Epstein file mismanagement created political blowback
โShe commits this enormous self-inflicted wound by going on Fox News and announcing Jeffrey Epstein's client list is sitting on her desk ready for her review. And then the next day she joins a meeting of conservative influencers at the White House and gives them a binder labeled Epstein files that they walk out of the White House waving for the cameras.โ
Bondi abandoned traditional Justice Department independence
โPam Bondi was executing on a wide-ranging agenda that the president outlined when he ran for president for a third time. He wanted to lead a retribution campaign against his political opponents, and much of that depended on having an attorney general willing to shatter decades-long norms about how a justice department operates, which traditionally is independent from the White House.โ
Politically motivated indictments collapsed in court
โAnd then we saw the Department of Justice, under Pam Bondi's leadership, launch investigations into some of Trump's long-standing political opponents. Adam Schiff, the Senator from California, Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve Chairman, who he wants to lower interest rates. And many of these cases and investigations have collapsed or not moved forward for various reasons, mostly because there was not enough evidence to indict or to move forward.โ
โShe oversees a wide scale purging of Justice Department prosecutors and FBI agents who worked on cases investigating Donald Trump when he was out of office. She's immediately making clear that there is a loyalty test for anyone who works in the sprawling Department of Justice and FBI. And that, I think, is the blueprint for which she carried out her job.โ
โEven as she is devoting so many resources to investigating Donald Trump's political opponents, it's still not enough for him. He is complaining to aides and allies that she's moving too slowly. And we even saw some of this criticism spill out into the public when Donald Trump posted on True Social a message addressed to his attorney general, basically castigating her for not getting enough results and not prosecuting individuals that he thought were guilty of crimes.โ