Attorney General Pam Bondi offered a rosy assessment of the Justice Department’s court record during last week’s Cabinet meeting at the White House, telling President Donald Trump, “We’ve had some great wins in the last few days.” While the department has successfully fended off attacks on several administration policies, there have been as many (or more) high-profile face-plants from federal lawyers, with dozens of other cases still waiting adjudication. Bondi needs all the help she can get if she hopes to stave off more defeats — but her ironfisted demand for total loyalty to Trump, and the punishments she’s doling out to dissenters, doesn’t seem to be making her job any easier.
Upon taking office in February, Bondi made clear that there was no room for dissent among the Justice Department’s lawyers. In a memo issued on her first day, federal lawyers were warned they “are expected to zealously advance, protect, and defend their client’s interests” — those being Trump’s interests, of course, not the American people’s. Bondi has applied her maxim extremely literally, reportedly punishing government lawyers for being insufficiently full-throated in their support of Trump policies, either in court or behind closed doors, as the onetime firewall between the attorney general and White House collapses.
Earlier this month, the department placed Erez Reuveni, the acting deputy director of the department’s immigration litigation division, on indefinite leave. The letter from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, which The New York Times obtained, said it was for failing to “follow a directive from your superiors” and “engaging in conduct prejudicial to your client.” The department confirmed his suspension to NBC News in a statement from Bondi, in which she stated, “At my direction, every Department of Justice attorney is required to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States. Any attorney who fails to abide by this direction will face consequences.”
But the only thing that Reuveni, who had only been promoted to his role recently, had done to earn this punishment was to tell the truth in court. Reuveni found himself unable to give U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis a reason why the administration had deported a Maryland resident, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, to El Salvador despite his being legally in the country. Reuveni admitted to Xinis that Abrego Garcia “should not have been removed,” adding that he was “also frustrated that I also have no answers for you on a lot of these questions.” (The Times also reported that another lawyer working on the Abrego Garcia case, August Flentje, was placed on administrative leave for failing “to supervise a subordinate.”)
The answers Xinis wanted still haven’t been properly provided to the court, despite the Supreme Court ruling last week that the Trump administration must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the states. It appears that those answers are also being withheld from the Justice Department’s lawyers. In another tense hearing on Friday, federal attorney Drew Ensign said his clients hadn’t provided any information about where Abrego Garcia actually is. (It was only on Saturday, minutes after a deadline that Xinis had imposed, that the government acknowledged in a court filing that Abrego Garcia is alive and detained in El Salvador.)Ensign’s struggles and Reuveni’s punishment highlight the struggle that career lawyers are facing under Bondi. Dozens of federal attorneys have been fired, demoted, forced to resign, placed on leave or otherwise retaliated against for reasons as varied and capricious as working on cases against Trump under special counsel Jack Smith and not being quick enough to remove Biden administration portraits from the walls at the DOJ’s headquarters. Meanwhile, we’re seeing more and more situations in which lawyers are sent to defend policies they can’t explain, while attempting to dodge the threat of sanctions from annoyed judges. As I wrote last month, the department has been frantically trying to replace the lawyers who have left or been reassigned to other Trump administration priorities — but the caseload just keeps on growing. Things are bad enough that Blanche, along with other senior leaders like his main adviser, Emil Bove, and Bondi’s chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, have been taking on tasks that would normally be done by staff attorneys. As more of the administration’s slapdash policies and strong-arm tactics draw court challenges, the pace will only get faster, with fewer hands to do the work, leading in short order to burnout, abuse or an even more frenetic flailing in federal courtrooms. In ruling with all the grace of a dictator over demoralized, overextended lawyers, Bondi is making it harder to notch the wins in court that she so desperately needs to report back to the White House. If she can’t put up a good defense, she’ll likely be expected to shift gears toward actively investigating, and potentially prosecuting, Trump’s purported enemies. But if finding lawyers to defend the government in civil suits is already a challenge, finding prosecutors who will put their career on the line under the intense scrutiny of the criminal courts is going to be even harder. At that point, it may be Bondi herself who’s forced to schlep to court daily when nobody else is left to do the job.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW Daily. 
