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Pam Bondi, the attorney general of the United States, was asked what should have been a pretty simple question during a Fox News appearance on Monday night.
“Is that legal?” Jesse Watters wondered, referring to Donald Trump musing earlier in the day about sending “homegrown” American citizens to El Salvador. Doing so would be unequivocally illegal, and acknowledging as much is an extremely low bar for the nation’s top law enforcement official to clear.
She didn’t clear it.
“Jesse, these are Americans who he is saying have committed the most heinous crimes in our country, and crime is going to decrease dramatically in our country because he has given us a directive to make America safe again,” Bondi said, repeating a Trump campaign slogan. She tacked on that “we’re not going to let them go anywhere, and if we have to build more prisons in our country, we will do it.” This last bit was a tacit admission of what she was afraid to say outright, that deporting U.S. citizens would be wholly illegal.
She didn’t say it was illegal because Trump wants it to happen, and Bondi has made clear throughout her first few months on the job that she’s not concerned with the law so much as pleasing the president. It was no secret that Trump had designs on turning the Justice Department into an arm of the White House, but the degree to which Bondi and other officials are publicly pushing MAGA propaganda — largely through a steady stream of TV appearances — marks an alarming betrayal of the separation of powers that has undergirded American democracy since the nation’s founding.
The Department of Justice is supposed to operate independently of the White House. The president gets to nominate an attorney general to lead the department in its mission to enforce federal law, which it is supposed to carry out without any naked political biases.
Trump’s first-term attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and William Barr, certainly catered to the president, but they also had their limits. Sessions recused himself from overseeing the Russia investigation, leading to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment, and Barr wouldn’t play ball with Trump’s effort to overturn his loss to Biden. Trump has spent plenty of time publicly lambasting both Sessions and Barr since forcing them out of their roles atop the Justice Department. He’s once called Barr a “gutless pig,” among other invectives.
Trump, in his second term, doesn’t want an attorney general with limits. He wants one who is wholly loyal to him and him alone — not to any personal sense of duty, not to federal law, not to the Constitution, not to the United States.
Bondi, who served as one of Trump’s impeachment lawyers during his first term and supported his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, seems to fit the bill. She has stood by as Trump has pulled every lever he can to wrest power away from independent agencies, while openly touting how she’s used the Justice Department to do his dirty work.
“You gave us a directive to prosecute the people who are going after Tesla to the fullest extent of the law,” she said during a Cabinet meeting last week, seated across from a president who pardoned rioters who vandalized the United States Capitol and assaulted cops. “We’ve made four arrests. There will be no negotiations, at your directive. They are all looking at 20 years in prison.”
She doesn’t even pretend to operate with any independence. “You were overwhelmingly elected by the biggest majority, and Americans want you to be president because of your agenda,” she gushed at the same Cabinet meeting, before insisting that he, not Congress, has “the authority to determine how the money of this country will be spent.” (Freezing congressionally appropriated funds, an act known as “impoundment,” is widely understood to be unconstitutional.)
Bondi sounds less like the nation’s top prosecutor and more like a cable TV lackey — which is probably a better way to think of her. She routinely goes on TV to parrot the administration’s talking points, bashing judges she argues are “trying to control our nation’s agenda”; entertaining the idea that Trump could run for a third term in office; bragging about sending Tesla vandals to prison for decades; and, of course, offering effusive “thanks to President Trump.”
Media Matters for America, a nonprofit that tracks right-wing media, found that Bondi has appeared on weekday Fox News programs 11 times from when she took over as attorney general on February 5 through last week — and she’s made at least three more appearances since then. The number doesn’t include weekend appearances or hits on other networks (including Fox Business), and so it only represents a portion of the time she’s spent in front of a camera, using her stature in the Justice Department to lend legitimacy to the president’s talking points.
Bondi isn’t the only federal prosecutor going on TV to stump for Trump. The president in March tapped Alina Habba — one of his personal lawyers who has no prosecutorial experience — to serve as the interim U.S. attorney for New Jersey. Habba was a TV fixture throughout Trump’s campaign, and as a counselor to the president before moving into her home state’s U.S. attorney’s office. She’s continued to go in front of the camera since taking the job.
Habba has been on TV defending Trump’s deportation agenda, pushing misinformation about Social Security, and otherwise touting the president’s agenda. She announced to Sean Hannity last Thursday that she is opening an investigation into New Jersey’s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, who she says is working to thwart the administration from expelling migrants from the state. “Pam Bondi has made it clear and so has our president that we are to take all criminals — violent criminals and criminals — out of this country and completely enforce federal law,” she said.
Media Matters found Habba has been on Fox News 27 times from when Trump was inaugurated until last week, including six times since she took over as New Jersey’s top prosecutor in March. The number, again, doesn’t include weekend appearances or hits on other networks.
“We have seen the capture of the Justice Department for purely political purposes to a degree that we’ve never seen before,” Steve Vladeck, law professor at the University of Texas, tells Rolling Stone.
There seems to be at least some awareness within the Justice Department that this kind of overt politicization isn’t a good look — and might hurt the department’s cases.
Reuters reported on Tuesday that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche — another one of Trump’s personal attorney installed in a high-ranking Justice Department position — is behind a new social media policy prohibiting Justice Department employees from “injecting their political views into the work they perform” or from posting anything that might “heighten condemnation of an accused.”
It’s unclear if Blanche’s policy applies to his only superior at the Justice Department. Reuters points out that Bondi posted to X on March 27 that law enforcement arrested a “top MS-13 national leader,” despite the criminal complaint only stating investigators found “indica” of the suspect’s “association” with the gang. The charges were later dropped and the suspect is expected to be deported instead. Bondi’s post is still up.
So is a post from Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., who in February described himself and those in his office as “President Trumps’ lawyers.” Martin’s time in front of a camera has mostly come on Russian state TV prior to this year, but he’s demonstrated astonishing political bias in both his social media posts and official actions since taking his new role. He is currently preparing for what could be a hotly contested confirmation process to take the job permanently, and has been reposting a host of MAGA commentators, including Donald Trump Jr., calling for Senate Republicans to confirm him.
Martin’s colleague in New Jersey acknowledged on the air last week that she shouldn’t be letting her own bias show. “I can’t speak politically so I’m going to speak solely on criminal,” Habba began before responding to a question from Fox News host Jesse Watters about why the Supreme Court ruled the administration can’t leave Kilmar Abrego Garcia to rot in a Salvadoran prison.
Habba’s supposedly non-political explanation was that federal law required Abrego Garcia to be deported. The Trump administration has admitted, however, that it should not have sent him there, chalking the mistake up to an “administrative error,” as a federal judge had ruled that he could not be deported to El Salvador and granted him a “protection from removal” order. The law literally stipulates the opposite of what Habba is claiming.
“You commit a crime, you’re out — that’s what America asked for, that’s what they want,” Habba added, despite Abrego Garcia’s never having even been charged criminally.
“We have an administration that thinks you govern by going on television,” Vladeck says. “Where sound bites are more important than policies, and photo ops are more important than achievements, where getting a video of Kristi Noem in El Salvador is more important than actually accomplishing the goal of reducing crime by undocumented immigrants.”
The White House recently posted a video of Noem, the head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), sporting a Rolex worth tens of thousands of dollars as she spoke about the administration’s deportation blitz in front of a prison cell in El Salvador, carefully staged with tatted up inmates. Trump’s entire crackdown seems mostly like a propaganda effort designed to produce these types of videos, as the vast majority of those sent to El Salvador did not have a criminal record, including Abrego Garcia. Noem’s DHS has simultaneously budgeted up to $200 million on TV commercials effusively thanking Trump “for closing the border.”
The propaganda has intensified in recent days as Abrego Garcia’s case has found its way to the center of the news cycle. Trump and his top administration officials have pushed a torrent of misinformation about the case while resisting the Supreme Court’s order to return him. One might think the attorney general could offer a relatively level-headed assessment of the situation without throwing the administration under the bus — but with Abrego Garcia’s case, as with Trump’s broader weaponization of the Justice Department, there is no level-headed way to rationalize what is happening.
Bondi, then, is less an attorney general than a front-facing spokesperson for the administration. She was pushing misinformation in the Oval Office on Monday as Trump welcomed Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, claiming Abrego Garcia’s case is an “international matter” and that the Supreme Court only ruled that the U.S. needs to “facilitate” his return if El Salvador first decides to release him. (The Supreme Court ruling is somewhat vague, but it specifies that the U.S. should “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s “release” from custody in El Salvador.)
A few hours later, Bondi was talking to Watters about how Trump wants to “make America safe again” by sending U.S. citizens to El Salvador.
She continued her work helping Trump rid the nation of violent crime by holding a press conference on Wednesday to announce that the Justice Department is suing Maine for letting trans athletes compete in women’s sports. Trump and Maine Governor Janet Mills got into a verbal altercation over the state’s policy in February, with Mills telling the president she would see him in court.
Bondi attacked Mills following the press conference on Wednesday from the same place she gushed about Trump after appearing with him in the Oval Office on Monday: Fox News.
She was back on the network that night, speaking to Sean Hannity about Abrego Garcia. “This is an extremely disturbing case,” she said. “Every American tonight should be thanking Donald Trump for making America safer.”
