Donald Trump’s DOGE-ification of the federal government added a key team at the Department of Justice to its list of victims in a pair of moves that greased the wheels for his adminsitration to use the agency to go after Democratic members of Congress.
The Justice Department’s public integrity section (PIN) underwent a series of key changes this year at the direction of Trump-appointed Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has overseen the agency as it charged a Democratic member of Congress, LaMonica McIver, with assault after she was repeatedly confronted by ICE agents during a legally permitted congressional oversight visit to a detention facility in Newark.
McIver’s charging is one of several instances where the Trump-led Department of Justice has brazenly defied the tradition of independence from the White House that agency officials typically follow. Under Bondi’s leadership, the agency has quickly transitioned into an arm of the White House, focused on the president’s priorities and willing to target his political enemies.
Other targets of that trend have been a Milwaukee judge, arrested and charged with allegedly preventing immigration authorities from arresting a man outside of her courtroom by leading him out a back entrance after his hearing concluded, and Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident who was deported to a hellish prison in El Salvador in violation of a court ruling.
Abrego Garcia was charged with trafficking migrants last week after the federal government relented in a weeks-long battle with the courts and returned him to the United States. A federal prosecutor in Tennessee, Ben Schrader, resigned over his concerns that the charges were filed for political reasons, according to ABC News.
McIver’s charging shortly followed the agency-wide suspension of a rule which previously required prosecutors to obtain approval from the PIN before members of Congress could be criminally charged — a safeguard previously in place to prevent targeting of the administration’s political opponents on spurious charges, Reuters reported.
McIver was charged with assault after being involved in a scuffle with ICE agents outside of a Newark detention facility; video shows her making physical contact with an agent, but possibly by accident.
The agency has not released an explanation for why agents engaged in a scuffle with McIver at the scene at all, given that the agency is, by law, prohibited from using its funding in any way to prevent members of Congress from conducting oversight visits. Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, was arrested at the scene.
The Independent reached out for comment regarding the suspension of the rule regarding criminal cases which involve members of Congress, and to inquire about any other reductions to the PIN division’s responsibilities.
As part of staff reductions across the whole of the federal government, the PIN team was also hit.
The decision of federal prosecutors to drop an investigation into New York’s Democratic mayor sparked a wave of resignations at the division, with departing attorneys having been asked to give the order to end the probe after federal prosecutors in New York refused.
What followed was a gutting of the PIN section, which is now a fraction of its former size, according to multiple reports, and no longer handling cases directly. Just five prosecutors were directly assigned to the division by mid-March, down from 30.
The suspension of the rule in May and the other reported erosions of PIN’s authority marks a serious reduction in a key safeguard that the agency implemented in 1976 after the Watergate scandal. At the time, another Republican president leaned on the Justice Department to influence an investigation into a break-in at the Democratic Party’s headquarters and the extent of the Oval Office’s knowledge of the plot.
Donald Trump, in an executive order, directed Bondi to review all DOJ teams with “civil or criminal enforcement authority “ and identify whether individual divisions were, by Trump’s standards, used for political purposes by the Biden administration. Biden officials have denied any weaponization of the DOJ, with prosecutions of the president’s son Hunter and a Democratic senator from New Jersey as evidence to point to.
The stated purpose of that executive action was to end the “weaponization” of the Justice Department and other agencies. But over the course of six months, the DOJ’s greatest tool for preventing that possibility has all but vanished.
Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island, wrote to Bondi in March about the dismantling of the PIN division, but his office has not released a statement on the matter since. The DoJ issued no public statement in response.
“Certain political appointees in this Department of Justice have already proven they put President Trump’s political interests over their duties as prosecutors and as lawyers. Multiple Public Integrity Section attorneys resigned rather than endorse then-Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove’s unethical quid pro quo in dropping the case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams,” wrote the senator.
He added: “If the Trump administration’s goal was to encourage corruption and abuse of office, it is hard to know what it would do differently.”
