Trump Attorney General Pam Bondi is going to cause headaches for the administration, a conservative predicted on Saturday.
Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency, said over the weekend that Trump’s pick for the top law enforcement official for the federal government was making a big mistake.
Specifically, in an article called “Pam Bondi’s ‘Weaponization Working Group’ Will Come Back to Haunt the Trump DOJ,” McCarthy highlights what the analyst calls a “bad idea arising from Bondi’s first-day directives: the Justice Department’s new ‘Weaponization Working Group.’
“The ‘Weaponization’ memo is a patently partisan and ethically careless political document masquerading as legal guidance. As such, it lends itself to exploitation by Democrats implicated in Trump DOJ enforcement actions, as well as by the 570 judges appointed by Presidents Obama and Biden to the federal courts over twelve of the past 16 years (about two-thirds of the total of non-senior federal judicial seats in the United States),” the lawyer wrote in the National Review. “And there is already abundant reason to conclude that the last thing the Trump administration intends to do is remove politics from law enforcement decisions.”
McCarthy goes on to suggest one mistake was going after Trump’s “nemeses by name.”
“The AG’s directive is an obvious attempt to cement a revisionist history of the Trump prosecutions as nothing more than the partisan harassment of an innocent man — with this revisionism to be authored by newly minted Trump prosecutors who, as defense lawyers, represented Trump and other defendants implicated in the ‘weaponization’ cases,” the conservative added. “Perhaps worst of all, in theatrically decrying the subversion of good-faith law enforcement by partisan political calculations, and in standing up a ‘Weaponization Working Group’ supposedly toward that end, it turns out that Bondi was just kidding.”
He then continued:
“Put aside that it is not the Justice Department’s job to generate partisan messaging or write political history. Bondi’s directive will give [Democratic attorney general, Letitia James], New York State, and the many Democratic-appointed judges who are likely to hear the immigration case, and others like it, ammunition to claim that the Trump DOJ is using the Justice Department to pursue retribution against Democrats who tried to ruin him.”
He added, “You say Democrats would have made such contentions anyway? Sure . . . but why help them? And why create legal obstacles to the accomplishment of vital national security and law enforcement objectives? It can only be because these experienced Justice Department lawyers, who presumably know better, are putting on the show they know President Trump expects them to perform.”
