There is a degree of irony surrounding the Justice Department’s recent efforts. On the one hand, Attorney General Pam Bondi and her team have weaponized federal law enforcement to a degree unseen since Watergate. On the other hand, they’re simultaneously on the hunt for evidence of the Biden-era DOJ having been weaponized.
By all appearances, the latter crusade isn’t doing especially well.
Bondi created something called the “Weaponization Working Group” shortly after taking office, and in May, after far-right activist Ed Martin failed as the interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., he was rewarded by being named the director of the working group.
Nine months later, after Martin failed to do anything worthwhile in the role, he was removed from the leadership post without explanation.
Efforts to breathe new life into the working group are, however, apparently ongoing. NBC News reported:
More than a year after Attorney General Pam Bondi created a ‘Weaponization Working Group’ meant to root out ‘abuses of the criminal justice process’ by federal law enforcement officers in their investigations of President Donald Trump, the Justice Department is scrambling to produce a report, according to a person directly familiar with the group’s work.
The report, which has not been independently verified by MS NOW, added that the group is moving forward with plans “to meet daily” — a detail that CNN also reported last week.
Of particular interest, however, was an element of the NBC News report that noted that Justice Department officials involved in the working group “said they were berated over their inability to produce so far.”
If that’s accurate, it’s emblematic of a larger breakdown.
Imagine if the Justice Department created a working group committed to finding and apprehending Bigfoot. Bondi and her colleagues sent memos about the dangers posed by Bigfoot; they promised to get to the bottom of Bigfoot’s many crimes; and after months of efforts, they decided to hold daily meetings about the hunt for the mythical creature.
As part of this same hypothetical scenario, imagine the working group reached a crossroads. After more than a year of searching for Bigfoot and coming up empty, the Justice Department started to realize that it had nothing to show for its work.
That would leave the DOJ with a choice: It could conclude that federal law enforcement personnel simply hadn’t worked hard enough to find Bigfoot, or it could conclude that it was chasing after a creature that doesn’t exist.
Common sense suggests that the proper response should be “I guess there’s no Bigfoot,” not “Clearly, we need better Bigfoot hunters.”
Similarly, Bondi’s Weaponization Working Group has struggled to produce results, not because it’s failed to try, but because it’s chasing a mirage. The Biden White House, then-Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Justice Department between January 2021 and December 2024 weren’t weaponized. Republicans on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue have spent years trying to uncover evidence of these nefarious activities, but they’ve failed because the activities didn’t happen.
The Weaponization Working Group doesn’t need more frequent meetings, it needs to realize that it’s been tasked with uncovering a conspiracy that only exists in the imaginations of misguided partisans.
