Pam Bondi’s Power Play

The event left veterans of previous Administrations shaken. “There’s never been a Great Hall event anything like it,” Peter Keisler, a senior Justice Department official during the George W. Bush Administration, and a co-founder of the conservative Federalist Society, told me. “It sent the unmistakable message, not merely that there was a new sheriff in town but that this new sheriff intended to harness law enforcement into a pure and unfiltered tool of politics and revenge.” Shortly thereafter, a new piece of art appeared on the walls of the Attorney General’s conference room, where Bondi’s predecessors had displayed portraits of Attorneys General past: a large photograph of Bondi and Trump at the Great Hall event. (Her other selections: paintings of Washington and Lincoln, borrowed from the National Portrait Gallery, and the official D.O.J. portrait of Robert F. Kennedy. “She is very, very close to Bobby Kennedy,” Mizelle explained, referring to the Secretary of Health and Human Services.)

The Justice Department declined to make Bondi available for an interview with me, but it did arrange sessions with several other senior officials, who offered a glimpse of the new relationship between the D.O.J. and the White House. Mizelle, who worked at the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term, is particularly close to Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff. “You have one client, and you have to represent that one client. If you don’t want to do that, then it’s just not the place for you,” Mizelle told me. When I asked him who the client is—the United States or the President—he rejected the premise of the question. “I don’t see a difference between those,” he said. “I think—and I don’t mean this as an attack on you—the very fact that you asked the question shows the fundamental problem in how everybody has always, in the last two decades, conceived of government. . . . The President is the executive branch.”

Temple Terrace, Florida, where Bondi grew up, sits at the northeastern edge of Tampa. It takes its name from the Temple oranges that grew in what was once the world’s largest orange grove. Bondi’s father, Joseph, was a professor of education at the University of South Florida; her mother, Patsy Hammer, was an elementary-school teacher. The eldest of three children, Pamela Jo Bondi received an early education in politics from her father, a Democrat, who served as a city-council member and then as the mayor of Temple Terrace. “The household she grew up in was one that loved what Roosevelt did during the Depression and loved Kennedy for his youth,” Patrick Manteiga, the publisher of Tampa’s La Gaceta newspaper, recalled. Bondi’s father, he said, “was just a very traditional Roosevelt Democrat.” Billy Howard, a Tampa lawyer who dated Bondi for about five years, said that she “was extraordinarily close with her father,” who died of leukemia in 2013. “Her father was a very passionate individual about doing the right thing. And I think that passion for doing the right thing passed down to Pam.”

In her own telling, Bondi is an accidental prosecutor, perhaps even an accidental lawyer. In college—she attended the University of South Florida for three years before graduating from the University of Florida—she imagined becoming a pediatrician. Even after deciding to go to law school, at Stetson University, in Gulfport, Bondi wasn’t sure of her career path. “I knew I wanted to get a law degree, but I wasn’t certain I wanted to practice law,” she told the Florida newspaper Business Observer. Her father pushed her, helping to arrange an internship in the state’s attorney’s office. Bondi was hooked. She worked on four jury trials as an intern, and was hired after graduating. “What an ingenue!” one prosecutor wrote in notes from her job interview.

Ingénue or not, Bondi thrived. “Pam is a vibrant, enthusiastic, good natured individual,” her supervisor wrote in an assessment in September, 1992, a year after she joined the office. “Her zeal and enthusiasm are evident in her case presentation. With her effervescent personality, she gives a cohesive feeling to the work area.” As to weaknesses, the supervisor wrote, “She needs to continue polishing her trial skills and knowledge of the law, which comes only with experience.” Bondi rose quickly through the office ranks, from processing misdemeanor traffic offenses to trying serious felonies. “I always saw Pam as a career prosecutor,” Paul Sisco, a Tampa defense lawyer who was a young prosecutor alongside Bondi, told me. “The great majority of us were sort of counting our time until we could get into private practice. Pam had a little bit more of a pure prosecutor philosophy, and by that I mean she was one hundred per cent convinced that was the correct side and she didn’t want to do anything else.”

A murder case in 2000 helped make Bondi’s career, albeit in a circuitous way. A fifteen-year-old named Valessa Robinson was accused, along with her boyfriend, Adam Davis, and another friend, of killing her mother. Bondi secured the death penalty for Davis (the sentence was later reduced to life in prison); Robinson was also convicted of murder and served thirteen years. The high-profile case helped bring Bondi to the attention of producers and bookers at the TV networks and major cable outlets. She was soon a legal talking head on MSNBC, CNN, and, more and more frequently, Fox News. It was an unusual role for a local prosecutor, but Bondi had a knack for short sentences and punchy phrasing; she emphasized key words with the skill of a veteran correspondent. “These were all internet searches, done on the computer that Casey Anthony used, three months before that little girl went missing,” Bondi told CBS News, speaking about the high-profile trial of a woman who was acquitted of killing her toddler. “So if that doesn’t give you premeditation, I don’t know what does.”

It was through her television appearances that Bondi first encountered the real-estate developer Donald Trump, in 2006. Trump had filed suit against the town of Palm Beach after it fined him for flying an oversized flag at his private club, Mar-a-Lago. Bondi, in one of her cable appearances, spoke out in Trump’s defense. Soon afterward, as Bondi related to Lara Trump, her assistant came in to announce, “ ‘Donald Trump’s on the phone for you,’ and I said, ‘Donald Trump the billionaire?’ ” Trump, she recalled, “saw me defending him, got my number somehow, called up the state attorney’s office and just wanted to thank me.”

Bondi’s television career was central, too, to her unexpected campaign for Florida attorney general in 2010. Two candidates, both with statewide experience, were running in the Republican primary. Goodman, the political consultant, spied an opening for an outsider in the race. “I thought, Oh, my God, what about Pam Bondi? She’s photogenic, she thinks on her feet,” he told me. Goodman called to pitch her on the notion. An hour and a half later, she wasn’t sold, but she was taking it seriously. She was still wavering the night before her announcement, she later said. “I had no political aspirations whatsoever,” she told Business Observer. “I always said if I won the lottery, I’d keep prosecuting.”

Bondi entered the race in December, 2009, and it quickly emerged that she had been a registered Democrat until 2000. Her explanation was that Tampa was a heavily Democratic area and she wanted her vote to have an impact in the primaries; this was undercut by the revelation that she had not voted in the primaries in 1984, 1986, 1988, or 1992. Florida newspapers offered an alternative explanation: shortly before the switch, her boss, a Democrat, died and was replaced by a Republican. “In my conversations with Pam, she never presented herself as being a conservative, a liberal, or anything,” Manteiga, the newspaper publisher, told me. “She was in the middle.” But Bondi was running in a Tea Party year that favored unconventional candidates, and she benefitted from her visibility on Fox News even as she positioned herself as the nonpolitician in the race. “I’ve not spent my career behind a desk in Tallahassee, but on the front lines,” she said in a debate.

Bondi endorsed the Republican program with a passion that surprised friends and observers. “Once she jumped in, the evolution from prosecutor to politician happened so fast and with such ideological fervor that it jolted those who knew her,” Colleen Jenkins, a reporter for the Tampa Bay Times (then known as the St. Petersburg Times), wrote. “Political Pam touts herself as pro-business, pro-Second Amendment and pro-life. She talks about Lincoln and Reagan and bedrock Republican Party principles. She blasted the national Democratic leadership on the Sean Hannity Show and met with ex-vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin at a breakfast in Washington, D.C. She even wears a necklace with elephants on it.” Hannity went to Florida to campaign for Bondi; Palin provided an endorsement, as did the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List Candidate Fund. “There is no better woman to defend the pro-life, pro-woman legal position,” the group’s president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, said. Bondi won the primary with nearly thirty-eight per cent of the vote.

To the extent that the general election captured national attention, it was because of a St. Bernard named Master Tank, who had been separated from his owners in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in 2005. Master Tank turned up at an animal shelter, emaciated and mangy, and Bondi, whose own St. Bernard had died of cancer days earlier, adopted the dog, whom she renamed Noah. When Master Tank’s owners, Dorreen and Steven Couture, tracked down the dog three months later and sought to reclaim him, Bondi refused to give him up, alleging that he had been poorly cared for before the hurricane. The Coutures, desperate to recover the dog for their young grandchildren, whose parents had died prior to the storm, found a pro-bono attorney and filed suit. The attorney, Murray Silverstein, recalled being astonished that the matter had come to litigation. “We had the proof,” he told me. “We figured a normal, ordinary, reasonable person would say, ‘I didn’t realize that, I’m so sorry, here is your dog back.’ ” Bondi went so far as to argue that the Coutures were seeking the wrong dog—there was a dispute over a missing toenail—but the judge overseeing the case rejected that argument. A July, 2006, Tampa Bay Times story captured the toll of the dispute. “Emotionally distraught, she started crying when a reporter asked innocuous personal background questions,” Jenkins wrote of Bondi. “She said she was sensitive to a fault.” (Other local journalists told me that Bondi had at some point called them in tears.) On the eve of trial, Bondi agreed to a settlement under which she would pay the dog’s food and medical bills and have visitation rights. But, Dorreen Couture later said, Bondi stopped making the payments after a few months and cancelled her first visitation. The custody battle, which was covered by People and CNN, lasted sixteen months.

From the perspective of Bondi and her supporters, the dog drama underscored her tenacity in defense of the vulnerable and mistreated. “I took a dog who was a walking skeleton,” she told the Tampa Bay Times, citing a veterinarian’s conclusion that Tank/Noah had been suffering from heartworm for years before Katrina. “There is no way I can send him back there to die.” Democrats saw an opportunity to portray her as selfish and heartless, willing to manipulate the legal system at the expense of grieving children. An ad sponsored by the state Party quoted Steven Couture saying of his grandson, “He’d wake up in the night, having nightmares that Bondi took his dog.”

The story wasn’t enough to defeat Bondi in a Republican year. “She had more notoriety. She’s very telegenic,” her general-election opponent, Dan Gelber, told me, using an adjective that was ubiquitous in stories about Bondi from the time. “She had a strong Fox News contingent, and I had a lot of very good professors from Columbia Law School.” As Matt Gaetz told me, “She was like a cult figure with law enforcement. She’s a beautiful blond woman. She took these tough cases, she went to court, and won. And what Pam did was she used the platform of her earned fame to dominate.”

Bondi, as Florida’s attorney general—the first woman to hold the office—staked out a political position that was undeniably conservative but not at the extreme. She brought in a Democrat, Dave Aronberg, who had run for attorney general in the primary and endorsed Gelber in the general election, to take on the “pill mills” that were contributing to the state’s opioid epidemic. “When I worked for her, I didn’t even consider her partisan,” Aronberg told me. During her second term, Bondi hired another Democrat, Patricia Conners, as her chief deputy. Gaetz, who worked closely with Bondi on criminal-justice issues as a member of the state legislature, described her as “more of a tactician than an ideologue,” adding, “She actually likes getting into the weeds of the criminal-litigation process. And I think that gets her up more than reading old William F. Buckley articles about the nature of conservatism.”

Bondi may not have sought out the culture wars of the Tea Party years, but she did join them. Continuing the work of her predecessor as attorney general, she was involved in orchestrating Republican states’ 2012 challenge to the Affordable Care Act; she also had Florida sign on to a separate lawsuit challenging the A.C.A.’s requirement that religiously affiliated employers provide contraceptive coverage. She joined fifteen other states in a Supreme Court brief backing Arizona’s “show me your papers” law, which required police to check the immigration status of anyone they suspected of being undocumented; Bondi wouldn’t say whether she agreed with the law but framed it as a matter of states’ rights.

Gay rights proved to be a particularly thorny issue for Bondi. Florida had banned same-sex unions, including in a 2008 constitutional amendment that defined marriage as being between a man and a woman. As court after court struck down the amendment, Bondi ducked disclosing her own views. She declared that “I have many, many gay friends,” yet she kept appealing the rulings, despite mounting public criticism of her position. The backlash intensified when her office filed a brief asserting that “disrupting Florida’s existing marriage laws would impose significant public harm.” Bondi eventually acknowledged that the language was problematic—“I can tell you now I’m reading every word of every brief that’s being written,” she told the Tampa Bay Times—and presented herself less as an advocate than as a bureaucrat managing the issue until the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in. “There are great people on both sides of this issue, and all we want is finality for everyone,” she said. Critics had a different take. “The saddest thing about Pam Bondi is how much of a shape-shifter she is,” Nadine Smith, the executive director of Equality Florida, which advocates for L.G.B.T.Q. rights, told me. “She will cut her conscience to fit whatever suits her ambition.”

Bondi served as Florida’s attorney general at a time when, across the country, the role was becoming increasingly politicized. In that landscape, the National Association of Attorneys General tried to lessen the partisan divide. The leadership of the NAAG traditionally alternated annually between Republicans and Democrats, and rotated along regional lines. In 2013, it was the Southern Democrats’ turn, meaning that the Mississippi attorney general, Jim Hood, was in line for the position. Bondi mounted a last-minute challenge, not informing Hood in advance but lining up backing—or so she thought—from her Republican colleagues. The vote was conducted by secret ballot; two Republicans voted against her, dooming her effort. “I like Pam Bondi. She has always been very gracious, pleasant in her dealings with me,” Chris Toth, then the deputy executive director of the group, told me. “But I also believe that she was more responsible for the rise in partisanship than any single A.G. that I ever worked with.”

Bondi’s tenure was marred by several episodes that prompted questions about her ethics and judgment. In 2014, she asked Governor Rick Scott to reschedule an execution; unbeknownst to Scott, the date conflicted with Bondi’s “hometown campaign kickoff” reëlection fund-raiser. (When the reason was reported, Bondi quickly acknowledged that she had made a mistake.) That year, the New York Times, as part of a series on Republican attorneys general, reported on Bondi’s close ties to a Washington law firm, the now defunct Dickstein Shapiro, which specialized in lobbying attorneys general on behalf of corporations. Bondi had even invited one of the firm’s lawyers to recuperate at her Tampa home after having foot surgery. (A Bondi spokeswoman declined to comment to the Times.) Lisa Lerman, a legal-ethics expert at the Catholic University of America, described the relationship as “unseemly.”

But perhaps the most intense criticism of Bondi’s time in office involved her dealings with Donald Trump. In 2013, Trump made a twenty-five-thousand-dollar contribution to a political group supporting Bondi’s reëlection; the check came three days after a Bondi spokeswoman said that her office was considering joining a fraud lawsuit against Trump University which had been filed by the New York attorney general. Bondi’s office decided not to pursue the case, and she continued to welcome Trump’s financial support. In 2014, Trump, along with Giuliani, headlined a fund-raiser for her at Mar-a-Lago.

The donation resurfaced as an issue in 2016, after Bondi’s endorsement of Trump. Pressed by reporters, her office acknowledged that she had personally asked Trump for the contribution. In the end, though, the evidence pointed more to a breakdown in procedures for vetting donations than to a quid pro quo. An outside investigator for the Florida Commission on Ethics concluded that, though the timing of the contribution “may raise suspicions,” there was “no evidence” that Bondi weighed in on whether to pursue the case against Trump University. The investigator noted that the staff lawyer who looked into the complaints against Trump testified that he did not discuss them with Bondi and that she “was not involved in the decision” about whether to join the lawsuit.

In 2019, shortly after her second term as attorney general expired, Bondi joined Ballard Partners, which had opened a D.C. office the year before to capitalize on its Trump connections. Bondi was brought on as the chair of the firm’s new corporate-regulatory-compliance practice, but her main role involved forging connections between Ballard clients and key officials. “She was more of a networker than a substantive lawyer,” one person who worked with Bondi said. Brian Ballard, the firm’s founder, disputed that characterization. “Pam is an incredibly substantive person, so that person doesn’t know Pam well,” he told me. Bondi reported lobbying the White House, Congress, and federal agencies on behalf of thirty clients, many with interests before the department that she now heads. They included blue-chip corporations such as General Motors, Amazon, and Uber; the government of Qatar (which paid Ballard a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars a month); and GEO Group, one of the nation’s largest private prison companies.

One notable client of Bondi’s was Carnival Corporation, the giant cruise operator. For years, Carnival and other cruise lines had docked their ships in Cuba under a special government exemption: a waiver that protected them from claims made by companies whose properties had been seized by the Castro regime. In April, 2019, the Trump Administration, wanting to up the pressure on post-Castro Cuba, was poised to change course and allow such lawsuits to proceed, exposing Carnival to hundreds of millions of dollars in potential liability. The company hired Ballard, and Carnival’s chairman, Micky Arison, secured the highest-possible-level meeting: with the national-security adviser, John Bolton; the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo; and Trump. The short session was “unusual,” Bolton told me. “I think a more normal course would have been to say, ‘Why don’t you meet with the Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America?’ or something like that,” he said. “I heard about the meeting after it was set up. I didn’t set it up. Pompeo didn’t set it up. We both saw eye to eye on the substance of the thing, which was not to extend the waiver again.” He went, he explained, because “I figured, good God, if this is going to happen, I’d better be there.” As Bolton recalled, Arison made his case to Trump, whom he had known for years; Bondi said little, and the Administration moved forward with its plan to end the waiver.

According to those involved in Bondi’s selection as Attorney General, Trump did not consider anyone else after the collapse of the Gaetz nomination. But the President hadn’t always been sold on her. Following his first election, the speculation was that Bondi would secure a prominent role in the new Administration. “I would imagine her opportunities are unlimited,” Brian Ballard, who had represented Trump’s interests in Florida and raised money for him during the campaign, said at the time. “There’s nobody closer to Trump in Florida than Pam Bondi.” Trump’s daughter Ivanka pushed Bondi for the key role of White House counsel, Maggie Haberman reported in her book “Confidence Man”; that idea went nowhere. Rubio pitched her for Homeland Security Secretary during the first transition and again when the position was vacated by John Kelly, in 2019. Governor Scott also lobbied for her to get an Administration job, telling one Trump ally, “She really wants to be in Washington.” Trump wasn’t convinced. When Bondi’s name would come up, the Trump ally said, “he’d roll his eyes and shake his head. I always took it as he didn’t take her seriously—he didn’t think she was a person of substance.” (Others dispute that Bondi was seeking an appointment—saying that, after years of government service, she preferred to earn more money and focus on her personal life—and maintained that Trump did not disparage her.) During the first term, the best Bondi could secure was an appointment to Trump’s opioid commission, and, after she left state office, a stint on the White House legal team for his first impeachment.

As Trump prepared for a second term, Bondi was not in line for an Administration position—this time apparently by her own choice. Then Trump made her an offer. “He picked up the phone one morning about seven o’clock and called her and said, ‘I’ve made a dreadful error, and would you consider this?’ ” one senior Administration official told me. Within hours, Gaetz had withdrawn and Bondi’s selection was announced. Gaetz told me that, shortly afterward, he called Bondi. She said that she knew it had been a “tough week” for him and added, “Come work for me,” he recalled. He demurred—although, he said, “I thought that was super kind of her.” Others in the MAGA sphere were more concerned by Bondi’s selection. “I was absolutely, like, We can’t do this, right?” one prominent conservative said. “Pam’s great. She’s very political, she’s savvy, she’s high-energy, she’s always there, she’s got a big heart. I would never ask her any legal question at all to do with anything but a parking ticket.”

The Attorney General is often required to make decisions, with high stakes and on short notice, on an array of difficult matters, from blocking mergers to approving counterintelligence investigations to appealing cases to the Supreme Court. The job also involves supervising a vast bureaucracy that includes the F.B.I., the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the Bureau of Prisons. Few have come to the job with less experience in complex federal legal issues than Bondi. By all accounts, she was a capable prosecutor, and her colleagues on the impeachment team praise her performance. But as Attorney General she has fumbled basic questions. In late June, the Supreme Court handed the Trump Administration a major victory in its effort to eliminate birthright citizenship, ruling that, while challenges to Trump’s order worked their way through the courts, federal judges could not fully block it from taking effect. Bondi, appearing with Trump at a triumphant White House news conference, was asked whether the Justice Department would enforce the edict in states where it had not been struck down. “Birthright citizenship will be decided in October in the next session by the Supreme Court, unless it comes down in the next few minutes. I guess it could come down. There’s still—I think they’re still deliberating right now on some cases,” she said. This was gibberish. The Court had released all its rulings for the term, and it has not yet accepted a case that directly challenges Trump’s action.

Bondi also stumbled, at least early on, in staffing the department. By the time she took the job, the White House had announced the other top-tier Justice appointees: Deputy Attorney General Blanche; his top deputy, Emil Bove (who has since been confirmed to a federal judgeship); and Solicitor General D. John Sauer. A cannier operator, knowing that Trump needed her to step in for Gaetz, might have insisted on appointing members of her own team; Bondi did not. She was able to select one minor player, tapping a Florida sheriff, Chad Chronister, to be the head of the D.E.A. But Chronister’s nomination quickly faltered when it emerged that his department had enforced pandemic lockdown rules, arresting a pastor in 2020 for holding a church service. “She was hasty,” a senior Administration official said, “and just skipped a very, very important step.”

Bondi’s penchant for Fox News appearances from the West Wing lawn helped fuel a perception that she is a figurehead Attorney General. She was absent from one of the highest-profile matters her department has handled: its move, in early February, to drop criminal bribery charges against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams. Bove, who was then the acting Deputy Attorney General, instructed Danielle Sassoon, the interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to dismiss the case. She refused, and sought a meeting with Bondi, to no avail. Sassoon turned to Mizelle, asking that he print out an e-mail she had written and put it in front of the Attorney General, according to a source familiar with the episode. Still, she heard nothing from Bondi, and Bove accepted her resignation. A former U.S. Attorney who served during a previous Republican Administration described Bondi’s refusal to engage with Sassoon as extraordinary. “If a U.S. Attorney wants to speak to the A.G., they speak to the A.G.,” this person told me. “It tells you how removed Bondi is from actually running the department.”

Justice officials dismiss this characterization of Bondi as inaccurate and sexist. But a whistle-blower complaint from Erez Reuveni, a former senior immigration lawyer, indicated that the White House is intervening heavily in the department—not merely shaping policy but overseeing the content and the timing of legal arguments. Reuveni described receiving an urgent call from Henry Whitaker, a counsellor to the Attorney General, telling him that the “White House wanted the brief filed by midnight” in one high-profile immigration case. In another case, that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador in March, Reuveni said that Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign told him the White House wanted to know why he had failed to argue that Abrego Garcia was a terrorist. Reuveni replied that the evidence didn’t support that assertion. Bondi fired him for insubordination.

Early in Trump’s first term, the President erupted in anger over his inability to contain the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” he demanded, referring to his legendary personal lawyer and fixer, who stopped at nothing to manipulate the legal system to his clients’ advantage. Bondi is no Roy Cohn, but in her Trump has found—at long last—an ally who will bend the department to his will and punish his perceived enemies. In seven tumultuous months, nearly every aspect of its operations has been reshaped to facilitate and enable his agenda.

“The transformation that this department has gone through since January 20th, it’s something that nobody has been able to do in the recent history of the Department of Justice, and that’s because of the Attorney General,” Blanche told me. On the criminal side, investigating corruption is no longer a priority. The Public Integrity Section, which prosecutes corruption cases involving government officials, has been all but disbanded; under an executive order, enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits U.S. companies from paying bribes overseas, has been suspended. On the civil side, the overhaul may be even more dramatic. A June memorandum from Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate announced that the new priorities would be denaturalization; “combatting unlawful discriminatory practices in the private sector” (that is, going after diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives); pursuing doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies that provide care to transgender children; and ending sanctuary-city protections. The Civil Rights Division has been upended, going from a unit entrusted with protecting minority rights in voting, housing, and education into one whose stated missions include “protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation,” “ending radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling,” “keeping men out of women’s sports,” and “eradicating anti-Christian bias.”

With the shift in focus has come a cataclysmic upheaval in personnel. Bondi is not the first Republican-appointed Attorney General to chafe at overseeing a workforce that undoubtedly skews liberal. But no Attorney General has been so overtly at odds with the staff she supervises. “There are a lot of people in the F.B.I. and also in the Department of Justice who despise Donald Trump, despise us, don’t want to be there,” Bondi told Hannity in March. “We’re going to root them out. We will find them, and they will no longer be employed.” Bondi spoke of the lawyers she oversees in the terms that Administration officials use for individuals they target for deportation: “We’re starting at every level of the Justice Department and getting rid of the worst of the worst.”

Thousands of employees have taken a buyout offer from the new regime. Not surprisingly, some seventy per cent of the Civil Rights Division’s two hundred and fifty lawyers have left, much to the apparent delight of Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon. “I think that’s fine,” Dhillon told the radio host Glenn Beck in April. “The job here is to enforce the federal civil-rights laws—not woke ideology.” Other departures have been more damaging to the Administration. More than half the attorneys in the Federal Programs Branch, which defends executive orders and other Administration actions against lawsuits, have left, limiting the department’s ability to litigate the onslaught of cases it faces. In the élite Office of the Solicitor General, which represents the Administration before the Supreme Court, at least half the career lawyers have resigned.

Stacey Young, who left the D.O.J. in January and founded Justice Connection, a group that supports department employees, estimates that two hundred staffers have been dismissed or transferred to lesser positions. Generally, no reason is provided, in seeming violation of civil-service laws that protect employees from being fired without cause and without being given due process. Instead, a typical letter of dismissal, signed by the Attorney General, invokes Article II of the United States Constitution—the provision establishing the authority of the President—and states, “You are removed from federal service effective immediately.” One lawyer was fired because he failed to remove his preferred pronouns from his e-mail signature, according to a department official, who said that the Attorney General possesses the power to terminate employees “for any reason or no reason whatever.”

The purge has served to intimidate those who remain in the Justice Department, diminishing the threat of pushback. Among those dismissed was the head of the Office of Professional Responsibility, which handles ethics complaints against department attorneys; no one has been named to fill that role. In late January, the Justice Department’s senior career lawyer and chief ethics adviser, Bradley Weinsheimer, was removed as Associate Deputy Attorney General, a position to which he was appointed during the first Trump Administration. The ethics matters he handled, including advising senior department officials about whether to recuse themselves from particular issues, were transferred to two political appointees.

In July, Bondi fired the department’s senior career ethics lawyer, Joseph Tirrell, in a letter that misspelled his name as “Jospeh.” In his first interview since being terminated, Tirrell told me that he presumed he was fired because of his decision, in the closing weeks of the Biden Administration, to sign off on Jack Smith’s request to accept pro-bono legal services from the Washington law firm Covington & Burling. As Tirrell describes it, the decision was a no-brainer. Federal regulations explicitly permit government employees to take free help for legal matters that arise in connection with their employment, and Trump’s campaign-trail demands that Smith be prosecuted meant that the special counsel was wise to prepare for that eventuality. Tirrell has filed a lawsuit challenging his dismissal. “They’re firing people solely for doing the work that they were required to do,” he said. “There’s definitely this culture of fear that’s been created in the department.”

One of the driving convictions of the Bondi Justice Department is that its predecessor, acting at the direction of the White House, improperly pursued Trump. Numerous prosecutors who worked on the criminal cases against Trump have been fired. “Obviously, you cannot have the people who were prosecuting the President of the United States still working for the President of the United States,” Mizelle said. “I mean, we would be stupid, right?” (For department veterans, that is not at all obvious. The career prosecutors assigned to work on the Trump cases were following legitimate instructions from the political officials in charge, much as Bondi has demanded of the career staff that reports to her.)

Bondi has created a “weaponization” working group to examine what Trump has called the “unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.” Whether it will produce the actual indictments—not to mention convictions—that Trump craves is far from clear, but its activities have ramped up. Early this month, Bondi reportedly authorized Ed Martin—a former Stop the Steal activist who heads the new working group—to open criminal investigations into Senator Adam Schiff and New York’s attorney general, Letitia James. Schiff, as the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, had helped lead the 2020 impeachment proceedings, and James had successfully brought a civil fraud case against Trump. The New York Times also reported that the acting U.S. Attorney in Albany was investigating whether James’s office had violated Trump’s civil rights in pursuing its fraud suit.

Jared Wise, a former F.B.I. agent who was criminally charged with encouraging the January 6th insurrection, recently joined the department to work on weaponization. According to his indictment, Wise told D.C. police officers at the Capitol that day, “I’m former law enforcement. You’re disgusting. You are the Nazi. You are the Gestapo.” As officers were knocked to the ground in front of him, Wise, according to body-camera footage, yelled, “Yeah, fuck them! Yeah, kill ’em!” The jury in Wise’s case was about to begin deliberating when Trump took office and ordered such prosecutions dismissed. In a statement, a department spokesperson called Wise “a valued member of the organization,” adding, “We appreciate his contributions.”

Under Bondi, perceived weaponization has produced the real thing. But Justice Department officials bristle at the suggestion that her actions are anything beyond a necessary response to Biden Administration overreach. “I don’t think you will be taken seriously,” Mizelle warned me, “if you don’t acknowledge that prosecuting the former President of the United States was the single greatest shift toward weaponization that the Department of Justice ever could have undergone. And so any sort of notion that anything she does is even comparable to that just can’t be taken seriously. It’s laughable.”

This raises the unsettling question of what happens when a Democrat is elected President. Does one purge beget another? Once the criminal-justice system is deployed against political enemies, can that cycle be broken? I was haunted by my conversation with Sauer, the Solicitor General, who praised Bondi’s “absolute sense” of the “strategic judgment calls” that must be made in litigation. “When is it time to show judgment and restraint?” Sauer asked. “When is it time to be creative and aggressive . . . in taking a legal position that will advance the President’s agenda?” I suggested that it was hard to discern much restraint in the legal positions the department has advocated under Bondi. The Solicitor General laughed. “We view it,” he said, “the opposite way.”