DOJ Tracker: April Update

Our monthly update to track the attacks on the rule of law and the Justice Department. Here’s what you need to know from April.

Welcome back to our Substack series to help you stay informed and engaged in protecting the Justice Department. Each month, we pull highlights from Justice Connection’s DOJ Tracker to offer a more digestible way to keep up with the latest attacks.

Here’s what happened in April.

Leadership Shake-Up

On April 2, President Trump fired Attorney General Bondi. While the exact reason remains unknown, many speculate that Trump was dismayed by the Epstein debacle and her failure to successfully prosecute his political enemies.

In her 14 months as attorney general, Bondi oversaw a massive purge of the Justice Department’s career employees; initiated the “Weaponization Working Group” to go after the President’s enemies; turned civil rights enforcement on its head; dedicated federal law enforcement resources to immigration and street crimes rather than the complex terrorism, organized crime, and white-collar cases they’re trained for; and brazenly shattered firewalls between the White House and the department.

Justice Connection issued the following statement that was, which appeared in many media outlets’ coverage of the termination:

Pam Bondi took a sledgehammer to the Justice Department and its workforce. DOJ’s independence, integrity, and workforce have degraded more under her leadership than at any other time during the department’s 155-year history. What she destroyed in a year could take decades to rebuild. But we have a President who fired her because she didn’t go far enough. Replacing her with a more competent Attorney General who – like her – believes their sole client is the President and not the country may just make things worse. We need the Senate to exercise its constitutional check to ensure that doesn’t happen.

President Trump installed Todd Blanche as Acting Attorney General, though news analyses suggest various factions within MAGA are jockeying to elevate their preferred candidate to the nomination. Names that have been floated include Pardon Attorney Ed Martin, Civil Rights Division head Harmeet Dhillon, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro, and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.

In his short tenure so far, Blanche has ramped up DOJ’s efforts to target Trump’s enemies as he vies to make the position permanent. On April 14, Blanche released the Weaponization Working Group’s first report, alleging the Biden Administration coordinated too closely with reproductive rights advocates to prosecute violence at clinics under the FACE Act. Along with the report’s release, Blanche fired three seasoned prosecutors who had worked on FACE Act cases. In the New York Times, Justice Connection criticized DOJ leadership over its “cruelty and hypocrisy” in its insistence “on zealous advocacy by career staff in advancing the president’s priorities, while shaming and firing those who did just that in the prior administration.”

Under Blanche’s leadership, DOJ has also secured an indictment against James Comey over an Instagram post of seashells in what might be the most embarrassing prosecution in DOJ’s history. He also hired a Trump campaign lawyer to lead the investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan, moved to vacate seditious conspiracy charges against Oath Keepers and Proud Boys leaders for their roles in January 6, and devised a plan to assign hundreds of denaturalization cases to lawyers in already overwhelemed U.S. Attorney’s Offices. Blanche is expressing his loyalty in words, too, telling Americans they should be “happy” that Trump is so involved in DOJ operations, and saying “I love you, sir” to the President during a press conference (this actually happened).

Here are a few other things you might’ve missed:

• The DOJ Office of Legal Counsel released an opinion claiming the Presidential Records Act of 1978 is unconstitutional. While the opinion is not binding, and the White House has confirmed it continues to preserve records, critics fear this is setting the groundwork for President Trump to retain sensitive government records after he leaves office, like he did following his first term.

  • Anthony Coppolino and Jason Baron, who litigated Presidential Records Act cases at DOJ, raised concerns about what this means for the country’s classified national security secrets in their post on Justice Connection’s Substack.

• Over the past year, DOJ sued more than 30 states to obtain voting records in the name of election security. Bloomberg now reports that, at the same time, the department has quietly abandoned many of the institutional, nonpartisan safeguards that keep elections safe. This includes:

  • Disbanding a centralized rapid response command that fields calls 24/7 during election week, concerning local law enforcement. The command post helped local officials deal with bomb threats, hacking, power grid issues, and more.

  • No longer providing mandatory election-law training to local prosecutors and FBI agents. Indeed, the Public Integrity Section, the unit that conducted training, was one of the first to be gutted after Trump took office.

  • Restricting access to threat briefings and reducing the availability of FBI election liaisons.

• The investigation into the Federal Reserve and its chair Jerome Powell ended on April 24, more than a year since it was initiated. This came after a federal judge blocked subpoenas because there was no evidence of a crime. “A mountain of evidence suggests that the Government served these subpoenas on the Board to pressure its Chair into voting for lower interest rates or resigning,” Judge James Boasberg wrote. Republican lawmakers had also demanded the administration abandon the investigation, calling it “bogus.” The probe’s closure allows President Trump’s nominee to replace Powell to move forward.

• DOJ indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on charges of fraud based on a shuttered paid informant program. The Justice Department alleged donors were defrauded when SPLC used its funds to pay informants from the KKK and other hate groups for insider information, saying the organization funded the very organizations it claimed to be fighting. (Notably, the FBI, DEA, and ATF regularly pay confidential informants during investigations.)

  • Justice Connection issued the following statement: “DOJ leaders have made no secret of their intention to investigate and prosecute organizations for expressing disfavored views. Groups have been targeted for being perceived as anti-American or anti-Christian – terms so broad that the administration can choose targets and work backward to find alleged crimes. The Justice Department’s mission is to uphold the rule of law, keep the country safe, and protect civil rights. At Justice Connection, we will continue to speak out in defense of that mission and DOJ’s role in ensuring the fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans.”