‘Department of Revenge’: Bondi accused of turning office into weapon for Trump as troops land in Chicago

Washington: United States Attorney General Pam Bondi has clashed with Democratic senators and deflected questions about her actions at a fiery congressional hearing, amid accusations she is turning the Department of Justice into a weapon to seek vengeance against President Donald Trump’s political opponents.

Democrats sought to use the hearing, which took place just 11 days after the indictment of former FBI director James Comey, to warn of what they view as the politicisation of a department that has long prided itself on remaining independent of the White House.

It took place as Texas National Guard troops gathered in Chicago, Illinois, ahead of a deployment to the city on Trump’s orders. Illinois and Chicago are both fighting the move, which they say is “unlawful and dangerous”, but which Trump says is needed to protect federal immigration enforcement efforts and crack down on crime in the Windy City.

During a grilling that lasted more than four hours on Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT), Bondi told Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the committee, that FBI director Kash Patel and her own deputy, Todd Blanche, were also on their way to Chicago to “keep your state safe”.

Durbin and his Democrat colleagues countered that Bondi was destroying the credibility of the Department of Justice and eroding its longstanding independence from the White House, as the president publicly calls for the prosecution of his political foes.

“What has taken place since January 20th, 2025, would make even president Nixon recoil,” Durbin said, referencing the former president who resigned to avoid being impeached in connection with the Watergate scandal.

“This is your legacy, Attorney General Bondi. In eight short months, you fundamentally transformed the Justice Department and left an enormous stain in American history. It will take decades to recover.”

Democrat senator for Hawaii Mazie Hirono said the Department of Justice had become “the Department of Revenge and Corruption” under Bondi, seeking “to favour the president’s friends and instill fear in his alleged enemies”.

Bondi flatly refused to answer time and again as Democrats pressed her on politically charged investigations, the firings of career prosecutors and other matters, and opted to respond to Democrats’ attacks by echoing conservative claims that President Joe Biden’s Justice Department – which brought two criminal cases against Trump – was the one that had been weaponised.

“They were playing politics with law enforcement powers and will go down as a historic betrayal of public trust,” Bondi said of the Biden Justice Department. “This is the kind of conduct that shatters the American people’s faith in our law enforcement system. We will work to earn that back every single day.”

The hearing split early along deeply partisan lines, with Republicans repeatedly leaping to Bondi’s defence to highlight the criminal cases against the president that they say show the institution she inherited was deeply politicised. They pointed to revelations from a day earlier that the FBI had analysed phone records of several Republican lawmakers as part of an investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Biden, a Democrat.

“This is an outrage, an unconstitutional breach and ought to be immediately addressed by you and Director Patel,” Senator Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the committee, told Bondi.

The hearing marked Bondi’s first before the panel since her confirmation hearing last January, when she pledged to not play politics with the Justice Department – a promise Democrats pounced on as they pressed the attorney general on whether she can withstand political pressure from the White House.

Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, reminded Bondi of that commitment and asked her if she thought she had upheld it. Bondi replied that she believed she absolutely had.

“I pledged that I would end the weaponisation also of the Justice Department and that America would once again have a one-tier system of justice for all,” Bondi said. “And that is what we are doing.”

She refused repeatedly to discuss a bribery investigation into Trump border czar Tom Homan that was shuttered under the Trump administration, and declined to say whether she had talked to the president about the case against Comey, who was charged last month with lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee when he said he had not authorised anyone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about a particular investigation.

His indictment came just days after Trump appeared to publicly implore Bondi on social media to take that action against Comey and other perceived political enemies.

Comey is set to make his first court appearance on Wednesday in the case, which was brought despite career prosecutors’ reservations about the strength of evidence, after the Trump administration raced install a new prosecutor to secure the charges following the resignation under pressure of the experienced leader of that office.

The Justice Department under Bondi has opened criminal investigations into other vocal critics of the president, including Schiff on accusations of mortgage fraud, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor and current mayoral candidate. They have all denied wrongdoing, as has Comey, and have slammed the investigations as politically motivated.

AP, Bloomberg

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