The Adams case is not the only one that will bring the foolishness of this directive into sharp relief.
In 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.
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