President Donald Trump now has his full Justice Department team in place. But how will Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel pursue justice over the next four years?
The first obvious opportunity is to follow through on Trump’s promise to depoliticize the Justice Department. That should mean an end to warped DEI-related priority setting, an end to double standards in how Republicans and Democrats are treated by Justice Department investigations, an end to prejudicial government treatment of law-abiding people of faith, and a refocus on actions that bolster confidence in a bold but fair application of justice.
With support from Trump and Republicans on Capitol Hill, there is reason to think that Bondi and Patel will succeed on many of these counts. Still, addressing DEI and ensuring propriety in investigations represent low-hanging fruit. The real test for Bondi and Patel will center on whether they can bring additional public safety, protect the nation from terrorist attacks and foreign spies, and bolster public faith in their most important department.
Trump has made clear that a top priority will be reducing illegal drug flows across the U.S.-Mexico border. While the drug war cannot be won until the American shame of purchasing drugs that support vicious cartels becomes greater than the perceived pleasure of doing so, robust law enforcement action could drive up the price of drugs and impose greater consequences on their top-level purveyors. While the Drug Enforcement Agency will play the predominant role here, the FBI can leverage resources in its own bolstered counter-drugs effort. But Patel and Bondi will have to be bold in their appetite for ambition and risk if they want their efforts to have any significant effect.
Working with the CIA, which Trump appears to have directed to engage in covert action against the Mexican cartels, Bondi and Patel could authorize the FBI and DEA to conduct more and riskier undercover operations. This is the best way to gain insight into the organization and operation of a cartel, and then dismantle it from the inside out. The problem? If undercover agents or confidential informants are caught, they will be tortured and executed. Courageous personnel and informants of the CIA and DEA have repeatedly found out as much. The Obama and Biden administrations had a low tolerance for risk in operations such as these. And while Bondi and Patel may want to alter that risk calculus, failure will risk their officers’ lives and their own careers.
There’s another point to consider when it comes to bold action against the cartels. Namely, that dramatic operational successes also risk causing embarrassment and fury in the Mexican government. The ruling Morena party of President Claudia Sheinbaum has a close relationship with the powerful Sinaloa cartel, for example. When, in 2020, the United States arrested former Mexican Defense Minister Salvador Cienfuegos on drug trafficking charges, Mexico threatened to suspend all cooperation with the U.S. unless it released him. Then, the first Trump administration blinked and released him. Will it do the same thing when a similar scenario inevitably occurs?
Another challenge of great national importance will center on how the Justice Department tackles foreign espionage on U.S. soil. The political import and public concern attached to terrorism means that the FBI’s counterterrorism efforts are almost certain to maintain their heavy resourcing provision. But it’s not clear how Bondi and Patel aim to deal with foreign spies. The reality of FBI resourcing means that boosting resources from one investigative area means reducing resources in another. Eradicating DEI and headquarters bureaucracy positions might free up a few dozen agents to be reassigned to fieldwork, but this will only represent a drop in the ocean.
The associated problem is that while deploying more agents into criminal investigations will help better confront gangs and other organized crime outfits, the “spy catching” counterintelligence mission remains a crucial one.
China operates a vast apparatus of hundreds, if not thousands, of spies on U.S. soil at any one time. Its wide-ranging mission is to steal civilian and military technology, infiltrate government agencies and high-end research laboratories, and blackmail ethnic Chinese Americans into serving the Chinese Communist Party. Combined with China’s rapacious cyberespionage campaign, these efforts cost the U.S. economy hundreds of billions of dollars a year in lost economic opportunity. This Chinese espionage also directly endangers the lives and mission success of the U.S. military personnel. After all, if China can learn how U.S. military technology works, it can either replicate that technology for its own military or undercut the U.S. military’s utility in employing it. Put simply, pulling FBI agents from China counterintelligence work would be highly detrimental to national security.
It’s not just Chinese spies who pose a threat, however. Iranian spies working out of the United Nations Headquarters in New York will continue to gather targeting intelligence that could be used to carry out future attacks in the event of an American-Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, for example. The highly skilled Cuban intelligence service also poses a sustaining espionage threat. As do the intelligence services of some otherwise close allies such as France and Israel. All of these concerns must be monitored.
Then there’s Russia.
While Russian intelligence operatives share China’s interest in American technology and other secrets, they also work hard to penetrate U.S. political parties, think tanks, and other circles of perceived influence. With the U.S. and Russia set to restaff their respective embassies, a lot more Russian intelligence officers are set to arrive in Washington. This matters for various reasons, but few more so than in light of the highly compelling evidence to suggest that Russian spies have conducted highly aggressive radio-frequency and microwave-weapon attacks against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. Like most of the intelligence community, the FBI has attempted to cover up Russia’s culpability for these incidents. Will Patel fix this? Top line: Even if Trump somehow secures a semi-detente with Russia, Russian intelligence services will continue to operate with aggression on U.S. soil. They will do so because, like their forebears, they view the U.S. as their “main enemy.”
Bondi and Patel should also face scrutiny in how they approach public integrity concerns — public corruption. Unfortunately, Bondi has given early indications that she does not consider public corruption to be a priority. Take the furor surrounding the Justice Department’s decision to drop charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams. That decision has led numerous Justice Department prosecutors to resign in protest at what they assert is an unjust political favor to Adams in return for his support of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigrants.
As Jason Willick notes, while it bungled the move to drop charges against Adams, the Trump Justice Department could have offered a more compelling legal argument for why the prosecution was misjudged. The problem is that the Justice Department appears disinterested in pursuing future public integrity investigations and prosecutions per se. As Justice Department chief of staff Chad Mizelle observed in an X thread last week, “Additionally, the amount of resources it takes to bring a prosecution like this is incredible — thousands and thousands of man hours. Those resources could better be used arresting violent criminals to keep New York safe or prosecuting gang and cartel members.”
This may well be true in the case of Adams. But it is a weak and alarming argument to make in the context of public corruption generally. There are few more important American principles than the understanding that government officers, especially elected officials, should be held accountable for corruption. Public corruption often involves illicit payments in return for lucrative contracts or favors by government officials. Indeed, such corruption constitutes the deep state at its worst: public officials using the privilege bestowed on them by the people to enrich themselves or empower others contrary to the public interest. Heavily resourcing these investigations is thus crucial toward ensuring good government, improved public trust in government, and deterring corruption by others who might otherwise sense no risk and great prospective benefit in corruption. If Trump truly wants to “drain the swamp,” these investigations and ensuing prosecutions need more resources, not fewer.
It will be equally important to bear close scrutiny as to whether the FBI and Justice Department make investigative or prosecutorial decisions on the basis of a person’s perceived loyalty or disloyalty to the president. Any such activity will be anathema to good government and deserving of decisive congressional, judicial, and public riposte.
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In short, Bondi and Patel have opportunities to go after criminals big and small who, for too long, have sensed impunity. The situation in many cities, not least Washington, where prolific offenders have too long been treated as a minor nuisance by prosecutors, and where politicians such as Brianne Nadeau ignore hardworking constituent victims of crime, is patently unacceptable. The Trump administration can earn bipartisan popular support by taking law and justice back to the honorable basics.
But while Trump and his officers of state have legitimate grievances about the past four years, they will serve the people ill by weaponizing those grievances into their own politically motivated attacks on the imperative of equal and objective justice under the law.