Justice Department Turmoil Bubbles Up to the Surface

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-09-26-justice-department-turmoil-bubbles-up/



In 2006, George W. Bush fired seven of his U.S. attorneys, primarily because they refused to prosecute bogus voter fraud cases (or they were not “loyal Bushies,” as one administration official put it). Bush replaced them with Republicans deemed more loyal. What resulted was a popular outcry, a protracted investigation and hearings in Congress, and the eventual resignation of the sitting attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, along with eight other top officials.

In 2025, Donald Trump fired a U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, because he refused to prosecute two of his political enemies, former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. He installed Lindsey Halligan, an insurance lawyer with no prosecutorial experience, who was also on his personal legal team, to get the job done. Within a few days of taking over the office, Halligan scrambled to get a grand jury to indict Comey for one false statement and obstruction of an investigation, before the statute of limitations runs out next week. More U.S. attorneys, like Kelly Hayes in Maryland, are under threat too if they don’t file charges against Trump’s foes.

There doesn’t need to be a protracted investigation about this, because Trump mistakenly sent publicly what appeared to be a direct message to Attorney General Pam Bondi, admitting that he fired the attorney (a “Woke RINO, who was never going to do his job”), saying, “Lindsey Halligan is a really good lawyer” and “we can’t delay any longer” to indict Comey and James. Separately, six other U.S. attorneys have been specifically instructed to investigate George Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) and openly suggested charges including arson (!), after the president explicitly threatened Soros (saying “he should be put in jail”) and other top donors to Democratic causes. The only evidence given for opening this investigation was a research paper from a right-wing think tank.

And on the flip side of these politically motivated prosecutions, we learned last week that the Justice Department and FBI shut down an investigation into immigration czar Tom Homan after he literally took a bag of $50,000 in cash, on tape, in exchange for agreeing to help undercover operatives posing as potential government contractors. (Granted, the Supreme Court has defined bribery down so thoroughly that taking a bag of cash might not even be bribery anymore if nothing is done to repay the bribe.) This comes as the division of DOJ that prosecutes corruption by public officials now has exactly two full-time attorneys. The Justice Department isn’t being weaponized as much as it’s being honed into a razor-sharp poleax and hurled in the direction of any enemy of the government, while shields are passed out to the government’s friends.

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