How the Justice Department is remaking itself in Trump’s image
Pam Bondi vowed at her confirmation hearing this year that “politics will not play a part” in her time as attorney general.
Now she’s leading a Justice Department more visibly aligned with the political agenda of the White House than any in recent history.
In less than two months, Bondi and other top department officials have wielded the law to shield President Donald Trump’s allies and strike at his political foes. They have curtailed anti-corruption efforts that were sources of irritation for the president and ratcheted up immigration enforcement, while cutting national security expertise and refocusing the civil rights division on culture war fights that go beyond traditional conservative causes like religious freedom.
And they have pushed out dozens of prosecutors and FBI agents deemed insufficiently loyal, launching sweeping probes of past investigations and the veteran attorneys who led them.
The rapid-fire actions mirror dramatic changes underway at other agencies. They are moving the department away from long-held law enforcement priorities and norms, according to interviews with more than 30 current and former officials and law enforcement experts, leaving its leadership at odds with much of the workforce.
While Trump promised major changes at both the Justice Department and the FBI during his campaign, the speed and severity of the overhaul has stunned many observers. It is a stark departure from Trump’s first term, when his efforts to exert control were often blocked by agency leaders.
“The main theme here is that there’s sort of a breaking down of the independence of the Justice Department,” said Caren Morrison, a law professor at Georgia State University and former federal prosecutor. “This is not your mother’s Department of Justice. It’s just something very different.”
The transformation was on vivid display as Bondi welcomed Trump to the agency’s Washington headquarters last week for a speech in which he excoriated those who brought criminal charges against him and declared himself “the chief law enforcement officer in our country.”
Attorneys general for decades have sought to maintain some measure of independence from presidential influence. Bondi, as she introduced the president to the crowd of senior Justice and FBI officials, said: “We are so proud to work at the directive of Donald Trump.”
Bondi and her deputies have touted a string of early accomplishments, including bringing alleged drug cartel leaders to the United States for prosecution, launching immigration-related lawsuits and arresting a suspect accused of helping plan a 2021 attack that killed 13 American service members in Afghanistan.
She declined requests for an interview. In a statement, a Justice Department spokesperson said the attorney general’s priorities include “prosecuting violent criminals, terrorist cartel and gang members, and enforcing our immigration laws. This DOJ will uphold the rule of law and ensure there is one tier of justice for all Americans.”
Trump and his allies are celebrating the change in direction for the department, which includes roughly 110,000 lawyers, support staff and federal law enforcement officers at component agencies like the FBI.
“We’re turning the page on four long years of corruption, weaponization and surrender to violent criminals,” the president declared in the Justice Department’s historical Great Hall. “And we’re restoring fair, equal and impartial justice under the Constitution.”
Helping Trump’s allies
Some of the most striking changes at Justice so far involve officials intervening on behalf of the president’s supporters and potential allies.
Within 48 hours of Trump’s inauguration, the department moved to drop charges against former congressman Jeff Fortenberry (R-Nebraska), a vocal backer of the president who’d been accused of lying to FBI agents about whether he’d accepted an illegal foreign campaign contribution. Trump had called the case “very unfair” and lauded its dismissal on social media. Fortenberry thanked Trump for “standing up to this injustice.”
In New York, then-acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove ordered an end to the prosecution of Mayor Eric Adams, saying the case was politically motivated and could hinder Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts. Eight prosecutors, including several who helped lead the office that investigates public corruption, resigned in protest.
Former pardon attorney Elizabeth Oyer said she was fired after refusing to back the restoration of gun ownership rights to actor and filmmaker Mel Gibson, a Trump supporter who was convicted in 2011 on misdemeanor domestic violence charges.
“I was asked to provide cover for a decision that had already been made by the political leaders of the department based on the considerations of politics and relationships and not public safety,” Oyer said. Justice Department officials have denied her account.
This month, Justice Department officials alerted a federal court in Colorado that they intended to review the state prosecution of former election worker Tina Peters, who was convicted of illegally breaching voting equipment while searching for evidence to support Trump’s 2020 election fraud claims. Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser (D) panned the department’s involvement in Peters’s lawsuit challenging her conviction as a “grotesque attempt to weaponize the rule of law.”
Bondi frequently portrays combating weaponization as one of her key priorities at the Justice Department. In her telling, she is fighting to address years of misdeeds against Trump and conservatives.
She has launched a task force to examine a string of the president’s perceived adversaries, starting with special counsel Jack Smith, who brought indictments against Trump in 2023 over allegations he mishandled classified documents and his attempts to block Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory. The nature of the task force investigations, including whether they could lead to possible criminal charges, is not clear.
More broadly, Bondi has deprioritized anti-corruption efforts, including some which have previously ensnared allies of the president. She curbed enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act - under which Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort was prosecuted - and disbanded the FBI’s foreign influence task force, launched in Trump’s first term amid concerns over Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The attorney general also paused probes under a law that bars U.S. companies from paying bribes to win business overseas - a statute Trump floated scrapping entirely during his first term, citing complaints from business leaders.
The moratorium has left dozens of criminal cases in limbo as prosecutors decide how and whether to proceed. The department also had open investigations into at least 19 companies, including at Pfizer’s operations in China and Mexico and a Toyota subsidiary in Thailand, according to a database of corporate filings.
“Even if some of those get dropped, I think it will dramatically shift norms,” said Eugene Soltes, a Harvard Business School professor who studies how companies navigate risk and regulations.
A focus on migrants, antisemitism
Even as they’ve pulled back in some areas, Trump’s Justice Department appointees have redeployed resources in others explicitly in support of the president’s policy goals - including immigration enforcement, which they have indicated will take priority above almost all else.
Officials ordered investigations of state and local officials who refuse to cooperate with Trump’s plans for mass deportations of people who entered the country illegally. They created a “sanctuary cities working group” to sue local jurisdictions whose policies clash with federal enforcement efforts, and the department already has filed lawsuits against the city of Chicago and state officials in New York.
But although more than a dozen top career officials in the Justice Department’s national security and criminal divisions were reassigned to the newly created sanctuary cities team, those lawsuits were not the product of their work. Instead, most of those transferred - including experts in environmental, national security and disability law - have been given little information on their roles.
“The ‘working group’ does not appear to be designed to do any actual work,” one civil rights division employee wrote in a complaint filed this month with the Justice Department’s inspector general.
New leadership has ordered a freeze on much of the work in the civil rights and environmental divisions, leaving the future of voting rights, pollution and police-accountability cases in question. The department withdrew from a challenge to Idaho’s strict abortion ban and cases alleging discriminatory hiring practices in police and fire departments in Maryland, North Carolina, Georgia and Indiana.
Meanwhile, much of its civil rights muscle has been redirected in support of conservative concerns.
Bondi appointed Leo Terrell, a former Fox News personality now working as a senior lawyer in that division, to a multiagency task force investigating college protests of Israel’s conduct in the war in Gaza.
The group has canceled federal grants and contracts to Columbia University over what the task force described as antisemitic harassment, and it launched a pattern-and-practice investigation - the type of probe used to explore allegations of abuses within police departments or prison systems - to scrutinize alleged antisemitism at the University of California in Los Angeles.
Bondi has further invoked antidiscrimination laws in vowing legal action against officials in California, Maine and Minnesota if they refuse to drop policies allowing transgender athletes to participate in women’s sports.
Historically, the Justice Department’s civil rights division has been one of the most prone to drastic priority shifts when the White House changes hands. But William Yeomans, who spent 26 years at the department including as an acting attorney general for civil rights, described the changes implemented by Trump’s appointees as “qualitatively different.”
“I don’t think any of the positions they’ve taken are particularly surprising” given Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail, Yeomans said. “But I think it’s unfortunate that they think that the resources of the civil rights division should be used for those purposes.”
Tough talk and cable news appearances
To promote her new agenda, Bondi has appeared frequently on Fox News, often casting herself as an outsider fixing an agency that has “completely lost its mission.”
“There are a lot of people in the FBI and also in the Department of Justice who despise Donald Trump - despise us,” she told Sean Hannity. Then, using language law enforcement officials typically direct toward criminals, she vowed: “We’re going to root them out. We will find them.”
She also has embraced Trump’s pushback against a federal judge who ordered a temporary halt to deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, calling the ruling an “intrusion on the president’s authority.”
That tough talk has earned Bondi plaudits from Trump and his conservative base.
“I am thrilled with the job you’re doing,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told Bondi as he interviewed her at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month. He thanked her for “restoring integrity to the Department of Justice. It is desperately needed, and you’re doing a hell of a job.”
The caustic language and nontraditional backgrounds that Bondi and Trump’s new FBI director, Kash Patel, brought into their jobs have left a significant portion of their workforces questioning their understanding of the agencies they lead.
Bondi, a former Florida attorney general, never worked for the Justice Department before Trump nominated her for attorney general. Patel, who spent years as a federal prosecutor, had limited experience in management.
Patel alienated some of his staff when, days after his confirmation, he picked podcast host and former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino to serve as deputy director, breaking his pledge to the FBI Agents Association to elevate a bureau veteran for the job.
Patel also told agency leaders he planned to move some 1,500 personnel out of the FBI’s Washington headquarters to field offices across the country. On what was supposed to be a routine welcome call with agents leading those offices, he surprised participants by stating he intended to spend much of his time in Nevada, where he lived before accepting the director’s job.
He also suggested the bureau should partner with the popular mixed-martial arts promotion company Ultimate Fighting Championship to improve agents’ physical training regimen, according to a person familiar with that conversation, who like some others interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal details not announced publicly. An FBI spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
Bondi, too, has been criticized for her actions in key moments.
At her first news conference, she said the Justice Department had “charged” several New York officials with interfering with Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts - language more typically used to describe a criminal case. It took several minutes for her to make clear she was referring to a civil lawsuit.
Bondi was flanked on the podium by agents from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal agencies, none of which were involved in the suit. Justice Department officials had asked for personnel who could appear onstage in uniform behind her, according to multiple people familiar with the news conference’s planning.
Minutes afterward, Joshua Stueve, a Justice Department spokesman during both Republican and Democratic administrations, submitted his resignation letter.
“To be clear, the outcome of the most recent general election did not influence my decision,” he wrote. “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.”
Bondi also drew criticism for her public rollout of case files tied to disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Right-wing pundits, conspiracy theorists and some GOP members of Congress for years alleged that authorities had engaged in a cover-up to protect Epstein’s famous contacts and demanded the release of more records. But conservative influencers panned documents Bondi made public, saying there was little new information there.
The attorney general pivoted to attacking her own workforce, accusing the FBI’s New York office of withholding documents.
“Sadly, these people don’t believe in transparency,” she later told Fox’s Hannity. “But I think more unfortunately - I think a lot of them don’t believe in honesty.”
Retaliation and retribution
Since Trump took office, hardly a week has passed without dramatic personnel news: firings or forced retirements of prosecutors and FBI employees whose loyalty is questioned, or reassignments of career veterans to teams where they have little expertise. Current and former officials worry that the removals have villainized dedicated public servants and pushed vital experience out the door.
Christopher Piehota, a former FBI executive assistant director who retired in 2020, said his former colleagues who remain at the bureau are deeply uneasy. “They have a terrible sense of a lack of control over their own destiny at the moment,” he said. “It’s a vacuum of information; the rumors start. It’s an organizational cancer.”
That sense of uncertainty has spread to the nation’s 93 U.S. Attorney’s Offices. Trump has abandoned the traditional practice of leaving the top career official in charge of each U.S. attorney’s office until his nominees can be confirmed by the Senate. Instead, the administration installed its own interim leaders in key locations.
Nowhere has that strategy been more apparent than in the nation’s capital.
Right-wing commentator Ed Martin - Trump’s pick for interim U.S. attorney for D.C., whom he has since nominated to stay on in the role - has embraced the administration’s vision with gusto. He’s threatened to investigate critics and demoted or fired prosecutors who worked on politically sensitive cases, including the Capitol riot investigation. This week, he summoned D.C. police to help staffers from Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency take over the U.S. Institute of Peace.
The head of Martin’s criminal division quit last month over what she described as an improper order to freeze the assets of a Biden administration grant initiative at the Environmental Protection Agency. In a sign of how dynamics have changed, a different attorney in the criminal division said, some defense lawyers have sought to bypass line prosecutors when lobbying on behalf of clients, asking to speak to their Trump-appointed supervisors instead.
“You’ve got your top 5 percent or 10 percent of cases … where you assume the administration is going to be interested,” the prosecutor said. “I didn’t necessarily appreciate that [those requests] could seep down” to more mundane cases.
A spokesperson for Martin declined to comment.
Tensions remain high in New York as well. Since ordering the Adams case dismissed, Justice Department leaders derided the investigation and the prosecutors who led it.
“There are a lot of other people in the department who are wondering where this is going,” said Alberto R. Gonzales, an attorney general during the George W. Bush administration, of the fallout from the Adams case. “As attorney general, you must find a way to calm the waters.”
So far, though, the rhetoric from the top has remained combative.
“We’re starting at every level of the Justice Department and getting rid of the worst of the worst,” Bondi recently told Fox News. “There are a lot more people that shouldn’t be there.”