A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
This week, the Senate voted to confirm Pam Bondi as President Trump's new attorney general.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Bondi takes over at the Justice Department as the Trump administration makes aggressive moves to take over the federal bureaucracy. Over the past few weeks, the new administration has already pushed out senior career officials at the department and at the FBI, setting off fears about mass firings.
MARTÍNEZ: NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucas has been following this. Ryan, let's start with the new attorney general, Pam Bondi, sworn in this week in the Oval Office by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. So now that she's on the job, what has she done?
RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: One of the first things that she did was sign a whole bunch of memos, more than a dozen of them, that aim to advance the president's agenda and the department's role in it. These things address a whole range of topics. Bondi revived the federal death penalty. She set up an October 7 task force to focus on the threat posed by Hamas. Other memos addressed immigration enforcement, the drug cartels. This sort of thing reflects the shift in priorities that we often see out of the Justice Department with the change in administration, saying that, though, there's one memo in particular that really stood out, and it raises questions about whether the department under Bondi aims to go after the people who investigated Trump.
MARTÍNEZ: So tell us about that memo.
LUCAS: Well, the subject line is "Restoring The Integrity And Credibility Of The Department Of Justice." But what the memo does is establish what it calls a weaponization working group that will review the criminal and civil cases that were brought against Trump over the past four years by federal and state prosecutors. It will also look at the Capitol riot investigations and what the memo calls the pursuit of improper investigative tactics and unethical prosecutions relating to the Capitol attack.
Now, Bondi has been a fierce defender of Trump over the years. Before she was attorney general, she talked about investigating the investigators. And there are certainly concerns that that's what's going on here. And look, in the past few weeks, the department has already fired more than a dozen prosecutors who worked on Trump investigations because the new leadership said those folks couldn't be trusted to carry out the president's agenda.
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah. There's also been turmoil at the FBI. So where do things stand now?
LUCAS: Right. There's been a lot of nervousness and fear at the FBI over the past week. Remember, the FBI falls under the authority of the Justice Department. But the panic at the FBI started after the No. 2 official at the Justice Department ordered the firing of eight senior career FBI officials, and at the same time, demanded a list of all FBI personnel who worked on any January 6 case. That's around 5,000 FBI employees in all. Now, that set off fears at the FBI of possible mass firings. Sources told me about FBI agents printing out their HR files because they were worried that they'd be fired immediately. They wouldn't have access to the system.
Things have settled down a bit in the past few days. The FBI handed over a list of employees who worked January 6 cases, but not the agents' names, to the Justice Department. The department says this is part of a review process related to ending what it calls the weaponization of the justice system. There are still concerns, though, about FBI agents' names possibly being made public and then they or their families facing threats. Remember, Trump pardoned some 1,500 January 6 defendants, including people who were convicted of violence. Agents have actually filed two lawsuits to try to prevent agents' names from being made public. So there's a lot of concern here. There's a court hearing scheduled on those lawsuits today, so there will certainly be more to come.
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah. That's NPR's Ryan Lucas. Ryan, thanks for breaking it all down.
LUCAS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
