The Adams case is not the only one that will bring the foolishness of this directive into sharp relief.
I n recording our podcast last week, I opined to Rich Lowry that Pam Bondi’s first day on the job as attorney general was Trump II in small compass: a flurry of directives that critics will have a tough time keeping up with, and that combine a lot of good with some bad ideas that could undermine the administration’s capacity to accomplish the good.
We are already seeing this.
This is the first in a series of posts that will address the main bad idea arising from Bondi’s first-day directives: the Justice Department’s new “Weaponization Working Group” (which itself follows on President Trump’s executive order on “Ending Weaponization of the Federal Government”). 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).
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.
Rather than simply announce an urgently needed policy to investigate and prosecute civil rights violations (which necessarily include “lawfare,” the punitive, selective deployment of law enforcement powers against political adversaries), Bondi targets a number of Trump prosecutorial 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.
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.
This week, the Trump Justice Department induced the resignations of several top prosecutors — including Danielle Sassoon, the very solid Trump-appointed interim U.S. attorney in Manhattan — by ordering them to dismiss the political corruption prosecution against Eric Adams. The point-man on this debacle was Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general. He’s a recent Trump personal defense lawyer and “Weaponization Working Group” member, and he said he consulted with the new attorney general in issuing his orders. Manifestly, he also spent plenty of time consulting with Adams’s defense lawyers.
Bove’s order to drop the case was explicitly political. He did not question the strength of the evidence or the integrity of the prosecutors on the case. Rather, the dismissal is a political favor for Adams in exchange for the mayor’s using his powerful political position to assist the Trump administration’s immigration-enforcement efforts — as U.S. Attorney Sassoon explained in eye-popping detail in her letter to AG Bondi. Since the latter end of this quid pro quo is something that New York officials must do anyway (there can be various legal and financial penalties if the city and state obstruct the feds), Bove pathetically attempted to paint the Adams prosecution as “politically motivated” (even as he absolved the prosecutors of any political motivations) because it was brought under a Biden-appointed U.S. attorney, Damian Williams. But it’s sheer nonsense — politicized nonsense.
The Adams investigation, which has been overseen by four different Manhattan U.S. attorneys, started under one of Williams’s predecessors. Williams had minimal involvement in it. The corruption allegations, which go back to Adams’s tenure as Brooklyn borough president, long predated Adams’s comparatively meek criticisms of Biden’s non-enforcement policies on immigration. (Adams, a chameleon whose latest incarnation, prior to ingratiating Trump, was as a staunchly pro-Biden hack, initially blamed Republicans for the city’s being overrun by illegal aliens.) So clear was it that the Adams case was not politically motivated that his lawyers never even bothered to file a motion to dismiss the indictment based on selective prosecution; such a claim would have been frivolous.
Moreover, Biden and Williams are gone. U.S. Attorney Sassoon, along with the case prosecutors and Justice Department Public Integrity Section officials (many of whom have also resigned over the dismissal), pursued the case with no political ax to grind. Because the evidence is strong, they believe that Adams is guilty, and that the nonpartisan administration of justice — the Justice Department’s core function — therefore required proceeding in a matter that was scheduled, at Adams’s request, for trial in April (in advance of the mayoral primary and general elections, on June 24 and November 4, respectively).
If the president wants a political outcome unrelated to the legal merits of the case — which is what Bove pushed for, after consultations between the White House and Adams’s lawyers that quite intentionally cut out the prosecutors — then he can pardon Adams. That would be transparently political, and the president could take the heat (or perhaps reap the rewards) for it, rather than trying to disguise a political favor as a decision driven by law enforcement considerations. Bondi and Bove are apt to learn this the hard way: Federal rules require leave of the court to dismiss the indictment. The Biden-appointed judge on the case, Dale Ho, will be even less inclined than the prosecutors to lend the prestige of his office to a farce — expect him to make the litigation over whether he should grant leave to dismiss the indictment as publicly painful as possible for DOJ.
In the Adams corruption case, the prosecution was emblematic of nonpolitical law enforcement; it is the dropping of the case that is, to borrow Bove’s ironic phrase, “politically motivated” — a mockery of aspirations about “Restoring the Integrity and Credibility of the Department of Justice,” the title of AG Bondi’s weaponization directive.
The Adams case is not the only one that will bring the foolishness of this directive into sharp relief.
One of the new attorney general’s top initiatives is to put the full weight of the Justice Department’s enforcement authorities behind President Trump’s priority to restore border security and reassert federal immigration law. As we’ve just seen, that’s the pretext for dropping the Adams case. On Wednesday, Bondi filed a lawsuit against the state of New York for obstructing federal immigration enforcement (mirroring action the AG had already taken against the state of Illinois).
On the merits, the DOJ states a strong claim. Under then-Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2019, the state’s Democratic-dominated legislature enacted the so-called Green Light Law (the Driver’s License Access and Privacy Act), which enables illegal aliens to obtain driver’s licenses. Not only does it generally bar the state from sharing Motor Vehicle Department data about licensees with federal law enforcement agents; the state affirmatively alerts illegal aliens if the feds make inquiries about them, obstructing immigration-law enforcement.
Over the last century, the courts have deemed immigration enforcement a federal responsibility. The sovereign states are thus expected to carry out federal immigration law. They are not required to support the government’s federal immigration policies (which, to be sure, are often unaligned with statutory immigration law), but they may not impede federal law enforcement. Bondi makes a good case that the Empire State is doing precisely that. A significant part of DOJ’s evidence entails characteristically foolish pronouncements by the state’s progressive Democratic attorney general, Letitia James, who has bragged about the state’s shielding of “undocumented migrants” from potential arrest and deportation.
But the government’s case could be undermined by the Bondi weaponization memo’s singling out of James for her hounding of President Trump.
Put aside that it is not the Justice Department’s job to generate partisan messaging or write political history. Bondi’s directive will give 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.
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.
That might titillate the base, at least in the short term. It is going to bite the Trump Justice Department, though, in the courtrooms where many questions of consequence for the nation will be decided — decisions that could determine the fate of the president’s policy agenda.
In this series, I’ll address the problems presented by the Weaponization Working Group and the way AG Bondi’s directive outlines its mission. I’ll also discuss how the Justice Department could easily and properly combat weaponization without the self-defeating appearance of politicizing law enforcement — and would that it were just an appearance.