Daly: Pam Bondi Is Gone; Her Corruption Continues to Work Its Way Through the System

The Justice Department moves on to Cassidy Hutchinson.

A few weeks ago, when Pam Bondi was still our attorney general and trying desperately to keep her job, she directed the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into one of her boss’s old political foes: Cassidy Hutchinson.

On January 6, 2021, Hutchinson worked for Trump’s then chief of staff, Mark Meadows. A year and a half later, she provided damning testimony to the January 6 Committee, including the implication that Trump was aware, prior to the attack at the U.S. Capitol, of his supporters potentially causing violence that day.

Cassidy publicly recalled the president, after being told that some of the protesters outside his infamous “Stop the Steal” speech were armed, saying words to the effect of, “I don't f****** care that they have weapons. They're not here to hurt me.”

Others have disputed Hutchinson’s summation, which was the expressed basis for the DOJ pursuing the notion that she lied under oath in front of Congress.

A number of Justice Department officials have reportedly been skeptical all along that there’s a viable case to be made against Hutchinson. Nonetheless, the department has been moving forward with the former AG’s last sacrificial offering to the president. And they’re doing so in a highly unusual way.

The investigation has been assigned to the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division — a specialized unit that typically handles cases involving systemic issues like police misconduct, voting rights, and racial discrimination. It’s currently headed by Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump appointee and staunch Trump loyalist with a penchant for going after the president’s critics.

Normally such a case would be led by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, headed by former Fox News host, Jeanine Pirro (another Trump loyalist). But Pirro has been handed so many judicial defeats in recent months, while trying to advance criminal cases against Trump’s political adversaries, that there are apparently higher hopes for Dhillon.

None of this should be surprising, of course. As The Dispatch’s Kevin Williamson recently pointed out, the Trump DOJ has launched “a series of pretextual criminal investigations and prosecutions targeting the president’s political enemies, even when there was not the hint of an actual legal case to be made against them.”

Williamson provided a useful list of the DOJ’s political targets so far:

Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, all of Minnesota; Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey; St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her; Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell; Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook; Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan; Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado; Rep. Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire; Reps. Chrissy Houlahan and Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania; Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona; Sen. Adam Schiff of California; former FBI Director James Comey; former CIA Director John Brennan; Attorney General Letitia James of New York. (The prosecution of former National Security Adviser John Bolton, no less political and pretextual where Bondi was concerned, is more complicated in that it is not solely the work of the Trump administration.)

And this doesn’t even include all of the DOJ personnel, FBI officers, and Secret Service agents who were fired for simply being assigned to investigate occurrences that Trump didn’t want investigated (like January 6, his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, his mishandling of classified documents, and his obstruction of the retrieval of those documents). In other words, their career-derailing sin was just showing up to work. Some of these individuals filed federal lawsuits last month, claiming they were unlawfully fired as part of a “retribution campaign.” It’s not clear whether such terminations are in fact illegal, but I suppose we’ll find out.

Regardless, Hutchinson is just the latest political target of this DOJ, but she assuredly won’t be the last. Trump fired Bondi, after all, because he didn’t feel she was aggressive enough in using the legal system to punish his opponents. And with Trump recently promising mass pardons for his staff before he leaves office (similar to what he did for almost 1,600 January 6 criminals on the first day of his second term), it’s entirely possible that Bondi’s replacement will indeed dare to go where no modern AG has gone before. What would he or she have to lose?

Whether that person is Todd Blanche or someone else, however, I suspect Trump will continue to be disappointed for one simple reason: It’s not a lack of internal willingness or desire to appease the president that keeps derailing these cases. It’s the frivolousness of them. In instance after instance, they have lacked compelling evidence of a crime having been committed. And judges and juries have been unwilling to make the same capitulations as the DOJ.

While it’s disheartening that the judiciary is arguably the only branch of our federal government that’s still functioning as it should, one is certainly better than none. These cases (including Hutchinson’s) will likely continue to fall apart regardless of who heads the DOJ, but that’s not to say that those who’ve been politically targeted will walk away unscathed. A legal defense-team costs a lot of money, and not everyone in this administration’s crosshairs is wealthy. There’s also the reputational and professional damage that can come from such an ordeal, even if one is legally vindicated.

What’s especially troubling to me is how normalized this has become. Congress is largely asleep at the wheel, and the general public doesn’t care much about it either, probably having priced such abuses into the baseline chaos and vindictiveness they’ve come to expect from a Trump presidency. Their biggest problem with Trump has been cost-of-living issues (now including the price of gasoline, due to the Iran War). Much of the rest is just noise.

Lots of Trump loyalists, on the other hand, are very much enjoying what the DOJ is doing. Like the president, their only gripe is that it hasn’t been brutal enough. They believe the department is righteous and justified in exacting their boss’s revenge, because of how Trump was treated by prosecutors and investigators when he was out of office. They’ve been assured over the years by the president, his surrogates, and the right-wing media that Trump wasn’t deserving of any of the criminal investigations, indictments, and prosecutions he had to contend with.

I certainly agree with them on the New York cases (as I’ve written many times). The federal ones were a different story. But that shouldn’t matter — not for the question of whether it’s acceptable for the DOJ (whose primary function is to enforce laws impartially and independent of political influence) to openly serve as an instrument for satisfying a president’s bottomless desire for political vengeance.

Regardless of how one feels about Trump, that is indeed what’s happening right now. And the country should care more about it.