(Column by conservative legal expert Andy McCarthy, often a defender of Donald Trump’s legal positions, in National Review, Feb. 22)
This is the fifth of seven posts on Attorney General Pam Bondi’s “Weaponization Working Group.” (Here are the first, second, third, and fourth posts.)
It should be obvious enough that you can’t end the weaponization of federal law enforcement by weaponizing federal law enforcement — that is, by targeting people rather than crimes, and by transforming the Department of Justice into a political messaging shop whose core mission is to peddle a partisan revisionist history of the Capitol riot and the investigations of Donald Trump, while reporting regularly to the Trump White House on its progress. But there is an additional, blatant complication for the working group: staffing.
According to her recent directive, AG Bondi will run the Weaponization Working Group. To assist her as members, she has assigned, among others, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, meaning DAG nominee Todd Blanche and his principal adviser, Emil Bove (currently the acting DAG and maestro of the Eric Adams mess); and Edward Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia (whom we’ll look at in more depth in the next post). The assignment of these top DOJ lawyers to this working group raises significant ethical problems.
Other than to politicize what is supposed to be the DOJ’s nonpolitical law enforcement mission, there was no reason for the attorney general to establish this working group. (There is a right way to combat the due process travesties of lawfare, which we’ll discuss in the final post of this series.) When you take an ill-conceived action for the wrong reasons, unforced errors are inevitable….
[And in Part Four, McCarthy had written:] … AG Bondi’s strategy “against” the weaponization of law enforcement adopts the Democrats’ lawfare model not only by naming targets (which we discussed in the third post of this series). Her weaponization directive barely pretends to be anything other than a partisan political document…..
[The rest of Part Five is at this link.]
