“If confirmed, I will work to restore confidence and integrity to the Department of Justice — and each of its components,” Pam Bondi vowed during her confirmation hearing in January. “Under my watch, the partisan weaponization of the Department of Justice will end. America must have one tier of justice for all.”
But since her confirmation on February 4, Attorney General Pam Bondi has done exactly the opposite, weaponizing the DOJ against Trump’s political enemies and withdrawing criminal investigations of his allies. The tone was set on her first full day, when she fired off an all-staff memo threatening to fire anyone who raised ethical or legal objections to advancing frivolous arguments in court.
Literal Mob Rule:
Garland was more than happy to prosecute all the goofy little J6ers, along with the traditional list of migrants and smugglers and foreign adversaries.
He just steered clear of anyone with power.
Was this a problem?
Chasing the small fry while the big fish swims away?
Some might argue it would have been more beneficial to flip defendants into witnesses and use them to prosecute the media organizers and financiers, not unlike how the FBI (finally, after decades of dragging their feet) broke up the East Coast mafia gangs.
Wasn’t that what Jack Smith was doing?
Garland waited until late November of 2022 to appoint a special counsel, after Democrats in Congress had lost their subpoena power, and put a guy with a broken leg on the case. Smith’s office focused on the Mar-a-Lago documents case, which floundered for years, before his very appointment as special counsel was rejected by a Trump appointee Judge (which they recognized was a problem going into the case clung to the venue regardless).
To my knowledge, Smith didn’t pursue any third party financiers or media figures responsible for organizing the J6 riot. His primary role was to fumble the Mar-a-Lago documents case. He did get a Grand Jury to indict Trump for inciting a riot, under a more-friendly DC venue, in August of 2023. But Smith never managed to bring the case to trial in the subsequent year and a half. The case was scuttled as soon as the election was over.
And by your reckoning that was them chasing the small fry?
What was the most high profile conviction Smith secured?
You mean in the year and a half he had two of the biggest cases in American legal history? One of them with the most obstructionist judge possible?
You’re right, the DoJ totally failed the bourgeois. Or was failed by the bourgeois. Or whatever.
Sam Bankman-Fried went from “investigated” to “in jail” inside nine months. The entire OJ Simpson Trial only lasted eight months. The time between the murder, the failed criminal case, and the successful civil suit, and the conviction was less than three years. Trump’s only been in office for six months and he’s already taken 20 different cases before the SCOTUS.
Seems like an experienced veteran DOJ attorney would have known to file the case in a more friendly venue. But I guess a man that loses 78% of his court cases is just too damned slick for the Garland DOJ.
Almost as though they were set up to lose by an incompetent chief executive and his worthless cronies.