Today, Explained - The DOJ's revenge agenda

Episode Date: November 26, 2025

A judge just threw out indictments against some of Trump's sworn enemies. It's part of a long year of chaos and confusion at the Justice Department. This episode was produced by Ariana Aspuru and Kelli Wessinger, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Adriene Lilly, and hosted by Noel King. Interim US attorney Lindsey Halligan at the Oval Office. Photo by Al Drago/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

President Trump is openly using the Department of Justice to get revenge on his enemies. The Justice Department is reviewing the investigation into alleged mortgage fraud by California Democratic Senator Adam Schiff. The Justice Department has now officially opened a criminal investigation into Lisa Cook. President Trump's former National Security Advisor John Bolton has just been indicted. It hasn't always gone smoothly. In late September, the president sent a message to Attorney General Pam Bondi on Truth Social that was probably supposed to be in the DMs. Pam, he wrote. Nothing is being done. What about Comey? Adam Schifty Schiff? Letitia? They're all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done. The DOJ indicted Comey and Letitia within weeks. Then on Monday,

a judge throughout those two indictments, prompting a surprisingly weak protest from Trump. So let's see what happens over the next week. Coming up on today, explain the DOJ's revenge agenda and the lawyers who are saying no to it. Megan Rapino here. This week on a Touchmore, we are live from San Jose talking to NWSL legends, Tobin Heath and Kristen Press, about their incredible careers, obviously, the rise of the NWSL, and what's next after retirement? Check out the latest episode of A Touchmore, wherever you get your podcast, and on YouTube. Right now, the internet feels like it's changing, maybe faster than it ever.

ever has. We have huge companies going through these big lawsuits about whether they get to keep being huge companies. We have companies big and small making giant bets on AI. And we have an internet that just feels different to be on as a regular person. This week on the Vergecast, we're talking about all of the ways that the internet has changed and what we as users and people in the world might be able to do about it. That's the Vergecast wherever you get podcasts. They looked at Today Explained in there and did today explained. And they did today explained. there. We have no idea. Emily Bazelon is a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine. Emily writes a lot about the long arm of the law. All right, Emily, so as I understand it, the dismissal of

these cases had to do with a woman named Lindsay Halligan. Who is Lindsay Halligan? Lindsay Halligan is supposed to be the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. But a judge found that she was improperly appointed to that position. The reason she was chosen for it is that she has been a personal lawyer for Donald Trump, and her main area of practice is insurance law, not criminal justice. The government seems to be out of control. It's plagued with manipulation, corruption, greed, deceit, and fraud. Did she have any qualifications for the job? She didn't have any experience as a prosecutor. No. How did she end up with that job? Well, President Trump cares deeply about

indicting James Comey and Letitia James and other people he perceives as political enemies. Truth Social We can't delay any longer. It's killing our reputation and credibility. They impeach me twice and indicted me five times

over nothing. Justice must be served now. The Eastern District of Virginia was investigating these people. and the person who was the acting U.S. attorney in this district, whose name is Eric Siebert, Normie, conservative, appointee, lots of prosecutorial experience. Based on the investigations that the people in his office were doing, Eric Seabert said he did not think there was enough evidence to prosecute James or Comey. And at that point, he was forced to resign and Lindsay Halligan

was brought in as his replacement very much to bring these charges against these specific targets of President Trump. But because of the unusual way that Halligan came in after the career prosecutors had decided there wasn't enough evidence to bring these charges, she basically had to do it herself. No one in the office was willing to go to court with her. What happened with James Comey? What was the story that led to his indictment? So Comey testified before the Senate years ago about the into potential Russian influence in the 2016 campaign. I want to thank Mr. Comey, James Comey, the former director of the FBI, for appearing today before the committee.

And at that point, Senator Ted Cruz asked him whether he had authorized any leaks to the press about this investigation. On May 3rd, 2017, in this committee, Chairman Grassley asked you point blank, quote, have you ever been an anonymous source in news reports about matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation. You responded under oath, quote, never. Comey said no. I just can only speak to my testimony.

I stand by what the testimony you summarized that I gave in May of 2017. And so the substance of the charges against Comey are that he made a false statement to Congress when he answered the questions from Senator Cruz. And what we've learned kind of belatedly is that this indictment is about the idea that Comey authorized a lawyer named Daniel Richmond,

who is a friend of his to leak information about the Russian investigation to the press. What did James Comey say when he was indicted? James Comey said that he was not guilty, that he had not authorized a leak, and that these were false charges that were being brought because President Trump is seeking retribution against him. My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump. But we couldn't imagine ourselves living in. any other way. We will not live on our knees. My heart is broken for the Department of Justice, but I have great confidence in the federal judicial system, and I'm innocent. Okay. And what was the

deal with New York's Attorney General Letitia James? What was she alleged to have done? Latisha James has been charged with mortgage fraud. The underlying facts here is that she bought a second property that for the most part her grandniece has been living in without paying rent. So the charges nonetheless are that James was making money from this property by claiming that it was her own primary residence, even though her niece was living there. And, you know, the background here is that Letitia James, as Attorney General of New York, prosecuted Donald Trump and the Trump Organization civilly for a big giant case of mortgage fraud. The complaint demonstrates that Donald Trump falsely inflated his net worth by business. billions of dollars to unjustly enrich himself and to cheat this system, thereby cheating all of us. We're coming on the air with a blockbuster ruling in one of the cases against former President

Donald Trump, a New York judge just ruled in the civil fraud case that Trump is liable of falsifying business records, conspiracy, and issuing false financial statements, among other claims. Today, justice has been served. Donald Trump and the other defendants were ordered to pay $463.9 million. Letitia James says that she did not commit mortgage fraud and that President Trump is going after her as an act of retribution. You know what you see in both of these cases is that Trump is very much explicitly on the record about wanting revenge against James and Comey and directing his Justice Department to go after them. So that motivation is very much explicitly present. That's separate from whether there's any criminal wrongdoing here.

But both James and Comey say that they have committed no crimes. All right. So Lindsay Halligan is brought in to handle these two cases. They're obviously very important to President Trump. And then they end up this week being thrown out. In twin rulings today, Judge Cameron McGowan Curry found the appointment of Lindsay Halligan as interim U.S. attorney was invalid. unlawful. A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration exceeded its authority

in appointing former Trump aide Lindsay Halligan as interim U.S. attorney. Emily, is this just a case where Lindsay Halligan's appointment was not done right, but Lindsay Halligan's work was exceptional? There's a few different things going on here. So there's this question of whether she even had the authority to be in the job she says that she has. And that's what derailed the case this week. Separately from that, entirely separately, when she presented by herself to the grand jury, she made a number of big mistakes. It's amateur hour. I mean, that phrase is not, that's not a legal term of art, but that's exactly what this has been from the very beginning. At one point, she entered the wrong courtroom. Mistakes can happen. When she found the right one,

she stood on the wrong side of the judge and then appeared confused about the paperwork she had just signed. And those mistakes were the subject of another hearing before a judge. different judge. But because now the case has been dismissed based on this idea that she was improperly appointed, that other whole set of problems with the case is just like sitting there in the background. And it will come back if an appeals court overrules this judge is ruling about Halligan's appointment or presumably if the government just starts over again and tries to refile the charges. But yes, those separate errors are sitting there in a pretty embarrassing way for Lindsay Halligan. Might the government decide to start over again, or do you think James Comey and Letitia

James are off the hook? I can't imagine they're off the hook because Trump cares about this so much, and the Justice Department, his Justice Department, would lose a ton of face if they just fold. So there's a couple things that could happen. They could appeal this kind of dry ruling about the appointment's powers and see if the appeals courts answer it differently than the judge who's ruled so far. Option two is that, as you were saying, they could just start over again, refile these charges against James and Comey. Presumably, they could bring in career prosecutors this time. There's a complication, though, for James Comey, which is that part of why this case was done in such a slipshod way was that Palagan was in a big rush. The statute of limitations

on the supposed crimes, this false statement to Congress, that Comey is alleged to have committed, it was about to run out. There were like five days left. So if they try to refile the charges now, they're going to face this question of whether they can refile them. Komi's lawyers are going to say, wait a second, if you have a defective indictment, that cannot be a reason to stop the statute of limitations from running out. And this case is over. This is all rather embarrassing for everybody involved here, except perhaps the two people who were indicted. What happens to Lindsey Halligan now that it's out that she may have improperly been in the job and also didn't do a very good job? I mean, maybe nothing, honestly. Trump and his Justice Department

are not such big proponents of admitting mistakes, pulling back, all that kind of sober way of running the government. It just doesn't seem to really apply at the moment. So it could be that Halligan will just remain in her job. They'll try to find some way to clean up this mess. Blame it on the courts. That's like a favorite card that President Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi like to play. So, you know, that is entirely plausible in this scenario. Emily Bazelon of the New York Times magazine. When we come back, we're going to talk about this blockbuster investigation that Emily co-wrote about DOJ lawyers who have gotten fired, who have quit, who are planning revenge that's coming up next.

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Mr. President, do you have any reaction to today? It's late being named the best news show. Wow. I didn't know that. I just, you're telling me now for the first time. We're back with Emily Bazelon. All right. So, Emily, you recently wrote a big and very compelling piece for the New York Times magazine.

You talked to more than 60 attorneys who have recently left or been fired from the Justice Department. Let's go back to the beginning. It is day one of the new Trump administration, and what is going on at the DOJ? On the very first day, Trump, first of all, makes it clear that lawyers who are personally loyal to him are going to be in charge of the Justice Department. The vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end. That starts with the Attorney General Pam Bondi, but there are other people he puts in place as well. And then the other thing he did, which was a huge deal on that day, was that he pardoned all of the people accused of rioting and violence on January 6th in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. So this is January 6th. These are the hostages. Approximately 1,500 for a pardon. Yes.

Full pardon. If I'm a DOJ attorney and I'm told that the insurrectionists are being pardoned, why is that a big deal for me? This was the biggest investigation in the history of the Justice Department. This effort to upend a legitimate election transferring power from one administration to another cuts at the fundamental of American democracy. We have to get this right. They had spent thousands of hours as prosecutors bringing these cases to court. And they felt really strongly that this was a really important signal to send that the U.S. would not tolerate the kind of violence and disruption that, you know, nearly or could have derailed

the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election. So prosecutors had devoted themselves to these cases. I should say so did judges had spent many, many hours working on them as well in Washington. It was just a huge blow to the people who worked on all of these matters to be told, actually, you were wrong. These people were kind of victims of the system. That's what Trump was saying by pardoning and commuting their sentences. All right. Then in February, President Trump's pick for Attorney General Pam Bondi is confirmed. Tell us about her and tell us what the so-called Pam Bondi mixtape is.

Pam Bondi is a former state's attorney from Florida. She had prosecutorial experience. She was also a personal lawyer for Donald Trump. And this kind of idea of a mixtape, as one of the lawyers put it to us, was that She issued a flurry of 14 memos on her first day. She paused the enforcement of certain corruption laws that prosecutors, you know, traditionally work hard on and make a priority. She talked about zealous advocacy, the idea of the lawyer's commitment as being a commitment

that was to the president as opposed to simply the Constitution. That threw a lot of lawyers. And there were other kinds of moves like that. It just made it clear that all of the priorities of the Justice Department were shifting. What were they shifting to? They were shifting to President Trump's agenda. So an agenda that was against any kind of diversity efforts, diversity and inclusion, an agenda that was toward immigration work and away from traditional aspects of the Justice Department's purview like prosecuting public corruption. I want to ask you about some of the specific cases.

that these attorneys talked to you about when you interviewed them. There was a lawyer who said they lost their job in April because of Mel Gibson. What happened there? This is the pardon attorney, Elizabeth Oyer, who my colleague, Rachel Pozer, interviewed. And Oyer's story is that she was reassigned to this unit that was looking into pardons of people who'd been accused of gun crimes. And the idea came up of pardoning Mel Gibson, who had a misdemeanor conviction for domestic violence. And it's been strongly suggested to her, she says, that Gibson had a personal relationship with the president. The only information I was given about Mr. Gibson was a letter from his attorney, which stated that Mr. Gibson is a friend of the president.

He's somebody who has a decorated career in Hollywood, has made a lot of high-profile movies. And because of that, his rights of possessive firearms should be restored. She was basically given the message that she needed to find some way to pardon Mel Gibson. But, you know, he, because of his history of domestic violence, she was very reluctant to do that. My ethical duty as a Department of Justice employee and now a former one is to the laws of the United States and the people that I was entrusted to serve. It is not to the bullies who are currently running the Department of Justice. So she said no to the idea of a pardon. and she was immediately fired.

Wow. All right, moving forward in time, let's talk about what you learned was happening in the Civil Rights Division. There's one story you tell about something called the firefighter cases. What happened there?

Yeah, we interviewed, my colleague Rachel, interviewed a lawyer named Brian McIntyre in the Civil Rights Division. He had been working on a case in Georgia where black people and white people were applying for positions in the fire department at about the same rate, but 90% of the hires were white people.

And so Brian McIntyre was wondering, like, why is this? And when they asked the fire department, the answer was that, well, black people tended to have more student loan debt. And so then the fire department said, okay, well, our problem with that is if you have a firefighter and he's deeply in debt and fighting a fire, he might steal grandma's pearls. Yeah, so this was apparently the reason for hiring fewer black firefighters and the Justice Department, the Civil Rights Division, sued. In February, they got a note saying that the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, wanted to withdraw the case. And they went further in a way that was really distressing to the lawyers by asking for additional language in dismissing the case that would say that it was all about reverse discrimination.

In other words, that the real victims here were white people. And so, you know, these lawyers in the Civil Rights Division, they really wrestled with whether they could sign this order because they didn't think it was true. And in the end, they did not sign it. As the year progresses, how does the Trump administration, how does the president start divvying up resources at the DOJ? What do we see him prioritizing? Well, there's a really important order that happens where about a third of the manpower and resources of the FBI, of law enforcement agents is supposed to start going to immigration work. So, you know, prosecutors told us that they saw these agents being pulled off of cases involving white color crime or national security, counterterrorism, child exploitation.

Those are the kinds of big cases that just take a lot of labor. And so if you have your FBI agents out on the street picking up people for immigration detention, then they're not going to be able to do these more law. longer-term cases that in the view of the prosecutors are very important for keeping Americans safe. All right. So moving forward to late September, Donald Trump, it is reported, has demanded that the DOJ pay him $230 million for investigations into him that happened during the Biden administration. Yeah, they probably owe a lot of money. But if I get money from our country, I'll do something nice with it, like give it to charity or give it to the White House. restore the White House. How does that play out within his Department of Justice?

Well, this is a really unprecedented demand. And also remember that the people who are going to decide whether Trump gets this big payout are his appointees, his former lawyers in the Justice Department, right? Pam Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche. And so from the point of view of the Justice Department lawyers, we interviewed, this just seemed comically corrupt to them. They just really couldn't imagine how the president could think this was an appropriate use of federal funds. One of your sources told you it would take a lot of restraint not to retaliate in the next administration. This person said they have a list in their head of career people who are helping the administration. And if we get out of this, some of them I'm going to

hold to account. Did you come away from this reporting concerned that there is a cycle of retribution here that may be becoming entrenched? I think it's too soon to say there's going to be a lot of temptation to move in that direction, right? Because some people are going to feel like they're surrounded by people who they watched do things that were unethical or traitorous to the colleagues around them. It's hard to let all of that go. I think there are different ways, though, that that can be addressed, right? I mean, there are employment repercussions, like questions of whether everyone gets to stay in the job. And then there's the much more serious question of whether they're going to be, you know, criminal investigations. That's the kind of tit for retaliation that I think could really send the justice system into a tailspin.

Another of your sources tells you that the average American does not really care what is happening at the Justice Department because we think it doesn't affect us. Is there an argument that this does in fact affect us, that we really should care about what's going on here? Yeah, I think there is. The rule of law, the idea of the stability of law is vital to American prosperity and social well-being, right? I mean, stability is honestly the most important thing we get from law. And when you live in a country where the president can turn the huge might of federal law enforcement against anyone he wants, then you're kind of betting it's not going to be you. But the odds are not the same as they were before when this kind of retribution was just off the table. And since Watergate, we have lived in a country where there was a very deliberate, carefully erected separation between the White House and its political influence and investigations and criminal prosecutions from the Justice Department. Once that is gone, eventually you see that play out in all kinds of ways in Americans' lives. Even if it starts by seeming it's just about a few people like James Comey and Letitia James.

She's Emily Bazelon of the New York Times magazine. Kelly Wessinger and Ariana Espudu produced today's show. Jolie Meyers edited. Patrick Boyd and the great Adrian Lilly engineered and Laura Bullard is our senior researcher. Do know we today explained are thankful for you, but our family said we must come home for Thanksgiving, so we're going to take two days off. We'll be back with new episodes on Monday. Peter Ballin-on-Rosen is cooking something up for.

for later in the week about folks who fall in love with AI. Happy Thanksgiving.