| | | Trump Demands That Bondi Move ‘Now’ to Prosecute Foes
His demand came a day after he ousted the federal prosecutor who failed to charge two of his most-reviled adversaries, Letitia James and James B. Comey.
nytimes.com
President Trump demanded on Saturday that his attorney general move quickly to prosecute figures he considers his enemies, the latest blow to the Justice Department’s tradition of independence.
“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post addressed to “Pam,” meaning Attorney General Pam Bondi. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
Mr. Trump named James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director; Senator Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California; and Letitia James, the New York attorney general, saying he was reading about how they were “all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.”
Asked later by reporters about his message for Ms. Bondi, Mr. Trump said, “They have to act. They have to act fast.”
Even for a president who has shattered the traditional norms of maintaining distance from the Justice Department, Mr. Trump’s unabashedly public and explicit orders to Ms. Bondi were an extraordinary breach of prosecutorial protocols that reach back to the days following the Watergate scandal.
His demands came a day after he ousted the federal prosecutor who failed to charge two of the adversaries he most reviles, Ms. James and Mr. Comey, showing how far Mr. Trump has gone in exerting personal control over the Justice Department and breaching the longstanding norm about keeping politics at a distance from law enforcement.
In a different social media post later on Saturday, Mr. Trump defended Ms. Bondi, saying she was doing a “GREAT job,” but that she needed a “tough prosecutor” in the Eastern District of Virginia, where Erik S. Siebert, was abruptly forced from his post atop the U.S. attorney’s office on Friday. Mr. Trump said he would nominate Lindsey Halligan, a special assistant to the president who was on his personal legal team, to fill the role.
Ms. Halligan, who spent much of her career as an insurance lawyer, has never been a prosecutor.
Mr. Siebert’s exit deepened troubling questions that have arisen in recent months about the politicization of the Justice Department’s supposedly self-governing satellite offices.
But it also raised a blunter and more immediate issue: Which of the nation’s U.S. attorneys might be next?
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Beyond their efforts to push out Mr. Siebert, whose inquiries into Ms. James and Mr. Comey effectively fizzled out, administration officials have also ramped up pressure against Kelly O. Hayes, the U.S. attorney in Maryland, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Ms. Hayes, a career prosecutor who has spent more than a decade in that office, is leading inquiries into two other vocal critics of Mr. Trump: Mr. Schiff, who has been accused of mortgage fraud by Mr. Trump’s allies; and John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, who is facing scrutiny over allegations of mishandling classified information.
Kelly O. Hayes told associates that she was under no illusions of the pressure she would face if she refused to bring a case she believed to be unsupported by evidence.Credit...United States Attorney's Office
Recently, Ms. Hayes told associates that she was under no illusions of the pressure she would face if she refused to bring a case she believed to be unsupported by evidence, as Mr. Siebert did, according to people with knowledge of those conversations. And while she signed off last month on asking for a warrant to search Mr. Bolton’s home in Bethesda, Md., she has indicated that she would not bring charges against Mr. Schiff unless her team discovered evidence to support them.
Mr. Trump’s campaign against U.S. attorneys, who oversee offices in 93 federal districts across the country, is an extension, even an escalation, of the early purge that his top political appointees carried out at the Justice Department headquarters and the F.B.I. against those who worked on the criminal cases brought against him before he returned to power.
But his latest demand for the prosecution of his foes also underscores how his desire for retribution against those who pursued him after his first term remains as intense as ever, and how he appears to feel less constrained by political and legal norms in imposing payback.
“I was indicted five times, it turned out to be a fake deal, and we have to act fast, one way or the other, one way or the other — they’re guilty, they’re not guilty, we have to act fast,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “If they’re not guilty, that’s fine. If they are guilty, or if they should be charged, they should be charged.”
Given that these prosecutors’ offices are where federal cases are filed on a day-to-day basis, the move strikes at the nuts-and-bolts foundations of the criminal justice system. It seems intended both to create a frictionless path for prosecutions of those who have run afoul of Mr. Trump, and perhaps to provide the White House with a tool it could use to set aside or slow cases it would like to see disappear. |
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