Should historians now and in the future need to identify a moment illustrating President Donald Trump’s unabashed attempts to politicize the Justice Department, they could easily look to the events of the past few days.
Let’s start with Trump publicly calling on Attorney General Pam Bondi to use the powers of the department to go after his perceived political enemies—James Comey, Adam Schiff, and Letitia James—individuals he claimed were “guilty as hell” and the Justice Department had yet to take action against. “All talk, no action,” Trump complained on Saturday.
In a subsequent post, Trump then announced plans to appoint his former personal attorney, Lindsey Halligan, to replace US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Erik Siebert, who on Friday resigned amid intense pressure from the president to prosecute James, the attorney general of New York. Siebert had declined, citing insufficient evidence to pursue a mortgage fraud indictment against James. (Trump claims he fired Siebert, not the other way around.) The case was being pushed by William Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the same Trump official who has seized on highly questionable accusations of mortgage fraud to go after Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve governor Trump is trying to fire.
But just as he was sounding off on social media, MSNBC reported that in recent weeks, the Justice Department closed a previously undisclosed case launched under the Biden administration involving border czar Tom Homan. FBI agents, MSNBC reports, had recorded Homan accepting $50,000 in cash from undercover agents, who had been posing as business executives, promising to secure government contracts related to Trump’s border security agenda.
Together, the posts and the Homan report crystallized Trump’s indisputable attempts to politicize the Justice Department and effectively use it as his personal law firm by stacking it with political loyalists, including Halligan, who until now had been tasked with leading the White House effort to rid the Smithsonian of “improper ideology.”
