Bondi Was Putting Out Fires -- The Next AG Needs To Go To War
Bondi Was Putting Out Fires -- The Next AG Needs To Go To War
Pam Bondi was a personable attorney general placed in a difficult situation, and by most measures, she handled it with grace and loyalty. She navigated numerous crises, beginning with an early misstep involving the Epstein folder. Far more consequential were the relentless and unceasing efforts to block President Trump from advancing his agenda, which she had to confront constantly in the courts, from immigration to DOGE’s access to key departments, and the dismantling of USAID.
But only playing defense, even when done well, will not restore justice to the Department of Justice (DOJ). The problems baked into the DOJ are deep, structural, and decades in the making, and confronting them requires more than a caretaker or a fireman. It requires a field general, someone who arrives on day one with a comprehensive battle plan already drawn, who understands every front of a sprawling and complex war, and who possesses the stamina, attention to detail, and strategic vision to prosecute every challenge simultaneously without pause for the remainder of the administration. This is a task that demands more than competence — it demands mastery.
The Department of Justice is not a single institution but a constellation of them, each with its own culture, priorities, and internal politics. With approximately 115,000 employees and a budget of $42 billion, the DOJ operates as a prosecution machine, an intelligence gatherer, a regulatory enforcer, a national security apparatus, and a defender of federal interests in civil and administrative matters.
It houses the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, the U.S. Marshals, and dozens of specialized divisions and offices covering everything from antitrust to civil rights. Each of these areas contains a dense network of career staff, routines, and workflows shaped over decades by ideological priorities, institutional capture, and entrenched habits. Reforming a single division would be a formidable challenge, yet the task at hand is to reform them all at once while simultaneously pursuing accountability for past abuses and restoring public confidence in the Department’s integrity.
Approaching this role demands the perspective of a general surveying a theater of war, mapping every front and designing a coordinated strategy for each one. Every statute, rule, and procedure can be exploited, delayed, or weaponized, and when ideological staff and internal activism go unchecked, the system becomes vulnerable to insubordination, administrative obstruction, lawfare, and outright sabotage. The damage does not remain contained. When the Department fails, the rot spreads outward, and courts, bar associations, and oversight bodies follow its lead, amplifying partisanship, bias, and systemic dysfunction.
Decades of Capture and Abuse
The Department’s problems did not arise overnight. Washington D.C. is a deeply left-leaning stronghold, so the baseline culture of the DOJ was already heavily tilted in one direction. Over the past two decades, politically motivated hiring amplified that tilt, eroding the impartiality of the career ranks as ideologically driven appointees embedded themselves in key divisions. During the Obama years, incoming Attorney General Eric Holder said they would be “looking for people who share our values.” A review of just one section of the Civil Rights Division, itself only a small part of the DOJ, found that every attorney hired over the first two years of the Obama administration had a background in left-wing advocacy, with many coming directly from organizations like the ACLU and the NAACP.
These hiring choices were part of a long pattern of abuses that illustrate just how deeply the Department has been compromised. To name just a few abuses and failures, over the years the DOJ orchestrated Operation Fast and Furious, recklessly allowing firearms to reach criminals while obstructing congressional oversight, facilitated the IRS’s targeting of conservative and religious 501(c)(3) applicants, and played a central role in weaponizing Russiagate and other politically motivated investigations. It overaggressively pursued January 6 participants, labeled school board parents as domestic threats, allowed coordinated, damaging anti-Trump leaks against figures like Gen. Michael Flynn and Trump himself to go largely unchecked and uninvestigated, turned a blind eye to civil rights infringements during Covid, let rampant benefits fraudexplode, and declared the 2020 election above board without ever investigating.
Career staff frequently acted based on ideological priorities rather than the law. In one case, Jay Bratt from the DOJ’s National Security Division, who later joined Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team, led the Mar-a-Lago investigation that targeted Trump. He coordinated with the Biden White House while simultaneously whitewashing Biden’s own documents case. Despite the Russia collusion hoax having collapsed, Andrew Weissmann pursued Trump as the brains behind the Russiagate witch hunt. He had previously headed the Criminal Fraud Section in the Obama DOJ before becoming Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s pit bull.
The Cost of Not Having a Plan
Yet no one has ever been held accountable for any of it. When Bondi arrived, the DOJ still lacked a plan to confront these challenges. Erik Siebert, for example, was appointed to lead the crucial U.S. Attorney’s office in Eastern Virginia, a post overseeing many high-stakes cases, and he predictably refused to pursue accountability for figures like James Comey and Letitia James. Siebert was a terrible choice for the role, with personal ties that made accountability impossible. His father-in-law is the godfather of Comey’s daughter and Troy Edwards, Comey’s son-in-law, was a senior Assistant U.S. Attorney in Siebert‘s office. There was never any chance Siebert would indict Comey.
This episode shows the consequences of having no plan. President Trump only learned at the last minute that Siebert was running out the clock on prosecuting Comey, forcing him to step in and do what the attorney general should have been managing from the outset. He firedSiebert and brought in Lindsey Halligan, who indictedComey just before the statute of limitations expired, only for the court to throw out the case on a technicality due to her last-minute appointment. It was an entirely avoidable own goal.
Worse still, the challenge is even greater than ideological infiltration, unchecked abuses, and unforced errors. Activist judges, treating the judiciary as a policymaking body rather than a neutral arbiter, have long undermined accountability and enforced the law selectively. Bar associations have acted in the same partisan manner, targeting Republicans while ignoring misconduct elsewhere. For example, former Assistant Attorney General Jeff Clark is still being targeted by the bar simply for carrying out his duties during the first Trump administration, illustrating how these enforcement mechanisms are used selectively.
While these problems technically play out outside the Department, they are tightly linked to how the DOJ operates.
Bar associations are not above accountability. The DOJ has the authority to act when they infringe on lawyers’ rights or pursue partisan discipline. Similarly, courts take their cues from what the Department challenges or ignores. In practice, this means the DOJ mostly turns a blind eye.
The one time it did act, moving against rogue D.C. Chief Judge James Boasberg, it spectacularly failed. Reporting from The Federalist revealed that Boasberg, who had repeatedly obstructed Trump and let the Russiagate FBI lawyer who fabricated false evidence off with only a slap on the wrist, had also made improper comments about Trump to other judges. Yet after the DOJ inexplicably failed to attach the evidence to the complaint, the case was promptly dismissed.
These are the kinds of elementary tradecraft errors that cannot happen.
Beyond this visible layer, there is also a tight-knit network of lawfare activists operating largely out of public view, coordinating strategy, drafting legal theories, and effectively scripting cases for willing prosecutors. Their role goes far beyond filing ethics complaints against disfavored attorneys. In some instances, they have developed detailed prosecutorial roadmaps in advance, as seen in the Georgia case against Trump, where Fani Willis was handed a template for how to proceed. These actors function as an unofficial planning arm, shaping outcomes while remaining largely off the DOJ’s radar. A serious attorney general cannot afford to ignore this shadow network. It must be identified, monitored, and countered, both by exposing its coordination and by closing off the legal and procedural avenues it exploits.
The Leader this Moment Demands
Unfortunately, the timeline is unforgiving. Nomination and confirmation alone will consume months, especially with the added hurdle that Republicans in Congress may slow the process. Once in office, the new attorney general will have roughly two years to act. Those two years must be spent dismantling networks of ideological capture, reining in internal staff, executing plans to address past abuses and hold people accountable, and countering resistance from courts and bar associations, all while the day-to-day operations of the DOJ continue.
At the same time, the next attorney general cannot operate as though this is a one-off effort. If a Democrat administration returns to power, the same machinery will be redeployed, likely more aggressively and with the benefit of experience. That means preparing the battlefield now, insulating key processes, closing off avenues of abuse, and developing countermeasures in advance. The goal is not just to act in the present, but to make future politically motivated investigations, prosecutions, and institutional abuses more difficult to execute and less effective when they inevitably return.
This moment does not allow for learning on the job or cultivating personal popularity. The leader it demands must combine sweeping strategic vision with precise technical mastery. Imagine a war room where the entire Department is laid out, each division, problem, and deadline accounted for and updated daily. It is a daunting challenge, but also a once-in-a-generation, and perhaps final, opportunity to restore the DOJ as an impartial instrument of justice.
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