Newly confirmed Attorney General Pam Bondi will arrive for her first day at the Justice Department Wednesday amid a firestorm over firings of agents and prosecutors who have worked on cases related to Donald Trump and the January 6, 2021, US Capitol riot.
On her first day in office, Bondi is expected to take a series of immediate and dramatic actions to investigate and undo legal moves from the Biden administration, setting the tone for her term as the top law enforcement official in the country, sources familiar with her plans told CNN.
Those actions will be a series of department-wide memos and orders, a law enforcement official said, that officials hope will shift the narrative coming out of the Justice Department away from the January 6 pardons and FBI employee purges that have led the headlines.
While a source familiar with the Trump administration’s strategy said there are “no plans for mass firings at the FBI,” agents remain concerned. The FBI handed over information about more than 5,000 employees who worked on the January 6 investigations after Acting Attorney General Emil Bove demanded the information in a memo last week with the subject “Terminations.”
The source defended efforts to get additional information about officials who worked on January 6 cases as part of an effort to comply with Trump’s executive order directing a review of the Justice Department’s actions over the last four years in an attempt to end the “weaponization of government.”
“The messaging has not been as clear as it could be on the personnel matters,” the person said.
Bondi’s first moves in office will be under scrutiny. The former Florida state attorney general and staunch Trump ally swore to lawmakers during her confirmation hearing last month that she would protect the department from political motivations. But the Trump administration has touted Bondi’s ability to reshape the Justice Department to fit the president’s vision.
“Every case will be prosecuted based on the facts and the law that’s applied in good faith, period. Politics have got to be taken out of the system,” Bondi told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “This department has been weaponized for years and years and years, and it has to stop.”
Bondi is expected to rescind memos issued under the Biden administration, including a 2023 FBI field office memo that seemed to suggest the FBI was targeting “radical traditionalist” Catholics, sources told CNN. The memo, which then-Attorney General Merrick Garland called “appalling,” was almost immediately pulled, but it was never officially rescinded.
She will also rescind a 2021 memo from Garland that addressed the “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” levied at schools, sources said.
The memo sparked months of backlash and false claims that Garland believed parents who were concerned about education policy were “domestic terrorists,” though a federal judge ultimately disagreed with that characterization.
Early on, she is also expected to order a review of the more than 1,500 criminal cases brought in connection to January 6, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The interim Justice Department leadership has already instructed leaders of the FBI to provide information about all current and former bureau employees who “at any time” worked on January 6 investigations, and the top federal prosecutor in DC launched an investigation into prosecutors who brought obstruction charges against some rioters that were ultimately tossed because of a Supreme Court decision last summer.
The Senate confirmed Bondi on Tuesday evening in a 54-46 vote. The vote was mostly along party lines, with Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania joined Republicans in supporting Bondi.
Department already in transition
The second Trump administration was expected to more successful in crafting its executive orders and policies to withstand court challenges, but so far that has not proven to be the case in the early going, despite prioritizing staffing of its Civil Division.
Bondi will face the immediate challenge to defend new Trump policies in court where DOJ has already faced repeated blows, as two federal judges issued orders temporarily blocking the administration’s plans to freeze all federal aid, and a third judge blocked Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.”
Within the first few days of the Trump administration, at least 20 high-level, career prosecutors across the department were removed from posts they’ve held for years, CNN has reported. The move happened well before Bondi was confirmed in an effort to insulate her from criticism, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
Several of those career prosecutors were reassigned to a new task force handling Trump’s crackdown on immigration, some of the prosecutors told CNN. That task force was revealed in a memo to all department staff from Bove that threatened to investigate or prosecute state and local officials, as well as federal prosecutors, who resist joining Trump’s federal immigration crackdown.
The department also fired officials who worked on former special counsel Jack Smith’s team, and ordered eight senior FBI leaders to retire, resign or be fired.
Interim department leaders began issuing additional memos to department staff informing them of further changes in the way the department would operate moving forward.
One of those memos halted agreements that require reforms of police departments where the Justice Department found a pattern of misconduct, while a second ordered civil rights attorneys to not “file any new complaints, motions to intervene, agreed-upon remands, amicus briefs, or statements of interest” until further notice.
A third memo instructed prosecutors to limit prosecutions under the FACE Act, a law that “prohibits threats of force, obstruction and property damage intended to interfere with reproductive health care services.” That memo also told prosecutors to drop ongoing cases charged under the act.
The department has dropped other criminal cases too, including one against a doctor accused of illegally accessing medical records showing that a Texas hospital was performing gender-affirming care for trans minors, as well as civil suits brought by the Biden administration, like one challenging Virginia’s purge of voters from the rolls in the weeks before the election using data indicating that voters might be non-citizens.
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