The Justice Department’s newly formed “Weaponization Working Group,” announced in a memo this week by Attorney General Pam Bondi, was purportedly intended to root out “abuses of the criminal justice process” by local and federal law enforcement officers.
But a literal reading of its name suggests that the investigative body was also an example of the department itself, now under new leadership, weaponizing its expansive powers to scrutinize and perhaps take action against several officials who, for various reasons, have run afoul of President Trump.
“They are trying to politicize all this,” said Donald Voiret, a former F.B.I. senior executive who was the top agent in Seattle and also ran the bureau’s London office before retiring in 2022. “They are doing exactly what they accused the F.B.I. and D.O.J. of doing.”
The memo, issued on Wednesday, signaled the most significant first step in deploying the levers of government to carry out Mr. Trump’s repeated suggestions to exact retribution against those he perceives to be his enemies.
While the memo contained some conciliatory language, promising that no one who had “acted with a righteous spirit and just intentions” had any cause for alarm, it also included a laundry list of Republican boogeymen and grievances that the working group was intended to address.
At the top of that list were three prosecutors who all brought separate cases against Mr. Trump, even though there is no indication that any of them violated the law. They are the former special counsel Jack Smith; Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney; and Letitia James, the New York attorney general.
Mr. Smith’s two cases — accusing Mr. Trump of seeking to subvert the 2020 election and of illegally holding on to classified documents after he left office in 2021 — were dismissed after Mr. Trump won re-election in November. The victory triggered a longstanding Justice Department policy that forbids pursuing prosecutions of a sitting president.
Mr. Bragg’s case was more successful and resulted in Mr. Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal on the eve of the 2016 election. In Ms. James’s case, Mr. Trump was found civilly liable of doctoring the value of his real estate portfolio and was ordered to pay a penalty of more than $450 million.
The directive is just as noteworthy for what it does not say. Former department officials and lawyers representing some of those who might be targeted said the memo was too ambiguous to provide a clear indication of how the department planned to proceed.
Nonetheless, the initial absence of a more aggressive approach — such as immediately referring any of the inquiries to a U.S. attorney’s office for investigation — suggested that senior department officials were weighing how to best balance Mr. Trump’s quest for retribution with their need to avoid actions that would backfire or destabilize the department.
Ms. Bondi’s memo also directed the working group to look into what it described as the “improper investigative tactics and unethical prosecutions” arising from the Justice Department’s sprawling investigation of the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Republicans have repeatedly accused the F.B.I. of acting heavy-handedly in Jan. 6-related cases. They have complained that the bureau focused too much on nonviolent rioters, used SWAT teams to arrest some suspects and relied on a broad “geo-fence” that used electronic data from sources like Google to pinpoint people’s location inside restricted areas of the Capitol.
Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress, who are pursuing their own investigations of the investigators, have quietly warned those around the president to proceed with caution.
There are political downsides to publicly revisiting Mr. Trump’s documents case and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, reminding voters of his past conduct when many Americans have shown themselves willing to move on.
For all their public bluster, House Republicans are particularly wary of providing Mr. Smith with a platform to relitigate his case against the president.
Ms. Bondi, who acted as a defense lawyer for Mr. Trump during his first impeachment trial, has enthusiastically embraced his claim that he was the subject of witch hunt. But she emphasized looking “forward” rather than backward in discussions with senators leading up to her confirmation, and shifted the discussion to her crime-fighting plans when Democrats questioned her independence from Mr. Trump during her testimony.
Typically, the Justice Department’s independent watchdog, the inspector general’s office, investigates allegations of misconduct by the F.B.I. Any evidence of a crime is then referred to federal prosecutors, as was the case in the bureau’s inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Ms. Bondi’s memo appears to have skipped that normal practice and gives investigative powers directly to the prosecutors themselves. Moreover, it seems to have drawn some conclusions in advance. It accuses Mr. Smith of having already engaged in “weaponization” and uses inflammatory language to describe a court-authorized search of Mr. Trump’s residence in Florida in August 2022 as an “unprecedented raid.”
Beyond examining the work of specific agents and prosecutors, Ms. Bondi’s memo said, the new investigative team would also look into other issues that were scrutinized by a similarly named congressional body: the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, led by a close ally of Mr. Trump, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio.
One of Mr. Jordan’s former aides, Tom Ferguson, was recently installed with the F.B.I. as a senior policy adviser, meaning he will serve as a key aide to Kash Patel, should he be confirmed as F.B.I. director.
Mr. Jordan’s subcommittee focused on several moves made by federal law enforcement during the Biden administration that have long served as flash points of Republican outrage.
Among them were the issuance of an F.B.I. memo that suggested that certain Catholic practices were affiliated with extremism and the release of a separate Justice Department memo that Mr. Trump and others have repeatedly — and falsely — claimed authorized terrorism investigations of conservative parents who aired their opinions at school board meetings.
Last spring, the inspector general’s office released a report about the 11-page memo on Catholics, saying that it violated professional standards but showed “no evidence of malicious intent.” It remains unclear why Ms. Bondi has asked the working group to revisit the same subject.
According to the memo, Ms. Bondi’s office would take the lead in running the working group with support from the office of the deputy attorney general, which Mr. Trump has said should be run by Todd Blanche, one of his former criminal defense lawyers.
Given that many of the working group’s investigative targets are in Washington, the memo said it would also include representatives from the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington. That office is currently being led by Ed Martin, a Trump loyalist who has spent the past four years raising money for — and in some cases personally defending — Jan. 6 defendants.
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