Since her first day in office, Attorney General Pam Bondi has made clear her view is that the Justice Department is but a tool for President Donald Trump to use as he wishes to advance his aims.
The lawyers of DOJ are “his lawyers,” she announced in a memo the day she took office more than a year ago.
The addition of Trump’s image on banners over the formal entrances to the Justice Department in February, visible from Pennsylvania Avenue, were a visual manifestation of that.
In the time in between then, hundreds of lawyers and staff have left the department. A DOJ job — a lifetime goal for countless lawyers until the past year — has become a job where embarrassing errors, at best, are regularly making it into court filings and where a constant question is whether a judge is going to threaten you with contempt for the role you are playing in this administration.
Last week, it became clear just how quickly — and dramatically — Trump’s say-so can upend plans at DOJ.
After The Wall Street Journal broke the news that DOJ would be withdrawing its defense of Trump’s law firm executive orders and DOJ did so that evening, The New York Times reported the next morning that a reversal was expected and DOJ did so that afternoon. This week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump hadn’t been told of the decision — although White House Counsel’s Office had been.
“‘I never signed off on that,’ the president said in the Oval Office, expressing displeasure with Justice Department leadership, the people said,” per the Journal.
Ironically, that was the sort of case in which one would have expected the president to weigh in — especially given the procedural posture of the case. This isn’t a law. It’s an executive order and, as such, Trump is, quite literally, the client. The decision not to proceed with the appeals of final judgments against the orders would mean that Trump would be unable to proceed with his executive orders.
In a normal administration, either the president would have been consulted — or the president would have trusted that DOJ, in consultation with counsel’s office, made the right decision.
We are not, however, in a normal administration.
Having angered Trump, DOJ and Bondi’s full supplication were on display on Thursday morning, when the Justice Department put out a news release.
“President Trump’s Justice Department,“ the DOJ news release stated, is suing California on behalf of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration over California’s electric vehicle mandate.
“President Trump’s Justice Department.”
It is, from what I can gather, the only time a Justice Department news release has used such a headline in the Obama, Trump, or Biden administrations.
The only other Justice Department news release that I can find in which the Justice Department is described as belonging to the current president was a release from April 2025 providing the prepared remarks from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche — Trump’s former criminal lawyer — at the start of the remedies phase of the Google search antitrust trial.
At that time, noting the long-running litigation, Blanche was to say that “President Trump’s Justice Department will finish the job.”
At one of the corners of the Justice Department, looking out on Pennsylvania Avenue, a quotation from Plato sits atop Trump’s visage.
“Justice in the life and conduct of the state is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.”
That includes — and should serve as a reminder to — Trump, Bondi, and Blanche.
