'Everything is on the table' on DOJ purge of Trump haters, AG Pam Bondi says
WASHINGTON – The Justice Department has fired all of Jan. 6 special counsel Jack Smith’s staff and is working to “root out” anyone at the department and FBI who it believes doesn’t like President Donald Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi has confirmed.
Bondi, in a Monday night interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, also said the Justice Department is looking at conducting investigations into the actions of Smith’s team and also into the conduct of prosecutors and federal agents involved in the sprawling criminal probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
"Everything is on the table, Sean,” Bondi told Hannity. “We're going to look at everything."
Bondi’s comments appear to be her most extensive public remarks on the department's actions and plans since she began her tenure at the department a month ago.
Over eight minutes, she described a scorched-earth effort currently underway to purge the 115,000-employee Justice Department of any staffers involved in investigating Trump during or after his first term in office and other perceived enemies of the president.
“Well, first and foremost, we got rid of the Jack Smith team. Gone. Those people are gone,” Bondi said. “We're still trying to find … a lot of people in the FBI and also in the Department of Justice who despise Donald Trump, despise us, don't want to be there.”
“You have to do the right thing and right now we're going to root them out,” Bondi said. “We will find them, and they will no longer be employed.”
She told Hannity she's been working with recently confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel to cull the staff of people determined to be problematic.
“We're starting at every level of the Justice Department, Sean, and getting rid of the worst of the worst. But there are a lot more people that shouldn't be there.”
The Justice Department did not respond to a Paste BN request for comment about how many people had been fired, on what grounds and how many others may be under scrutiny or investigation.
'Politics will not play a part'
Bondi's statements on the Fox interview indicated a stark shift from her tone earlier this year.
During her Jan. 15 Senate confirmation hearing, Bondi denied that she would engage in a politically motivated purge of the Justice Department, which she described as the world’s largest law firm, or its investigative agencies such as the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
“Politics will not play a part,” Bondi, a former two-term Florida attorney general, told senators. “I’ve demonstrated that my entire career as a prosecutor, as attorney general and I will continue to do that.”
Even before Bondi was confirmed, the Justice Department announced it had fired more than a dozen employees who worked on the two criminal prosecutions of Trump. One of those was for withholding classified documents. Trump was charged in the other for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election that he lost to former President Joe Biden.
Both cases were dropped after Smith concluded, following Trump’s election victory in November, that he could not be prosecuted as a sitting president.
That termination of career prosecutors from Smith’s team, and the reassignment of other DOJ prosecutors, was seen as highly unusual given that rank-and-file personnel have traditionally remained at the department throughout shifting presidential administrations and are not punished for their political beliefs or other participation in sensitive investigations.
The first indication of it came in late January when the Justice Department's Acting Attorney General James McHenry fired more than a dozen officials who had played a significant role in prosecuting Trump because McHenry said he did “not trust these officials to assist in faithfully implementing the President’s agenda.”
Before his November election victory, Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt that he planned to fire Smith. After her swearing-in ceremony on Feb. 5, Bondi announced the creation of a “Weaponization Working Group” to investigate federal and local prosecutions of Trump that she said had been overly politicized.
In her Monday night interview nearly a month later, Bondi described the ongoing – and widening – effort at DOJ in greater detail.
Bondi said the Jack Smith team was “low hanging fruit, really,” and that the DOJ also would “get rid of the people that raided the president's home,” a reference to the court-approved 2022 FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and club in Palm Beach, Florida in the classified documents case.
'Shocked' at what she's finding at DOJ
“I know it's very early in your tenure. Are you at all shocked at how things were running before you got there?” Hannity asked Bondi.
“Shocked. Yeah,” Bondi replied. “Kash and I, Patel, talk about this all the time. You know, we knew it was bad. We never knew how bad, and especially on the criminal side and on the people who were in” DOJ’s National Security Division, which focuses, in part, on foreign threats to the U.S. posed by Russia and other hostile nations.
“Will we look into what they did?” Hannity asked Bondi.
“Everything is being looked into,” Bondi said.
“It sounds like a massive list,” Hannity replied. “It doesn't sound like you're going to be sleeping a lot in the next four years.”
“None of us will,” Bondi replied. “But it's worth it. It's worth it to fight for the American people and to keep America safe.”