President Trump rattled many members of the military on Sept. 5 when he signed an executive order changing the Department of Defense back into the Department of War. But to be honest, that was probably the right thing to do, because under Trump, that’s what the department has become: a war machine.
Whatever the crime statistics actually say, if Trump thinks a city has a serious crime problem, he doesn’t depend on local police. He just sends in the military, or threatens to send it, into Washington, Chicago, Portland. Without checking first, if Trump thinks that a boat coming from Venezuela is carrying drugs, he doesn’t depend on the Coast Guard to investigate. He just sends in the military to blow it up and kill everyone on board.
And, just to make sure everyone gets the message, the president and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth have summoned hundreds of generals and admirals to the Quantico Marine Base this week — the purpose of which, Pentagon insiders report, is for Hegseth to instruct military leaders on the need to adopt a “warrior mode.”
So let the name reflect reality. It’s no longer the Department of Defense, it’s the Department of War.
But that’s not the only federal agency begging for change. The Department of Justice needs a new name, too.
It wasn’t long ago that the Department of Justice was respected by members of both parties as the one federal agency above politics. It was led by an attorney general focused only on enforcing the law, immune to political pressure, even from the president who had appointed him.
In 1973, Republican Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus became national heroes for defying Republican President Richard Nixon’s order to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. More recently, in November 2018, Republican Attorney General Jeff Sessions was celebrated for resigning rather than obey President Trump’s orders to personally oversee the Russia investigation.
In both cases, a Republican attorney general stood up to a Republican president and said the Department of Justice’s job is to follow the law and the Constitution, not to follow the political agenda of the White House. But that’s not the way it is today. Trump sees the Justice Department as his personal police force to pursue his political enemies, and in Pam Bondi he’s found a compliant attorney general more than willing to do his dirty work for him.
Case in point: the ridiculous indictment of Trump’s former FBI Director James Comey for allegedly lying to Congress five years ago. White House staffers have tried to paint this as having nothing to do with politics. The problem, however, is that Trump himself keeps saying the opposite. For once, he’s telling the truth. He admits it’s all about political revenge.
For years, Trump has been threatening to have Comey charged with a crime. On Truth Social last week, with time running out to file a case against him, Trump publicly ordered Bondi to get to work prosecuting Comey and two other political enemies, New York state Attorney General Letitia James and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). “They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done,” Trump wrote, adding in his characteristic all-caps, “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
When Erik Siebert, his hand-picked U.S. Attorney for Northern Virginia, concluded there wasn’t enough evidence to bring a case against Comey, Trump fired him and replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, his former personal attorney, who has zero prosecutorial experience. On her first day on the job, Halligan overruled her staff and took Comey’s case to a federal grand jury, which indicted him on two counts.
The next morning, after celebrating Comey’s indictment and calling him a “liar” and a “dirty cop,” Trump warned that he wasn’t going to stop there. He’s also promised to have Bondi pursue charges against other political enemies, including his former national security Advisor John Bolton, former FBI Director Christopher Wray, philanthropist George Soros, Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, and a handful of women protestors who showed up at Joe’s Restaurant when he was dining out.
To borrow a phrase, this is the complete “weaponization” of the Justice Department, which Trump once complained about but is now practicing with glee. But it’s no longer the Justice Department. Its mission is no longer to defend the Constitution. Under Donald Trump, its mission is to settle scores against his political enemies.
So in the spirit of the renaming of the War Department, let’s change the name of the Justice Department and call it what it now is: the “Department of Revenge.”
Bill Press is host of “The Bill Press Pod.” He is the author of “From the Left: A Life in the Crossfire.”