President Donald Trump is openly transforming the Department of Justice’s primary role of advising presidents on the limits of their authority under the Constitution into one that justifies and advocates his MAGA philosophy. This overlooks the reality that the public does not adhere to a single philosophy other than preserving their rights as guaranteed by our constitutional government.
Congress established the position of Attorney General in 1789, and the Department of Justice was founded in 1870 to serve the AG. The department was necessary to legally enforce the Constitution’s 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments following the Civil War. The Attorney General now possessed expanded powers, shifting from defending the government against civil lawsuits to enforcing laws and pursuing criminal prosecutions.
President Ulysses S. Grant appointed a former Confederate Army officer to prosecute those who resisted the transformation of the Southern Confederacy into a democratic institution, utilizing intimidation and violence against these amendments. By the end of Grant’s first term, there were over 3,000 indictments, with more than a third resulting in convictions.
And now 154 years later, we have another Republican President appointing an Attorney General who directs the Justice Department to punish individuals, schools, and businesses if they promote Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion (DEI) classes. The classes explain why the reconstruction of the South along democratic principles was needed. However, Trump’s MAGA movement sees it as anti-American because it could make white citizens feel guilty about America’s history.
Trump had a small but well-funded right-wing think tank help him turn our justice system on its head. The DOJ would not seek to protect the constitutional civil rights of oppressed groups. Instead, its objective was to preserve the status quo of groups traditionally benefiting from laws not being enforced. In short, its mission was to reverse the clock to a time when those with the most political and economic power were not threatened by the federal government chipping away at their entitled benefits.
Two right-wing think tanks drew up plans for accomplishing this critical task. Although the Heritage Foundation received the most attention through its Project 2025 report for developing Trump’s policies, the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) is now executing them.
AFPI was founded in 2021 by two former Trump administration officials to promote Donald Trump’s public policy agenda. Like the Heritage Foundation, it prepared for Trump’s return to the White House. The AFPI president revealed, at a women’s event it sponsored, that they had already “298 executive orders drafted and ready for day one of the next president.”
AFPI was writing executive orders that could utilize the President’s muscle to overpower any opposition to Trump’s policies. The executive orders then would be carried out by Trump’s appointed cabinet members, of which 7 are former AFPI employees.
The incoming secretaries of education, agriculture, veterans affairs, housing, and now the Department of Justice have all been employees of AFPI. We are not talking about interns. These are folks at the top, like Brooke Rollins, the president of AFPI, who heads up agriculture, and Linda McMahon, chairwoman of the AFPI board, who runs the Department of Education.
Other cabinet posts held by former AFPI employees are Lee Zeldin for the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Turner for secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Doug Collins for secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, and Matthew Whitaker for U.S. Ambassador to NATO.
Most importantly, AFPI folks are running the Justice Department. Pam Bondi is the General Attorney. She previously controlled the litigation arm of AFPI, which brought at least five lawsuits against the Biden Administration. According to the Brennan Center’s research, AFPI intended to hinder ballot box access or disenfranchise specific groups of voters in swing states.
However, even conservative judges saw their lawsuits as political conjectures without evidence. For instance, a Texas federal trial judge, who is a conservative Trump appointee known for his nationwide injunction on the abortion pill, denied AFPI’s request to stop a three-year-old Biden Executive order that encouraged federal agencies to integrate voter registration opportunities into their services.
The judge held that AFPI’s request provided “no direct evidence to support its claim” that the executive order “weaponize[d]” and was a “partisan” scheme to register noncitizens to vote to benefit Democratic candidates.
The other AFPI implant in the justice system is Trump-appointed FBI Director Kash Patel, who serves as a paid Senior Fellow at AFPI’s Center for American Security. Previously, he was a senior aide to Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Patel was the primary author of the Nunes memo, which alleges that officials in the Federal Bureau of Investigation abused their authority during the investigation into links between associates of Donald Trump and Russian officials.
Patel claimed in a podcast before being appointed that “FBI’s Confidential Human Source Corruption Coverup Network” was involved in allowing, if not helping, incite the January 6th insurrection. The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released a report discrediting the claim that the FBI corruptly used this network to instigate January 6th in December 2024, before Trump was in office. Trump did not fire him because he believed that this inspector general had been fair to him in the past.
Nevertheless, Trump ordered the FBI, presumably through Attorney General Bondi, to turn over a list of everyone who worked on the January 6 insurrection cases. The agents sued, believing Patel would reveal their identities, endangering them and their families from MAGA movement members. While a judge temporarily blocked the public release of names, Trump said he’d fire some for being corrupt.
Trump and his appointees to the highest public offices in the nation have consistently asserted that their opponents are corrupt. They have defined corruption not as accepting bribes but as sabotaging Trump’s reactionary agenda by neglecting to execute his orders.
This definition of corruption is at the core of how the DOJ has become a tool for Trump to apply the law to retaliate against all federal employees and any citizen or business that questioned or challenged his authority. Bondi and Patel were prior employees of AFPI, so they could work as a team to defend and justify Trump’s orders as legal.
Consequently, the only avenue for challenging them is through the court system. According to Just Security’s tracking, there are 170 open legal challenges to Trump administration actions as of April 6, 2025. In the 67 cases before district courts, where multiple lawsuits produced a single, consolidated ruling, 46 halted a Trump administration action from 39 judges appointed by five presidents. While both Democratic and Republican judges were represented, every judge appointed by Trump ruled in favor of him.
Nevertheless, Bondi considered that the judges who had stopped a Trump executive order needed to be removed. During an interview on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” show, she said “These judges obviously cannot be impartial. They cannot be objective. They are trying … to obstruct Donald Trump’s agenda.”
That attitude aligns with how judges should comply with Trump’s executive orders, much like AFPI believes all executive agencies should. On AFPI’s website, one of its primary objectives is to make all agency heads “serve to the pleasure of the president,” not serve all citizens by upholding the Constitution.
This goal reflects Donald Trump’s vision of the unitary executive theory, in which the president directs the decisions of all agencies, including the DOJ. The Supreme Court has never endorsed this legal doctrine, even though Democrats have been a minority on the Supreme Court since 1970.
Trump has corrupted the DOJ’s intended purpose, which is evident by how Bondi is punishing them if they do not comply with Trump’s political agenda. Bondi placed a Justice Department attorney on leave after he told a judge that he did not know what authority was used to arrest and mistakenly deport an El Salvadoran national even though an immigration judge’s 2019 ruling protected him from deportation to El Salvador, where he faced likely persecution by local gangs.
The Department of Justice provided no evidence that he had no criminal record or was a gang member. However, Bondi insisted that “every DOJ attorney is required to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States.” In reality, Bondi means to “advocate” Trump’s political agenda of deporting anyone legally living in the U.S. who is deemed a national threat, not by providing evidence but by being a suspicious immigrant.
If an attorney fails to vigorously enforce that assumption, like acknowledging that there is no evidence to pursue a legal motion, they could be fired. Bondi clarified this in her statement: “Any attorney who fails to abide by this direction will face consequences.”
This was not an isolated incident. The White House press secretary said that more than 50 U.S. attorneys and deputies had been fired “in coordination with” the Justice Department since the end of March. Almost all lawyers who worked on the prosecutions against the president were fired, and many others were demoted because they were seen as insufficiently loyal.
These employees may have included more than a dozen who worked before he was reelected or prosecutors in the cases against the people charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot. These measures appear illegal because firing many of them requires a specific reason not cited in the firings.
Trump uses AFPI as a fifth column within the judicial branch of government to eliminate any federal attorney who might not “zealously advocate” his philosophy on how Americans should behave. This top-down approach emphasizes loyalty to superiors, with Trump at the pinnacle. Requiring personal loyalty to a president is an action that is not covered in the Constitution or Congressional laws.
Although Trump has referred to himself as a king, in a half-joking manner, a U.S. District Judge, in a ruling against him, wrote that “a President who touts an image of himself as a “king” or a “dictator” misapprehends Article II of the U.S. Constitution, which tasks “the President to be a conscientious custodian of the law, enacted by the Congress and as interpreted by the Judiciary.”
Federal employees are the first and easiest citizens to be targeted by Trump because he can claim executive authority over their jobs. However, they are not his only targets. Other constituents who he sees as possibly resisting his MAGA agenda are already on the receiving end of his executive orders. These are schools, law firms, and cultural institutions. Each necessitates a more thorough examination of how his aggression is impacting them.
If citizens cannot rely on the government to protect their freedoms, they must learn to utilize the legal system as a peaceful avenue for achieving a just and fair society.
To help citizens better understand and protect their rights, the Washington State Bar Association is launching the Rule of Law Ambassador Program. The program will teach volunteer ambassadors in constitutional law so they can educate community members and secure constitutional law as the foundation of our democracy. This effort is based on the “rule of law” principle that government power is bound by law and human rights are guaranteed to all. Email ambassadors@wsba.org to receive updated information on this effort.
Nationwide, 98 bar associations endorsed the American Bar Association’s statement on the Rule of Law. Unfortunately, the ABA’s website does not mention national or state initiatives like the Washington State program. If readers know of such programs, please email nick@citizenshippolitics.org, and they will be posted.
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Thanks, Nick, for this information. It is important for us all to be informed about the nature of this calculated assault on our democracy. This massive and coordinated effort disguises itself as a simple effort to promote one partisan policy over another. But as emerging evidence like yours begins to make clear, the founders of this movement (who are they?) would abandon long established institutional practices and procedures for resolving differences–resolutions based on evidence, on honest debate and on a willingness finally to abide the decision of an impartial decision maker, saving one’s disappointment with a policy outcome for a later day when the case may be better made or the audience more receptive. Well beyond any substantive policies we may debate, those historic practices and procedures are democracy’s real guarantee. When they are compromised–when winning the argument is the sole criterion by which appropriate debate is measured–democratic self government is imperiled.
wow
i hae not seen any of this in the mainstream media. i have wondered how such a collection of incompetents could have been assembled. i hope this repirtig becomes more wide spread.
Thanks Nick for this illuminating and chilling article on yet another nefarious rightwing group that supports the illegal and unconstitutional actions of the Trump regime and the complicit Republican Party. Also I appreciate your mention of the State Bar Association’s Rule of Law Ambassador Program. The UW Law School also offers a series of events on the rule of law. Timely now and crucial for citizens to understand as we face a regime dedicated to abandoning any legal constraints on its power and control. May we see a restoration of the rule of law and the US Constitution in our lifetimes.