As she sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Jan. 15, Bondi provided vague but repeated assurances that the Justice Department under her watch would “only follow the facts and the law” and the White House and a President Donald Trump bent on revenge would play no improper role in cases it investigated or brought.
She also pledged to support frontline prosecutors and case agents from federal agencies such as the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration who work with the Justice Department in building cases, while forcing out only the “bad” ones.
And above all, the former two-term Florida attorney general who defended Trump against allegations he abused power and obstructed justice at his February 2020 impeachment, suggested she would stand up to the president if asked to do something wrong, illegal or unconstitutional.
“Yes, I believe that the Justice Department must be independent and must act independently,” Bondi told senators during extensive questioning by skeptical Democrats. “The No. 1 job is to enforce the law fairly and even-handedly, and that’s what will be done if I am confirmed as the attorney general.”
“Politics will not play a part,” Bondi also said. “I’ve demonstrated that my entire career as a prosecutor, as attorney general and I will continue to do that.”
Bondi’s comments appeared in sync with a Justice Department effort – dating back to the Watergate scandal of the 1970s – to remain independent of the political interests of the administration in power.
But within hours of her swearing-in on Feb. 5, Bondi moved swiftly to align the Justice Department with something else: Trump’s political agenda.
Pairing DOJ with Trump’s agenda
That evening, Bondi issued 14 formal memorandums reversing core DOJ policies, including many enacted by the administration of former President Joe Biden.
One of the directives established a “Weaponization Working Group” to investigate all federal and state prosecutions of Trump that the President has insisted without evidence were overly politicized. In court and on the campaign trail, Bondi supported those claims.
Another mandate required Justice Department lawyers to “zealously advance, protect, and defend” not the interests and policies of the United States but those of Trump himself.
A third disbanded DOJ initiatives to protect U.S. democratic processes from foreign actors, despite the Russian government’s persistent meddling in ways U.S. intelligence officials previously determined were meant to help Trump in elections dating back to 2016.
Since she started, Bondi’s Justice Department – and the FBI it oversees – have fired, transferred or launched investigations into dozens of senior officials deemed problematic.
That housecleaning included everyone on special counsel Jack Smith’s team who investigated and prosecuted Trump for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election he lost and for mishandling classified documents.
Others, including James Dennehy, the top agent at the FBI’s New York field office – the agency’s largest – were forced out for pushing back against Trump’s meddling in Justice Department and FBI affairs, including the demands to enact mass firings of frontline and supervisory personnel.
Using DOJ ‘to achieve political objectives or other improper aims’
Bondi testified at her confirmation hearing that she opposed pardoning defendants who attacked police in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, as Trump suggested he might. If asked, she said, she would review each defendant on a case-by-case basis.
When Trump provided a blanket pardon to nearly 1,600 defendants on Jan. 20, his first day in office, Bondi was not yet confirmed. But Bondi never objected publicly, before or after taking her oath of office; instead, the DOJ helped facilitate them.
At Bondi’s first news conference on Feb. 12, she announced that the Justice Department was suing New York officials including Attorney General Letitia James, who had convicted Trump in a civil fraud case, over the state’s immigration policies.
Two days later, the DOJ dropped the prosecution of a Trump political ally, New York Mayor Eric Adams on bribery and campaign finance charges, at the direction of top Bondi aide Emil Bove (another former Trump defense lawyer tapped to lead the Justice Department) and over the objections of the case’s prosecutors.
In a letter to Bondi, Acting Manhattan U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon pledged to resign if Bondi wouldn’t meet with her to reconsider dropping Adams’ case based on Sassoon’s concerns about not using “the criminal enforcement authority of the United States to achieve political objectives or other improper aims.”
After Sassoon resigned, so did six other prosecutors, including the lead prosecutor on the Adams case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagan Scotten.
“I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion” to drop the charges, Scotten said in his own resignation letter to Bove. “But it was never going to be me.”
Bondi also campaigned for Trump and has been a frequent guest at his Mar-a-Lago home and club in Palm Beach. And she made at least $3 million from the creation of the parent company of Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, according to her financial disclosure form.
The Senate last Wednesday confirmed a third former Trump defense lawyer and former prosecutor, Todd Blanche, as deputy attorney general, the No. 2 position at the DOJ in charge of running the 115,000-employee department and overseeing the FBI and other federal agencies. (Blanche and Bove defended Trump at his hush money trial in Manhattan, and Blanche also represented him in the federal classified documents case in Florida.)
Bondi’s track record: major takedowns, investigations
In her first month on the job, Bondi has said she is working aggressively to depoliticize a DOJ that she and Trump say is both biased against him and against political conservatives in general.
Supporters like Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee who pushed through Bondi’s confirmation, said she is not only “a highly qualified choice” but a necessary one.
Change, Grassley said, “is desperately needed” at a Justice Department that is “infected with political decision-making while its leaders refuse to acknowledge that reality.”
The Justice Department, through spokesman Chad Gilmartin, declined to comment for this article. But the DOJ provided a list of Bondi’s accomplishments at USA TODAY’s request. They included major arrests of suspects in terrorism, human smuggling and drug trafficking cases.
The DOJ under Bondi, the list said, has also dismissed four DEI lawsuits brought against police and fire departments under the Biden Administration.
More: Justice Department fires employees who worked on Donald Trump prosecutions under Jack Smith
It warned officials in California, Maine, and Minnesota that failure to comply with the federal law to “keep men out of women’s sports,” would result in federal lawsuits.
It launched a multi-agency federal task force to combat antisemitism and announced it would visit 10 universities accused of failing to protect Jewish students and faculty members from unlawful discrimination.
Last Friday, the task force announced it was pulling about $400 million in federal funds from Columbia University due to “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students” and said “additional cancellations are expected to follow.”
Removing Watergate-era guardrails, ‘the opposite’ of depoliticizing, expert says
Bondi’s flurry of activity on criminal and civil matters has led some legal experts and former Justice Department officials to question her pledge to depoliticize the DOJ.
“I would lean toward that she has done the opposite,” said Jeffrey Breinholt, a career senior Justice Department lawyer who served during five administrations, under Republicans and Democrats, before his retirement last year.
Breinholt told USA TODAY that Bondi has politicized the DOJ by actively responding to Trump’s political wishes in both New York cases and by seeking to rid the agency of career personnel she views as unsupportive of Trump’s agenda.
The most significant move might have come in a little-noticed Feb. 9 memo that lowered Watergate-era guardrails barring contact between the DOJ and White House officials, according to Breinholt and others USA TODAY interviewed.
Those guardrails spell out how the attorney general and other DOJ lawyers can stay impartial while interacting with the White House − including limits on who can interact and what they can talk about − have been “refined through trial and error over the past 50 years,” Breinholt said.
But the Feb. 9 White House memo, he said, “is a bad indication that there are going to be some changes in these norms. It raises the specter of a politicized DOJ.”
As evidence of how Bondi may be politicizing the agency, Breinholt cited her much-promoted efforts last month to release documents about convicted sex trafficker financier Jeffrey Epstein and his rumored ties to prominent Democrats including former President Bill Clinton.
Although Clinton and some others have denied wrongdoing – and have not been accused of it – Trump’s MAGA movement has been calling for the release of DOJ documents from Epstein’s criminal cases that they believe might help Trump by discrediting Democrats. Trump’s name also appeared in the flight logs Bondi released.
Bondi said in a Fox News interview she was reviewing and releasing the Epstein documents because “that’s been a directive by President Trump.”
Ultimately, Bondi released rehashed documents that had been made public in earlier court cases.
But by teeing up the Epstein case so prominently, Bondi “is obviously trying to show her fealty to the president who appointed her,” said Breinholt. And the fact that she specifically said she was releasing them at Trump’s direction, he said, is “out of line” for a supposedly apolitical attorney general.
Dennehy, the assistant FBI director overseeing the New York office, also reportedly angered Bondi by what she claimed was the New York FBI office’s failure to turn over all the investigative files related to Epstein, who died by suicide in a Manhattan prison while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
More: Trump’s Justice Department starts sweeping cuts targeting Jan. 6 prosecutors, FBI agents
An ‘alarming level of politicization and weaponization’
Last week, Bondi announced that her purge at Justice and federal law enforcement agencies isn’t over and that she plans to continue pursuing anyone she deems sufficiently disloyal to Trump and his agenda.
In an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Bondi said the DOJ will also investigate the conduct of prosecutors and federal agents involved in the vast criminal probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Working with recently confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel, Bondi said, we are “going to root them out,” she said. “We will find them, and they will no longer be employed.”
“Everything is on the table, Sean,” Bondi added. “We’re going to look at everything.”
Ryan Goodman, co-director of the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law, said he has been so concerned by what’s happening on Bondi’s watch that he has co-authored a running timeline of what he describes as “the alarming level of politicization and weaponization of the Department of Justice under the second Trump administration.”
“Politicization includes the misuse of the Department’s powers for political purposes rather than the independent and impartial enforcement of the laws,” Goodman says in the timeline of “the most clear-cut cases that raise such concerns” for the Just Security website. “Weaponization includes a deliberate and systematic misuse of the Department’s powers for political or personal purposes and in defiance of the rule of law.”
Leaving ‘hostile and toxic work environment’
In the wake of Bondi and Bove’s approach, some rank-and-file employees have publicly taken a stand.
Joshua Stueve, a disabled veteran who served nearly a decade on active duty in the Marines before becoming a spokesperson for the Justice Department, said he had witnessed “extraordinary expertise, patriotism, selflessness, and steadfast commitment to the mission of public servants.”
But Stueve, who served 23 years in public service under presidents from both parties, said in his resignation letter late last month it was “heartbreaking to see that basic decency come to an end.”
“Simply put, I cannot continue to serve in such a hostile and toxic work environment, one where leadership at the highest levels makes clear we are not welcome or valued, much less trusted to do our jobs,” Stueve wrote in the letter obtained by USA TODAY.
Last Friday afternoon, hundreds of New York FBI agents and employees lined the hallways of 26 Federal Plaza to clap and cheer as Dennehy, the ousted assistant director, left the building for the last time.
As a bagpiper played and TV cameras rolled, he told those gathered, “I will always be faithful to this country, this organization and most of all, I will always be faithful to you.”