The AG needn’t speak about her department’s Trump cases, but if she speaks, she has a duty to be accurate and evidence-based, not political.

This is the fourth of seven posts on Attorney General Pam Bondi’s “Weaponization Working Group.” (Here are the first, second, and third posts.)

AG Bondi’s strategy “against” the weaponization of law enforcement adopts the Democrats’ lawfare model not only by naming targets (which we discussed in the third post of this series). Her weaponization directive barely pretends to be anything other than a partisan political document.

Bondi cites “weaponization by . . . [Biden DOJ] Special Counsel Jack Smith and his staff, who spent more than $50 million targeting President Trump, and prosecutors and law enforcement personnel who participated in the unprecedented raid on President Trump’s home.” That’s not legal guidance. It’s partisan rhetoric, and, like all such rhetoric, it is hyperbole.

Look, I’d certainly have preferred for the FBI and the DOJ to have used a less intrusive tactic than a search warrant to recover documents that then-former President Trump was illegally retaining. But he was illegally retaining the documents, and he had falsely represented (through counsel) that he had previously surrendered all documents marked classified that were in his possession.

After the search, Trump took to claiming that it was lawful for him to retain the documents despite government objections and demands. If he had really believed that, then he could easily have filed a motion in court to quash the grand jury subpoena. He never did so; instead, he pretended to comply with the subpoena while hoarding documents.

There is no excusing that. Regardless of what you think of how Smith went about the investigation and whether Espionage Act felony charges (dozens of them) should have been filed, it was absolutely appropriate for the Justice Department to investigate the mishandling of classified information and the obstruction of a grand jury investigation — both of which involved nonofficial acts that took place after the president’s first term and were therefore not immune from prosecution. (The counter-argument that Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton were not prosecuted for mishandling classified information, which I have posited many times, is disingenuously misstated by Trump apologists: The anomaly is not that the DOJ under Democratic control charged Trump but that it was derelict in failing to charge Biden and Clinton.)

Bondi mentions none of this. Nor does she refer to the inconvenience that the Mar-a-Lago search was authorized by a federal magistrate judge upon a finding of probable cause that the search would yield evidence of (among other offenses) the illegal retention of national security intelligence and the misleading of a federal investigation — and that the search did, in fact, yield precisely such evidence.

Bondi is now running the Justice Department — she represents the government, not the president in his personal capacity. The Justice Department’s credibility, which Bondi now embodies, is crucial to the government’s effectiveness in litigation before the Supreme Court and other federal tribunals — note the DOJ’s plea over the weekend that the high court intervene in a dispute over the president’s authority to fire an agency chief.

Yet, in these assertions about the DOJ’s Trump investigations, her weaponization directive omits any description of the misconduct over which Trump was federally investigated. To be clear: There was no need for Bondi to speak about any of this — as I’ve been explaining in this series, the AG’s weaponization directive is an unnecessary document that provides no necessary legal or policy guidance. But if the AG is going to speak, she has an obligation to provide a complete version of events, not one-sided political spin. And if she is going to speak, she has a professional and institutional duty to be fair to the Justice Department — something that should not need saying. She cannot fulfill that duty by asserting that Trump was “targeted” in the Mar-a-Lago case as if the Biden DOJ had made the whole thing up.

To the contrary, the National Archives and Records Administration, the Justice Department, and the FBI pleaded with the then-former president for over a year to return the government’s property — and, to be crystal clear, the property by law belonged to the government, not to Trump. Only when Trump obstinately refused these requests, misled investigators about the documents in his possession, and finally directed actions that appeared designed to conceal the documents did the government ratchet up to a search warrant and criminal charges.

In Manhattan, Alvin Bragg manufactured a case against Trump; in Mar-a-Lago, by contrast, Trump handed himself to Jack Smith on a silver platter. In the end, the president got lucky and beat the case because (a) Smith overcharged it, so there was no chance of getting it to trial pre-election, and (b) Biden AG Merrick Garland was too bullheaded to adjust Smith’s appointment so it would pass Judge Aileen Cannon’s interpretation of constitutional muster, resulting in dismissal of the indictment. Contrary to the implications of Trump’s rally riffs and Bondi’s memo, there was no merits adjudication that Trump was not guilty.

In another line that could have been written by the Trump political campaign, AG Bondi’s directive says her weaponization group will examine “federal cooperation” with Bragg and James “to target President Trump, his family, and his businesses.” That is, the Trump DOJ is either (a) targeting Bragg and James and any DOJ lawyers who conferred with them, or (b) acting as Trump’s lawyer by pretextually investigating something that is not a crime — namely, federal cooperation with state prosecutors — in the hope of shaking loose information that might be helpful to Trump’s ongoing appeal of the New York criminal and civil judgments against him.

I doubt any commentator has derided the New York cases more than I have, and if the president, in his personal capacity, wants to hire more private lawyers and investigators to attack them, great — I hope he gets these farcical judgments reversed on appeal. But it is not proper for the United States Department of Justice to act as the president’s private lawyer (even if the DOJ is now staffed by a number of the president’s private lawyers).

Tellingly, Bondi does not describe any federal crime that Smith, Bragg, or James supposedly committed. If the Weaponization Working Group is going to investigate them (and regularly report back to Trump on their progress, as Bondi’s directive anticipates), a crime would be helpful; after all, the Justice Department’s main business is prosecuting crimes.

Still, the lack of an apparent crime is just one problem here. Another, which I’ve discussed before, is that, like presidents, prosecutors have immunity from prosecution for their official acts — even if their official acts are arguably abuses of power.

You want to squawk that it would be intolerable for these hard-edged partisan prosecutors to be beyond the criminal law’s reach after their abuses of power? Okay . . . but then you are echoing exactly the logic of Democrats, advanced in support of Smith’s legally dubious J6 charges against Trump, and even Bragg’s nitwit case. That logic is this: Our enemy’s bad character and abuses of power are too egregious to ignore, even if the criminal justice system is the wrong forum for addressing them.

That argument does not get more attractive because Democrats got away with using lawfare against Trump. Yes, the president was subjected to significant deprivations of due process — I’ve been documenting them for four years. But the Democrats’ achievement in that regard was Pyrrhic: (a) Trump’s immunity claims prevailed in the Supreme Court and thwarted the Democrats’ crusade to rush him into federal criminal trials prior to the election, (b) Trump won the presidency, and (c) the reason lawfare hurt the Democrats in the election was that their use of law enforcement on flimsy grounds against political rivals was wrong, and the public saw it as such.

The public will continue seeing it as such. The majority of Americans, who are not political partisans, know that lawfare is wrong, no matter who wages it. A key ingredient of lawfare is putting the Justice Department in the service of political narratives against partisan adversaries. That’s always wrong, too, no matter who does it.