Fresh Air - The Dramatic Overhaul Of The Justice Dept.

Episode Date: August 20, 2025

The New Yorker’s Ruth Marcus says Bondi has presided over the DOJ's most convulsive transition of power since Watergate, aggressively reversing policies, investigating Trump’s foes and firing staff.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, I'm Dave ISA founder of StoryCorps. This message comes from NPR sponsor, Subaru, the largest corporate supporter of Adopticlassroom.org by providing teachers with funding for supplies and resources. Subaru, more than a car company. This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. The leadership team of Donald Trump's second administration is known for having some colorful and combative characters. Among that group, Attorney General Pam Bondi is a standout. At an April cabinet meeting, she outdid others.

in praising the president by asserting that fentanyl seizures in his first 100 days in office had saved 258 million lives. That's roughly three quarters of the U.S. population. Bondi and the Department of Justice, which she heads, have been at the center of some of the administration's most controversial moves. Its aggressive seizure and deportation of immigrants, its handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, and the move to take over law enforcement in the District of Columbia. She's also spearheaded a determined campaign to fire and prosecute, present and former officials involved in investigations and prosecutions of January 6th rioters and Jack Smith's cases against Donald Trump. Our guest, veteran Washington journalist Ruth Marcus, has a profile in the

latest New Yorker about Bondi. She writes that Bondi has presided over the most convulsive transition of power in the Justice Department since the Watergate era, perhaps ever. She describes Bondi's rise to prominence in the Trump team, her fierce loyalty to the president, and criticism she's gotten from friends and foes of the administration. Ruth Marcus is a contributing writer for the New Yorker. Marcus spent 40 years at the Washington Post as a reporter, editor, and columnist. She left earlier this year, after disagreements with the paper's publisher, Will Lewis, and its owner, Jeff Bezos, over its editorial direction. Her latest New Yorker article is titled Pam Bondi's power play. Well, Ruth Marcus, welcome to fresh air.

Thank you for having me. You open this story with an anecdote about Pam Bondi walking into the Justice Department's National Security Division, unannounced, to remove portraits that were still hanging from the previous administration of the president, vice president, and the attorney general. Here she is on Fox News after that, describing that little visit to Laura Trump. How's it been moving into your new office? It's been interesting. So I went up on the seventh floor, which is the National Security Division. So the entire floor is a skiff, so no one can get in there.

So I was able to get the code, open the door, and I look on the wall and see President Biden, Kamala Harris, and Merrick Garland's painting still hanging. Oh, wow. Someone didn't tell them that there's a new president. I did. I personally took all three photos down. I'm walking down the hall with these pictures. Oh, I took them down. Oh, my gosh.

I'm walking down the hall. I put them in front of someone who said to me, oh, well, maintenance is really slow here. I said, well, it took me about 30 seconds to get them off the wall. Evens is not going to be slow anymore, I can promise you that. Yeah, and then he said, well, they don't like us touching anything. I said, well, I just did. Wow.

Well, good for you. That's what we've been dealing with. That's what's been going on in Washington, you see. For a long time. No longer. No longer. It ends here. It ends with here.

Sure does. And that is Pam Bondi with Laura Trump on Fox News. Ruth Marcus, you know, this could be seen as a kind of trivial thing. I mean, the Attorney General walking out with portraits and arguably not such an important thing for you to focus on. I mean, what does this tell us about Pam Bondi? Well, I focused on it for the reason that I think it's a time. tells us a lot about Pam Bondi, and it tells us even more about the mindset of the Trump

Justice Department and the people around her. As I understand it from the reporting that I've done, these photos were up there in this very obscure corner of the Justice Department, where they're not seen by anybody because the facility staff had not gotten around to removing them. And the lawyers who work in this division, it's one of the most important and high-profile divisions in the department. They deal with counter-intelligence, counter-espionage, all sorts of extremely highly classified things. They don't really focus on the artwork on the walls. So from their point of view, I don't think they probably gave a second thought to whose portraits were on the walls, they continue to do the same job they did day to day in the Biden administration and

in the Trump administration. But from the Trump administration's point of view, and you can hear that in the sound that you played from Attorney General Bondi, their understanding was that this was an example, you know, caught red-handed of the deep state seething with anger at Trump's victory and wanting to resist in any way possible. And I asked, the Attorney General would not talk to me for this piece, but I talked to her chief of staff, a guy named Chad Mazzle. And what he said to me was this, this is the same national security division that was responsible for a lot of the underpinnings of the prosecution against the president. The idea that it was, oh, sorry, mere oversight. I mean, come on, we're not stupid. And so I just thought,

that this story as kind of silly and trivial as it was showed how this Justice Department thinks about the department that it inherited. And she was really angry, as I understand it, the Attorney General when she saw this. And I said another Attorney General might have been a little chagrin that she was so upset and that it looked like she was focusing on something so trivial or picayune. But Pam Bondi bragged about it on Fox TV. So that's another important thing to understand about this Justice Department. And the interesting thing is that apart from, you know, personally walking out with the portraits and then talking about it on the media, she actually then demoted the acting head of the division, right?

For this terrible misdeed, and he was told that this was the reason for it, it's my understanding. This is a lawyer you need to understand who worked in the White House Counsel's Office. during the first Trump administration. He was a career lawyer. He was in line to, he was acting while they brought in their own head of the division, and he was supposed to be the principal deputy. But instead, he was punished over artwork. I want to talk in a little bit of detail about what's actually going on within the department. But first, I just want to focus a bit more on Bondi's public presence. I mean, you note that she displays a, what would you call it, a belligerence maybe, in dealing. with the media, even members of Congress and federal judges. Yeah, it's quite extraordinary. Having never met Pam Bondi, but watched her a lot and talked to a lot of people about her, I think from my understanding, she's a quite nice, friendly person, the kind of person who

talks to the cashier at the supermarket. But she has assumed, I think, is the right word to use, this person. of kind of bristling belligerence in very surprising and unusual places. We saw it first in her confirmation hearings where she really took on some of her democratic questioners. I saw it earlier this summer when I saw her testify about the department's budget. She was asked a perfectly reasonable and not accusatory question about the president's basically selling of access to people who invested in his

crypto coins and she just launched into Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon who dared to ask that question and talk to him in this very dismissive tone about how the department was doing its absolute best to help your liberal state, she said. But she doesn't just use that tone with Democrats. She has used that tone written and on television about federal judges. That is not normal. This is a sentence that I keep saying about the second Trump administration, but this is not

normal. The Attorney General of the United States does not talk about rogue federal judges. She doesn't file misconduct complaints against federal judges. She doesn't insist that they have to recuse themselves from case after case. So she has just decided, I think, that Donald Trump likes to see this counterpunching, as he calls it, and she is just going to punch and punch and punch. You're right that Bondi is responsible for the most convulsive transition of power at the Justice Department, at least since Watergate, maybe ever. Let's talk about some examples of changes in the department, which she has engineered. One of them, well, what's happened with the public integrity section, which is investigated corrupt politicians and all.

So on a substantive level, I don't think there's ever been as great a change in a justice department. And certainly when a Democratic administration takes over from a Republican administration or a Republican administration takes over from a Democratic administration, there is going to be a new sheriff in town and policies appropriately change. what we're watching here is something completely different. On the criminal side, the public integrity section, basically they have decided that prosecuting public corruption cases is not a priority. This is state and local and federal public corruption cases. They've stopped enforcing the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which tripped up some Trump administration officials during the first term. They've stopped prosecuting bribery cases from companies. So, but, both public corruption and private corruption off the list, really, for criminal prosecution on the list, dealing with illegal immigration. In some ways, the changes on the civil side of the Justice Department are even greater. I'll just talk for a second about the Civil Rights Division. Instead of enforcing the voting rights laws, instead of enforcing the police brutality laws,

they are going after alleged violations and excesses of DEI. On the civil side, they are going after doctors and hospitals that provide gender affirming surgery for trans kids. They're pursuing denaturalization proceedings. It's a substantively, it's a complete overhaul of what the Justice Department traditionally does. And we've also seen a cataclysmic of. upheaval in personnel, many, many employees simply gone.

You want to give us some meaningful examples? This is, and we mentioned this at the start with the demotion of this very senior National Security Division official. This is a Justice Department, and in fact, this is an administration that believes that its constitutional Article 2 power allows it to ignore the normal federal civil service protections and to fire lawyers and other employees for, as I was told by a department official, for any reason or no reason. So people have been fired because they worked for Jack Smith, the special counsel, who brought the two federal indictments against President Trump.

Chad Moselle, the Attorney General's Chief of Staff, said to me, well, obviously they prosecuted the president so they can't continue to work for him. That is not obvious at all to Justice Department veterans. People have been fired for reasons as trivial as failure to remove their preferred pronouns from their signature block. This is all ending up in litigation, and we'll find out whether this is, in fact, within their constitutional authority, or not. I don't think it is. The civil service laws are very clear that if you want to fire somebody, you have to go through the normal steps of process. But nothing like this has ever happened before in the history of a Justice Department. And one of the questions that I raise

in this piece is what comes next? Someday there's going to be a Democrat elected president and a Democratic nominated attorney general. Do we then just have this situation? of tit for tad and you fired our guys, so we'll fire yours, that just seems like a terrible way to behave. Although the sense that I get is that a lot of the people who've been dismissed weren't really anybody's guys, right? I mean, these are by and large professional staff who are committed to the work of the department. Yeah, thank you for making that point. None of these people should be seen as anybody's guys. The department has a leg, a very thin layer like most departments of political staff who turn in their resignations at the

change of an administration. They leave as is normal and new people take over, but the core of attorneys that traditionally remain from administration to administration are career lawyers. They are dedicated to defending the executive actions of President Biden, even if those executive actions are sometimes hard to defend. And they're dedicated to defending the executive actions of President Trump, even if those executive actions, and I'll just editorialize here, are often hard to defend. We were talking about some of the major moves that Pan Bondi has made within the Justice Department, to rid it of people that she thinks aren't in accordance with her agenda.

One of the things that we've read is that there is a weaponization working group to examine how the department has been used in previous administrations to punish opponents. Tell us about this. What's going on here? Well, the weaponization working group was really launched on day one of the new administration when President Trump issued an executive order that basically, directed the Justice Department to examine the alleged weaponization that had taken place at the Justice Department under the previous administration. And he came to the Justice

Department to give a speech and he talked about the scum that had run the department in the previous administration, including Jack Smith. So Pam Bondi, when she came in as Attorney General, immediately set up this weaponization working group. is now being headed by Ed Martin. Ed Martin, your listeners may recall, was the failed nominee to be the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, one of the most obviously important U.S. attorney's offices in the country. And he is now heading this weaponization working group, and he is doing quite a job there of at least launching the initial efforts to do precise from my point of view, what the Justice Department complaints happened in the previous

administration, which is the people who are complaining about weaponizing are, in fact, doing the weaponizing themselves. He has launched investigations of Letitia James, the New York Attorney General, who famously sued President Trump in civil court in New York for business fraud. He's launched investigations. These are both mortgage. fraud investigations of Adam Schiff, who famously tangled with President Trump during the first Trump term. Adam Schiff was then a congressman, now he's a senator from California. This is not done.

There's a very famous speech by President Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt's Attorney General Robert Jackson, where he talks about the role of the prosecutor. And he says, the role of the prosecutor is to go after the crime. It is not to go after the individual. But what we are seeing here, and its early stages, is precisely the opposite of Attorney General Jackson's admonition. They seem to be going after individuals because of who the individuals are and not because that what they did rises to the level of any crime, no less a federal crime. And I think the only word for this is scary. Yeah.

We should know that you can make a distinction between firing somebody who, in the course of their work at the Justice Department, engaged in cases that you found you didn't agree with, and then actually investigating and seeking criminal charges against them. And that's what's happening here in some cases. Pam Bondi declined to be interviewed for this story, but her chief of staff, Chad Mazzle, did talk to you. And on this subject, he said, I don't think you will be taken seriously if you don't acknowledge that prosecuting the former president. of the United States was the single greatest shift toward weaponization that the Justice Department could have undergone. And so any sort of notion that anything else she does is even comparable to that just can't be taken seriously. It's laughable. What's your reaction to that? This is the animating principle of the Trump-Bondy Justice Department that I think, as far as I can tell,

that Chad Mazzell, Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, the Deputy Attorney General, and many others in the administration, certainly the president, believe fervently and sincerely that there was this terrible weaponization of the department under President Biden and Attorney General Garland. But I think this conviction, and I do think it's a conviction on the part of Chad Mazzle and others, explains very much what is happening now. I think that the point that you made about the distinction between firing Justice Department employees and investigating others criminally is really important. We will see if any indictments really come out of this weaponization task force. I worry that they might. We will see if any actual convictions come out of this

weaponization task force, that is going to be kind of a high bar for the department to reach because obviously you need to have a crime, you need to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, you need a unanimous jury. But I think it's very important for people to understand that the mere fact of being investigated is so ruinous, both emotionally and financially, you need a lawyer. It's going to cost you thousands and thousands, not hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend yourself if you can't find a pro bono lawyer. It is hard in Washington these days to find law firms that are willing to represent prominent figures in the previous administration. Even if nothing actually is produced by the weaponization task force, the mere fact of being investigated is very, very serious and needs to be taken seriously.

We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Ruth Marcus. She is a contributing writer for The New Yorker. Her new article is titled Pam Bondi's Power Play. We recorded our conversation yesterday morning. We'll hear more after the short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is fresh air. This message comes from Wise, the app for using money around the globe. When you manage your money with Wise, you'll always get the mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Join millions. of customers and visit wise.com. T's and Cs apply. The novelizers podcast, where we turn classic films like The Matrix and Dirty Dancing into hilarious audiobooks narrated by guests like Rachel Dratch, Ira Glass, Samantha B, Will Forte, Wayne Brady, J.K. Simmons, and more. Listen to the novelizers podcast hosted by me, Dave Hill,

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all over the country about everything from political analysis to climate resilience, video games. We even talk about dumpster diving on this show. Check out here and now anytime, a daily podcast from NPR and WBUR. You're right about Pam Bondi's background, which is interesting. And when she grew up in Florida, her father was an education professor who was a city council member and the mayor of the city they lived in. Her father was a traditional Roosevelt Democrat. Pam Bondi herself got a law degree. at Stetson University in Gulfport, then became a local prosecutor. What was her reputation as a, you know, as a line prosecutor there in Florida? Well, her reputation was as a pretty good prosecutor.

She rose through the ranks in the Hillsborough County State Attorney's Office. She did some very serious homicide and other cases. She became the spokesman for the department. and that kind of launched her almost accidentally on a political career path because she became quite a fixture even as a working prosecutor, which was quite unusual, as a talking head on cable TV, eventually Fox TV. And though she didn't have any kind of political background,

and to the extent that she did have a political background, she had been a Democrat for most of her, life. She got tapped by a political consultant to run for state attorney general. And in a kind of outsider tea partyish year in 2010, she won that job against the state's lieutenant governor and another member of the state legislature and kind of senior state official. She was the outsider. Sean Hannity came to campaign for her, Sarah Palin. endorsed her, and we saw a different Pam Bondi than people had known her to be as a career prosecutor in Tampa.

Right. She ran in the Republican primary, even though kind of... Yes, she ran in the Republican primary. One there and then one in the general election. But it's interesting that once she was in the attorney general's office, she, as you tell the story, it was not a hard-edged ideologue, really, was she? she was a pretty well-regarded state attorney general she hired democrats to including one of the people who had run against her for attorney general to work in her office the work of state attorney generals is sort of bread and butter consumer protection and i trust other cases so on that she continued as a pretty normal republican attorney general at the same time her tenure as Attorney General coincided with a time when attorneys general across the country

were becoming much more political and politicized. And so she joined pretty enthusiastically various efforts to participate in national, much more kind of culture war issues. She was very involved in the state's litigation to defeat the Affordable Care Act, which was Obamacare, which was before the Supreme Court at that time. And she got involved in everything from defending the state's constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage. This was in the days before the Supreme Court decided that same-sex marriage was a constitutionally protected right to gun cases, to other things. So she was simultaneously. run-of-the-mill attorney general, and at times in this national effort, a pretty ruby-red one.

So she did both at once. There was one memorable episode in 2013. This is, you know, before Trump ran for president. And it was when the New York Attorney General had filed a fraud lawsuit against Trump University. That was the business Trump founded to offer seminars in real estate and financial management, which was allegedly misleading its students. Bondi was the Attorney General in the state where Trump resided and could have chosen to join the suit.

What happened here? Well, what happened in this case was that Bondi's office said that it was looking into whether to join this fraud lawsuit against Trump University. Shortly thereafter, Pam Bondi requested a solicited, a contribution, from Donald Trump. Donald Trump gave her a $25,000 contribution, pretty significant. He managed to give it from his charitable foundation, which was not permissible. So he ended up, many years later, having to return that and fix that problem.

The office decided not to participate in the New York lawsuit, basically saying there weren't that many complaints about Trump University. per se. And Bondi's defense, because this did not look like a very good set of facts for her office, the defense was that they didn't have adequate vetting procedures in place so that she had not realized she claimed that the office was considering this Trump-related prosecution or lawsuit at the same time she was soliciting money from him. The facts of this, suggested, I thought, more just sloppiness on the part of the Bondi office than they suggested malfeasance because the career lawyer who was deciding whether or not to join the suit

testified to an investigator that he had never discussed it with Bondi. So while it's really smelled, it was not clear that it was corrupt. Right, not necessarily a quid pro quo. Yes. She initially supported Jeb Bush for president, but then when his campaign didn't make it, she did endorse Donald Trump in 2016. She later worked on the legal team defending Trump in his first impeachment case. When he was elected the second time, his first choice for Attorney General was Matt Gates, the Florida congressman who had to withdraw due to a lack of congressional support and that investigation into his personal conduct. What did you learn from your reporting about how conservatives and MAGA faithful, how they regarded Pam Bondi as a choice? There was a large contingent of the MAGA faithful that were thrilled with the selection of Matt Gates.

And I spoke to a number of people who were very skeptical about Bondi's ability to step into the vacancy that was created by Gates's implosion. and to do what was necessary to turn the department around. So she came in with a lot of resistance to and skepticism about her capacity. And I think that may explain some of her belligerence and some of her extremism. I have to say when Matt Gates imploded and Pam Bondi was selected, I, like many other people who care about the Justice Department, was quite relieved. She was a state attorney general.

She was a career prosecutor. One could imagine that she would come into the Justice Department and say, you all, you know, do important jobs and please go ahead and do your jobs. Her performance there has been anything but that. And I think it can be explained by the MAGA skepticism towards her and by the fact that as with everybody who works for Donald Trump, Your tenure is only as good as your usefulness to Donald Trump,

and that can change as we have learned time after time in a nanosecond. We're going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Ruth Marcus. She is a contributing writer for The New Yorker. Her new article about Attorney General Pam Bondi is titled Pam Bondi's Power Play. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is fresh air.

Marley Matlin was the first deaf actor to win an Academy Award. She also helped pass a bill that requires captioning in movies and TV shows. So if you're one of the folks who uses captions, you know what to do. I see people with their laptops watching movies and with captions I want to say, are you enjoying captions, by the way? Marley Matlin from Coda, the West Wing, and more on Bolzai from Maximumfund.org and NPR. I'm Rachel Martin, host of Wildcard from NPR. I've spent years interviewing all kinds of people.

And I've realized there are ideas that we all think about, but don't talk about very much. So I made a shortcut, a deck of cards with questions that anyone can answer, questions that go deep into the experiences that shape us. Listen to the Wild Card podcast only from NPR. There's been a lot of criticism certainly from Democrats and people in Congress and legal scholars about Pam Bondi. But the real threat to her so far, it seems, have come really from the MAGA right. And this involves the administration's poor performance in releasing. information to confirm their conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein. You say that Pam Bondi botched

this matter from the start. How? She botched it by promising more than she could deliver. It started on February 21st, so she was confirmed on February 5th, so very shortly into her time as Attorney General. She went, of course, on Fox TV on February 21st, and she said there was going to be a lot information that was forthcoming plane logs and names and things like that and she was asked what about the client list that by the way there has been a theory that Jeffrey Epstein maintained this super secret list of clients that he helped procure young girls for this client list doesn't exist it I don't believe ever existed Pam Bondi was asked about the client list and she said quote it's on my desk right now this was a dumb thing to say and it's the kind of thing

that if you had a effective communication strategy you would have cleared up right away pam bondie let that prospect of this long sought but illusory client list hang out there for four plus months until finally in early June she said oh and I said it's on my desk I just meant there's a bunch of things on my desk including Martin Luther King files and JFK files and things like that so pay no attention to what you thought I promised you mega world forget it go away there's going to be nothing more to see here and that created the furor that we've been living with for the past month or so, as MAGA has said, we want to see it, we want to see it, we want to see it. The Justice Department's eventual response was, we're not going to give you anything else.

Then when there was this uproar and revolt from MAGA, they said, okay, we'll try to get your grand jury testimony. That didn't work. We'll interview Galane Maxwell. We'll see what happens about that. Now they're offering some files to the Congress. Jeffrey Epstein was going to be a problem even for a well-managed Justice Department because it is such an obsession in Maga World, but Pam Bondi's handling of it just made that persisting problem, I think, so much worse for her. Right. And one of the things she did was to release early on a binder of material about Epstein, which people who were begging for more information were quite disappointed in a lot of it was already public.

The interesting thing, I didn't realize until I was preparing to speak to you. She actually gathered like 15 or so conservative, you know, influencers and gave them these binders first and had a photo op out, which kind of only heightened their disappointment when the goods weren't really there. Again, not so well handled. I mean, it's an amazing story. she and cash patel the FBI director basically intervened in this White House event for influencers they didn't tell the White House that they were going to be distributing these binders these binders were not reviewed as they would be in the normal course of things by the White House counsel's office they distribute the binders they serve to aggravate the White House which hadn't known that this was

happening and they also even worse aggravate the influencers because no one likes to be played for a fool and the influencers are handed stuff that they know is not news and that was back in May and that was just the next stage of we are really mad so people like laura lager started attacking her as pam blondie and really going after her and i think it's only her pre-existing and quite close relationship with President Trump that has shielded Pam Bondi so far. A lot of the conservative critics have dropped their objection saying we trust the president to handle this properly. Has this largely blown over for Pam Bondi or is there big trouble ahead for her, do you think? I think that she is safe for now. But emphasis

on the fore now. The president who often accepts suggestions from Laura Lumer, the conservative activist, about who he should fire, resisted Lumer's importunings to fire, quote, unquote, Pam Blondie. He has made clear his support for the attorney general, but I think that retaining his support is going to require eventually coming up with some of what he wants. And what he wants is revenge and what he wants is revenge in the form of indictments and prosecutions. He said just the other day he was talking about the Russia-Russia hoax and he was at an event at the Kennedy Center.

Pam Bondi was there because Trump put her on the Kennedy Center board some time ago. And he said, and I'm looking at you, Pam. when I say Hillary Clinton should be investigated. So she is Attorney General for one reason only because Donald Trump wants her there. And if he doesn't get what he wants from her, that could easily change. You know, the list of people who Trump would regard as his enemies, people, his tormentors is long. I mean, it's Hillary Clinton, it's John Brennan, it's, you know, many, many others. Do you have any sense from your contacts in the Justice Department whether a lot of resources are now being devoted to these investigations?

Well, while we have the weaponization working group, we have the spectacle of the Deputy Attorney General spending two days of his time interviewing Galane Maxwell to see what can be extracted from her. This is not a normal thing for a deputy attorney. general to do. I think they are frantic, desperate to come up with a crime, any crime that they could charge the Jack Smiths of the world, the Hillary Clinton's of the world, the John Brennan's of the world with, I think that is going to be very hard to do. And I think as the challenges of that become clear, and some of the challenges, by the way, are very basic technical challenges like we have statutes of limitation, you know, under federal law. Much of the grudges that the president holds are outside the statute of limitations.

It's going to be difficult for them to bring indictments, no less secure convictions. But as that becomes clear, I think that the president is going to be increasingly infuriated. We're speaking with Ruth Marcus. She is a contributing writer for The New Yorker. Our new article is titled Pam Bondi's power play. We'll continue our conversation, and after this short break, this is fresh air. You know, one other thing that Pam Bondi has been involved in, of course, is the effort to federalize law enforcement in the District of Columbia. National Guard troops are there.

Other federal agencies are on the street. And there was this dramatic kind of comical moment last week where a Justice Department employee who disagreed with seeing all these federal agents on the street, taunted some, and then threw a wrapped sandwich at one of them, hit him in the chest, and then was eventually arrested. He's now been charged with felony assault. Do you know was Pam Bondi involved in that decision? I believe she was involved in that decision, and I do not believe in sandwich throwing, and perhaps it is felonious sandwich throwing, though that seems a little bit of an overreach. By the way, this was a Justice Department employee who also lost his job as a result. I think that you have to

look at the sandwich throwing in context. And the context of the sandwich throwing is the dismissal of prosecutions and the pardoning of so many people who were involved in so much more serious offenses against law enforcement officers on January 6th. And one thing that I think people should understand is that it's not simply the outrageous dismissal of these cases, not just people who breached the Capitol, but people who were involved in direct and harmful assaults on police officers. But there is a man working for the Justice Department now on the weaponization Task Force named Jared Wise. He was about to go to trial. Jury selection was supposed to start on January 20th when Donald Trump came into office and the case against him was dropped.

But this is a man who's a former FBI agent. He encouraged these assaults on D.C. police officers when people were knocked to the ground in front of him, he's on body camera footage yelling, yeah, I'm not going to use the word, F them, yeah, kill them. And that is a man who is now working for this Department of Justice, so it's a little hard to take their unhappiness about sandwich guy terribly seriously. Before I let you go, I want to talk about the transition in your career this year. Very few journalists spend 40 years at one institution. You were at the Washington Post for so long, really loved the place, and you were there when Bezos bought the paper, and his wealth meant that it had, you know, these resources to fund all this top-notch reporting.

Then there was his refusal to allow the Post to run its endorsement of Kamala Harris in the presidential race, stayed with them. Then Bezos contributed a million dollars to Trump's inauguration, showed up at the inauguration. And then he eventually decreed that the opinion section would focus on, quote, personal liberties and free markets. You had lived in the opinion section for a long time. You didn't leave right away. Tell us what made you decide you simply had to go. What made me decide that I had to go was that I wrote a column disagreeing with the new focus of the opinion section and the publisher of the paper. as far as I could tell for the first time in the history of the Washington Post, at least the modern

Washington Post, spiked the column because he didn't think it was proper. I don't know exactly what he thought because he never deigned to speak to me. I had written after the decision not to issue the endorsement. I had written a column disagreeing with that decision. Newspapers don't have to endorse presidents, but the timing of it was terrible. It looked terrible. The paper ran that column. I was very proud to work for a paper that was willing to tolerate dissent when I disagreed even more strongly with the decision to narrowcast our editorial outlook, and especially we have a very vibrant and wide ranging from left to right, or we did. op-ed section which i helped to supervise for many years and during the bezos era i wrote a column

disagreeing with that and when it became clear that that dissent was not to be tolerated i knew i could no longer say to my readers that i was free to write what i thought and if you're not free to write what you think then you can't be a very good columnist so that was the really sad and and i'm sad about it every day of my 40 years at the Washington Post. Yeah. Painful for you, isn't it? Totally painful, but I want to say two things about that. First of all, what federal employees are going through is so much worse than anything that I went through.

That's number one. And number two is the thing that I really care about is not who I get to write for because I'm so proud to be working for the New Yorker and to have the time and space to do longer pieces like this Bondi piece but I'm very sad that a opinion section that believed and I believe that Jeff Bezos believed this because I had many conversations with him about this where I thought and had every reason to know from his own mouth that he believed in expressing this diversity of views that we now don't trust our readers enough to apparently to allow them to hear dissenting opinions

And by the way, I myself am a very big believer in both free markets and individual liberties. So it's really a shame, not for me, but for the institution. You know, there aren't many institutions that have the resources to do serious investigative and enterprise reporting. The Washington Post is still one and does a lot of great reporting. Do you advise friends to still read it, subscribe to it? 100%. I understand why readers were so angry about the endorsement decision. and I understand why readers were angry about the tragic decision to kill a cartoon by our former cartoonist and Pulitzer Prize winner, Ann Telnais.

I understand why people were unhappy about the change in direction of the opinion section, but the paper is a great paper. It's doing great work, and I happily subscribe to the Washington Post, and I will forever. Well, Ruth Marcus, thank you for your report. Thanks for speaking with us. Thank you so much. Ruth Marcus is a contributing writer for The New Yorker. Her new article is titled Pam Bondi's Power Play. We recorded our conversation yesterday.

On tomorrow's show, Robert Reich joins us to talk about his new book, Coming Up Short, A Memoir of My America. The former Labor Secretary reflects on his personal journey through five decades of American politics, the moments that shaped his worldview, and the country he says he, still believes we can become. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.

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