Ruth Marcus writes:

Other Attorneys General have shared close—to some, disconcertingly close—relationships with the Presidents who appointed them. Robert F. Kennedy was his brother’s modestly qualified A.G. and consigliere at the age of thirty-five. Eric Holder once described himself as Barack Obama’s “wingman” and the President as “my boy.” But, even on a team of Trump sycophants, Bondi stands out for her fawning devotion. At an early Cabinet Room praise session, Bondi turned to Trump and said, “President, your first one hundred days has far exceeded that of any other Presidency in this country, ever, ever.” She proceeded to make the fantastical claim that the seizure of twenty-two million fentanyl pills during that period “saved—are you ready for this, media?—two hundred and fifty-eight million lives.” (The entire U.S. population is less than three hundred and fifty million; the number of fentanyl deaths each year is less than seventy-four thousand.) Bondi’s obedience to the President includes matters as insignificant as ending the department’s purchase of paper straws. A Trump executive order recognized that paper straws were “nonfunctional, more expensive, and potentially hazardous,” she wrote to D.O.J. staff in March. “The Department stands with the President in rejecting these misguided efforts.”

On March 14th, Trump announced, in effect, a new MAGA Justice Department in a visit to the D.O.J.’s Great Hall. For a President to appear at the department is itself unusual: Bill Clinton went to push his crime bill; George W. Bush spoke eight years later to mark the renaming of the building in honor of Robert F. Kennedy. Trump unleashed a partisan, grievance-laden diatribe against the department and other foes which lasted for more than an hour, assailing “the lies and abuses that have occurred within these walls,” the “Marxist prosecutors” appointed by the Biden Administration, and “scum” such as the latest special prosecutor to investigate him, “deranged Jack Smith.” Then he left, to the familiar strains of his campaign anthem, the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.”

The event left veterans of previous Administrations shaken. “There’s never been a Great Hall event anything like it,” Peter Keisler, a senior Justice Department official during the George W. Bush Administration, and a co-founder of the conservative Federalist Society, told me. “It sent the unmistakable message, not merely that there was a new sheriff in town but that this new sheriff intended to harness law enforcement into a pure and unfiltered tool of politics and revenge.” Shortly thereafter, a new piece of art appeared on the walls of the Attorney General’s conference room, where Bondi’s predecessors had displayed portraits of Attorneys General past: a large photograph of Bondi and Trump at the Great Hall event. (Her other selections: paintings of Washington and Lincoln, borrowed from the National Portrait Gallery, and the official D.O.J. portrait of Robert F. Kennedy. “She is very, very close to Bobby Kennedy,” [Bondi’s chief of staff, Chad] Mizelle explained, referring to the Secretary of Health and Human Services.)

The Justice Department declined to make Bondi available for an interview with me, but it did arrange sessions with several other senior officials, who offered a glimpse of the new relationship between the D.O.J. and the White House. Mizelle, who worked at the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term, is particularly close to Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff. “You have one client, and you have to represent that one client. If you don’t want to do that, then it’s just not the place for you,” Mizelle told me. When I asked him who the client is—the United States or the President—he rejected the premise of the question. “I don’t see a difference between those,” he said. “I think—and I don’t mean this as an attack on you—the very fact that you asked the question shows the fundamental problem in how everybody has always, in the last two decades, conceived of government. . . . The President is the executive branch.” [Continue reading…]