The NPR Politics Podcast - How President Trump Is Reshaping The Justice Department

Episode Date: May 6, 2025

In her Senate confirmation hearing earlier this year, Attorney General Pam Bondi promised that the "weaponization" of the Justice Department would stop. Now, over 100 days into Trump's second term, critics worry that the Trump administration is doing just that. This episode: political correspondent Susan Davis, senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, and justice correspondent Ryan Lucas.The podcast is produced by Bria Suggs & Kelli Wessinger and edited by Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from Yarle and Pamela Mone, thanking the people who make public radio great every day and also those who listen. Hi, I'm Maya. And I'm Clara. And we're on our way to Santa Fe, New Mexico. This podcast was recorded at 12 19 p.m. on Tuesday, May 6th. Things may have changed by the time you hear them. But hopefully we'll still be enjoying some delicious food in Santa Fe. Okay, here's the show. ["The New York Times"]

That was lovely, but I'm like, are two 10-year-olds on a road trip alone together? They sounded quite young to me. It sounds to me like they were forced to listen to the NPR Politics podcast long enough on that road trip that then they were like, you guys should do a timestamp. Santa Fe is a lovely town. I don't know if either of you have been, but it's beautiful.

I've been to Santa Fe. It's lovely. Yes, it is lovely. Hey there. It's the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Tamara Keith.

I cover the White House. And I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. And today, how President Trump is reshaping the Justice Department and what it might mean for the rule of law. Ryan, Attorney General Pam Bondi pledged at her confirmation hearing that she would end what Donald Trump has called the quote, weaponization of the Justice Department. How has that played out in real terms?

So in Bondi's own telling and certainly in the view of Trump supporters, she has taken steps to end the purported weaponization of the justice department. They point to, for example, cases that they've dropped against anti-abortion protesters that were brought under the Biden administration. And of course, one of the reasons that Bondi and Trump feel so strongly that the department was weaponized is because of the

prosecutions of Trump himself, which of course are no longer ongoing, but critics, including a department veterans, say that despite all of Bondi's talk of ending the weaponization of the Justice Department, what in fact is going on is she is weaponizing it herself. And to give you an example of where some of this criticism is coming from,

I spoke to the former pardon attorney of the Justice Department, a woman by the name of Liz Oyer. The attorney general has made it clear that directions are coming from the very top, from the president, and she is there to do his bidding. That means pursuing enemies of the president. That means doing favors for friends of the president. The Department of Justice is essentially whatever the president wants it to be right now.

Ryan, I also think one of the most high profile actions of this Justice Department was essentially ordering the case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams to basically just be thrown out. That's right. This is the corruption case against Adams last year. And in the direction that was given to prosecutors in New York to drop that case, the then Deputy Acting Deputy Attorney General basically said, this isn't based on the evidence in this case or the facts in this case.

We've come to a decision that this needs to be made. And there was a suggestion that it got in the way of Eric Adams helping out this administration with its immigration enforcement. And so we saw mass resignations from prosecutors in New York. We saw the Justice Department leadership push this case on the public integrity section in Washington. We saw mass resignations there because people thought that this is not the proper grounds for dismissing a case.

It isn't based on the facts and the law, it's based on politics. And you know this, Ryan, but I think that one of the perceptions sometimes of these departments or lawyers is that they are political actors, but so much, if not nearly all, the career force of the Justice Department are nonpartisan career officials

who generally just had expertise in the area of law that they were a part of. That's right. And this is something I spoke to a former senior justice department official from Trump's first administration. And what this individual told me was that the current leadership came in viewing themselves as

in a hostile environment. Yeah. And they essentially went to war with the career folks. And we've seen that with firings, reassignments, this sort of hostile attitude towards the career staff that, as Euler told me, has expertise in all these various different aspects of law.

And this administration, I've been told by multiple people, is just not engaging with them. And it appears, and this is what the former official told me as well, is that basically the directions appear to be coming from the White House, and then they're being pushed down. And Ryan, to be clear, this is happening at the

State Department. It is happening at the Department of Energy or the Department of Education. It's happening all over the government. The idea of sort of a hostile takeover where career officials, career civil servants are looked upon with suspicion by Trump and his allies. The president was asked directly about his involvement in the DOJ in an interview just this past weekend on Meet the Press. Last month you directed your attorney general,

Pam Bondi, to review two people who you perceive to be your political adversaries. And yet you told me in December that you would not direct the Justice Department to investigate your political foes. What changed? Well, no, I just look at people and I'm not directing anybody. They looked at these two people. They might have known it or they might have heard it from two years ago. Tam, what do you make of that? It's pretty hard to put an arm's length between yourself and an executive order that you literally signed.

And he did sign an executive order urging the Justice Department to look at two people, Chris Krebs, who was in the first Trump administration and said that the 2020 election was not stolen, and also Miles Taylor, who was known as anonymous and wrote a book about his experience in the Trump administration. I mean, these are people who President Trump is very clearly asking Attorney General Pam Bondi to look into. And I think another thing that's just worth noting here is also in that interview, President Trump talked about the Justice Department, talked about Pam Bondi essentially as his lawyers.

I will also note on this line that he had about not directing anybody that when Pam Bondi introduced Trump for his speech in the great hall of the Justice Department earlier this year, this is what she said. And we all work for the greatest president in the history of our country. We are so proud to work at the directive of Donald Trump. So we have Trump himself talking about directing people and we have the attorney general herself saying that we work at the direction of Donald Trump. Certainly not subtle.

Ryan, there's other details in your reporting that I want to get to before we take a break, but there are some examples that are showing how much the justice department has changed or things that have happened in big and small ways. I think of one of the smaller things, but notable to me, Mel Gibson, what happened there? Right.

So the, the attorney general basically directed the, the pardon attorney's office to start looking at, um, restoring gun rights to people who had lost them because of criminal convictions. One of these individuals is Mel Gibson, who is a very prominent supporter of Donald Trump, Mel Gibson from lethal weapon among other films. And what the pardon attorney, what Liz Oyer is Mel Gibson, who is a very prominent supporter of Donald Trump, Mel Gibson from Lethal Weapon, among other films.

And what the pardon attorney, what Liz Hoyer told me is that she had concerns about restoring Gibson's gun rights because he had a domestic violence conviction. And there's evidence that people who have domestic violence convictions can return to violence. And so this was a public safety issue for her. And so she recommended that Gibson not have

his gun rights restored. Hours later, she was fired. She was not told exactly why, but the timing here. And Mel Gibson's gun rights were restored. Right. And for her, this is an example of one, what we talked about earlier about the political leadership of the justice department, not listening to career staff and the advice that they give. And then the second one is it points to bigger

concerns about what is driving decision-making at the Justice Department. And in her view, that's it's politics. In one of the bigger ways, there's also been a ton of disruption in the civil rights division, which is one of the crown jewels of the Justice Department. What has happened there?

One, there's been a mass exodus of attorneys from the division, people leaving of their own accord, people taking the fork in the road. And then you also have people being reassigned, kind of pushed out to other things. One official who I spoke to describe this to me as, as complete insanity said that they're essentially the, the new administration is taking an ax to the

civil rights division and said, um, that it's unrecognizable what's happening and who knows what is going to be left of it. Also, it's important to say that, look, there are frequently shifts in priorities from administration to administration. We saw that from Obama to Trump won in terms of what their focus is going to be. And that's normal. That is not what is going on now. I am told this is a complete upending of the traditional role of the civil rights division. And it's been described to me as essentially abandoning the traditional role, the historic mission, which would be protecting the

vulnerable, the marginalized, particularly the rights of minorities. We're talking about voting rights, civil rights, constitutional policing, housing, education, all those things that's out I'm told, and the focus now is primarily on enforcing Trump's executive orders on anti-Semitism, housing, education, all those things, that's out, I'm told. And the focus now is primarily on enforcing Trump's executive orders on anti-Semitism, gender, so anti-trans stuff. This is a massive change and it's going to have an impact for a long time to come.

All right. Let's take a quick break and we'll be right back. Support for NPR and the following message come from Yarle and Pamela Mohn, thanking the people who make public radio great every day and also those who listen. And we're back. And Tim, as you noted, Trump taking greater control of the Justice Department certainly falls in line with his more expansive view of the executive branch. The executive branch should be more responsive to the whims of the executive. But we should also note that these guardrails at the Justice Department were specifically put in place to restrain the executive. Yes, and this all goes back to the Nixon era, which I feel like I'm a broken record on because many of the norms, laws, and other guardrails that President Trump is blowing past in this second term were put into place after the Nixon administration, after Nixon resigned

because of his weaponization of the government against his political enemies. And although there are exceptions here, attorneys general in recent times have done what they can to make it clear that they are not working at the direction of the president of the United States. They have taken great pains. And in fact, Merrick Garland, the attorney general under President Biden, it was widely reported that President Biden was not happy with Merrick Garland and the fact that the investigations into his son, Hunter Biden, continued the way they did. But that desire to maintain separation

is just completely gone. I mean, multiple times now, Pam Bondi has done cable news TV hits from the lawn of the White House, which I just don't know that you would have seen other AGs doing. I'd also note that Donald Trump firing the inspectors general across the government is also one of those, um, offices that were also created by Congress as a response to Watergate.

So it's not just at the justice department where he's sort of trying to unshackle the restraints that have been put on the presidency. I'll just toss something in here because I think it's important to note that the justice department is kind of unique in the sense that yes, it's a part of an administration and they are entitled to help the president with his policy agenda on many things. But when it comes to prosecutions in particular, that's where there definitely needs to be an arms length. That's been the norm so that you don't have a president directing investigations against perceived political enemies, using the vast power

of the Justice Department to punish people who he or she does not like. Although Ryan, that just reminds me of the related, but separate from the DOJ, how involved the president has been in personally targeting private law firms and trying to play a hand in how they operate. Well, this has been a big thing that's really cut at the foundations of kind of the rule of law in this country and it's Trump's use of executive orders. This is what you're talking

about, use of executive orders to go after these private law firms, imposing all sorts of punitive measures against them. And in essence for representing people or causes that the president doesn't like, or for employing attorneys at one point who he didn't like, who he has political beef with. So we have seen some law firms challenge these executive orders in court. We've seen some law firms cut deals with the president.

We had actually a development just at the end of last week where a court permanently blocked Trump's executive order against the law firm, Perkins Couey, ruling that it was unconstitutional. Really a very strongly worded order condemning the president's use of basically the powers of the White House to go after a private law firm for

doing what law firms are supposed to do that zealously advocate on behalf of their clients. Um, and warning that this, this really is something that if these things stay in place, um, could undermine the whole judicial system and rule of law in this country. Well, and you know, a fundamental part of democracy is believing in the rule of law,

right? Because if you don't believe in the rule of law, if you don't believe that the justice system is going to be fair, then why will regular people follow the law? I mean, Ryan, this to me is one of those podcasts where we talk about something that is very, very serious. And it's almost like our words cannot do justice, pun intended, to how fundamental and transformational this administration could be to the question of the rule of law. They could. And, and where this is going to ultimately land,

it's, this has been what, 105, 106 days? It's a long way to go. We just, we, we just don't know, but a lot of people who I talked to and we're talking attorneys at big law firms, attorneys at small civil rights outfits, um, inside and outside the justice department, constitutional scholars are watching all of this with a lot of concern. Um, we've seen, uh, attacks directed at the

federal judiciary coming from the president and his supporters calls for impeachment of federal watching all of this with a lot of concern. We've seen attacks directed at the federal judiciary coming from the president and his supporters, calls for impeachment of federal judges who rule against them. We've seen pushback from the judiciary. We've seen law firms, as we just talked about, pushing back, but where ultimately we're going to land on this spectrum.

I think we just, we just don't know yet, but there's certainly a lot of concern from people I'm talking to. In the words of Marlai, it's in a rolling constitutional confrontation for the next four years. All right, we're going to leave it there for today. I'm Susan Davis.

I cover politics. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. And thanks for listening to the NPR and the following message come from Yarle and Pamela Mohn, thanking the people who make public radio great every day and also those who listen.