Michael Barbaro

She oversees a wide-scale purging of Justice Department prosecutors and FBI agents who worked on cases investigating Donald Trump when he was out of office.

And we should just say, those FBI agents, those DOJ lawyers, they didn't necessarily seek to be on those cases.

They were assigned to investigate Trump by their bosses.

And suddenly, Pam Bondi is saying...

Doing your job and upsetting the president means that you are now out of a job.

Right.

She's immediately making clear that there is a loyalty test for anyone who works in the sprawling Department of Justice and FBI.

And that, I think, is the blueprint for which she carried out her job.

Hmm.

And then we saw the Department of Justice, under Pam Bondi's leadership, launch investigations into some of Trump's longstanding political opponents.

Adam Schiff, the senator from California.

Jerome Powell, the Fed Reserve chairman who he wants to lower interest rates.

We saw them try to secure indictments of James Comey, the former FBI director, Letitia James, the New York attorney general, and they even tried to indict six members of Congress for the alleged crime of telling military officials they should not follow illegal orders.

And many of these cases and investigations have collapsed or not moved forward for various reasons, mostly because there was not enough evidence to indict or to move forward.

Right.

The cases were so thin or legally dubious that they essentially collapsed.

Right.

So, Michael, she ultimately gets herself in a trap in which she makes it harder for her to carry out the president's directives of politically motivated prosecutions because she's making it so clear publicly that she's doing so that many judges and juries are just flat out rejecting any efforts to carry those cases or investigations forward.

Right, and by making the mission of the Department of Justice under her so narrow, I will go after your enemies, Mr. President, Bondi doesn't really leave herself much room for success because she knows at the end of the day that these aren't especially strong cases.

And even as she is devoting so many resources to investigating Donald Trump's political opponents, it's still not enough for him.