failures – on the Epstein files and the political vendetta cases – are Blanche’s too. He’s not quite as embarrassing or self-destructive as Bondi in front of the cameras, but don’t expect anything different, or better, if Blanche gets the permanent nod as attorney general.
Plenty of Trump’s loyalists will pursue the AG job over the upcoming weeks. But ultimately, the next attorney general will find no more success than Bondi did in pursuing the President’s doomed prosecutorial vengeance mandate. It’s not that the candidates themselves are lacking, though it’s an underwhelming lot. It’s that the job itself simply can’t be done as Trump wishes it could.
