In 2006, George W. Bush fired seven of his U.S. attorneys, primarily because they refused to prosecute bogus voter fraud cases (or they were not “loyal Bushies,” as one administration official put it). Bush replaced them with Republicans deemed more loyal. What resulted was a popular outcry, a protracted investigation and hearings in Congress, and the eventual resignation of the sitting attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, along with eight other top officials.
In 2025, Donald Trump fired a U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, because he refused to prosecute two of his political enemies, former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. He installed Lindsey Halligan, an insurance lawyer with no prosecutorial experience, who was also on his personal legal team, to get the job done. Within a few days of taking over the office, Halligan scrambled to get a grand jury to indict Comey for one false statement and obstruction of an investigation, before the statute of limitations runs out next week. More U.S. attorneys, like Kelly Hayes in Maryland, are under threat too if they don’t file charges against Trump’s foes.
There doesn’t need to be a protracted investigation about this, because Trump mistakenly sent publicly what appeared to be a direct message to Attorney General Pam Bondi, admitting that he fired the attorney (a “Woke RINO, who was never going to do his job”), saying, “Lindsey Halligan is a really good lawyer” and “we can’t delay any longer” to indict Comey and James.
Separately, six other U.S. attorneys have been specifically instructed to investigate George Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) and openly suggested charges including arson (!), after the president explicitly threatened Soros (saying “he should be put in jail”) and other top donors to Democratic causes. The only evidence given for opening this investigation was a research paper from a right-wing think tank.
And on the flip side of these politically motivated prosecutions, we learned last week that the Justice Department and FBI shut down an investigation into immigration czar Tom Homan after he literally took a bag of $50,000 in cash, on tape, in exchange for agreeing to help undercover operatives posing as potential government contractors. (Granted, the Supreme Court has defined bribery down so thoroughly that taking a bag of cash might not even be bribery anymore if nothing is done to repay the bribe.) This comes as the division of DOJ that prosecutes corruption by public officials now has exactly two full-time attorneys.
The Justice Department isn’t being weaponized as much as it’s being honed into a razor-sharp poleax and hurled in the direction of any enemy of the government, while shields are passed out to the government’s friends. Pam Bondi, who has throughout her history been exceedingly willing to ignore the law and exercise raw power on behalf of whoever’s paying her, has offered either enthusiastic support or token resistance to this politicization. Today, we don’t have a legal system as much as a retribution system.
This much is indisputable. Yet it would be scarier if that retribution system was minimally competent. The comical repeated failure to secure grand jury indictments in D.C. amid the attempted crackdown on crime speaks to this ineptitude. The grand jury in Virginia even refused to indict Comey on a separate false statement, suggesting continued skepticism of bad lawyers making bad arguments.
And behind the bravado, cracks are emerging at the DOJ, the biggest being the surprise resignation of Bondi’s chief of staff Chad Mizelle, who is deeply implicated in his own form of political favor-trading. The difference in Mizelle’s case is there’s a mechanism to bring that corruption all out into the open, which suggests that he deserted before the edifice toppled.
AS THE PROSPECT HAS REPORTED, Mizelle was at the center of a pay-to-play scandal, overruling the department’s Antitrust Division to approve a merger between Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks that the division had challenged just a few months before. Mizelle was pressured to do so by million-dollar MAGA lobbyists like Mike Davis and Arthur Schwartz in what has been described as a “boozy backroom deal.”
When top deputies at the Antitrust Division objected to the deal, they were fired, and one of them, Roger Alford, blasted Mizelle and the team at Main Justice a month later for subordinating the rule of law to “rule of lobbyists.” Alford named Mizelle personally. There was some talk that Mizelle wanted to curry favor with Davis and Schwartz, who are close to the White House, so they would help convince President Trump to give Mizelle’s wife Kathryn, a federal judge in Florida, a promotion to the appeals court.
Now this is all pretty par for the course in a Justice Department that’s frantically slotting in new prosecutors to indict people who make Donald Trump mad. But there’s a key factor here. The HPE-Juniper merger approval must be routed through a federal judge, under a 1970s law called the Tunney Act, which was put in place to prevent corruption in antitrust cases. The judge in question, Casey Pitts, happens to be a Biden appointee and former labor lawyer, who is now empowered to hold hearings and take testimony about this lobbyist-infused deal.
Numerous organizations and politicians have written the judge to demand a Tunney Act proceeding to uncover the truth, and I’d say it’s quite likely it will happen. That’s bolstered by Mizelle’s sudden resignation this week.
Mike Allen of Axios broke the news. He previously was the reporter who regurgitated DOJ spin about the HPE-Juniper merger being a “national security” imperative, despite this not being raised in any legal filings about the case, or by the intelligence community prior to the challenge. The point here is that Allen knows all about the controversy surrounding Mizelle. But it oddly didn’t come up in his report on Mizelle’s departure, which cites boilerplate about him wanting to spend time with his family, along with a string of valedictory comments.
Mizelle was serving as both chief of staff and third-in-command at DOJ. His replacement for the latter, Stanley Woodward, is about to be confirmed (amid questions surrounding his own role in HPE-Juniper and other cases). But chief of staff is a critical job. It doesn’t make sense for Mizelle to leave after only nine months without some precipitating event.
Trump isn’t exactly thrilled with the Justice Department to begin with; see his demand to Bondi that she persecute his enemies more swiftly. The botch job over the Epstein files is another indicator. You could credibly see Bondi blaming her chief of staff for communications failures and offering him up as a sacrificial lamb. Getting Mizelle out of government before any Tunney Act hearing would benefit the White House, too, as Matt Stoller points out. “If he’s put on the stand by Pitts as a Florida resident, that’s his problem. If he’s put on the stand as top DOJ official, that’s a problem for Trump. So he got knifed.”
The DOJ grift is hardly ending; Trump’s top first-term antitrust enforcer Makan Delrahim going to work for Paramount right as it seeks to merge with Warner Bros. is a good example. But the Mizelle departure looks strangely close to accountability, something that scarcely exists in Trump’s America. And the primary reason for it is this old law, the Tunney Act, that’s likely to expose at least a piece of a larger corruption.
That can get the avalanche rolling. Democrats investigating the decision to close the Homan inquiry can come at this from another angle. Trump is supposed to be impervious to scandal, but quiet, deliberate work, accomplished within an existing system that is not entirely dead, can puncture that myth.