The Department of Justice is a joke. And why wouldn’t it be? Under Attorney General Pam Bondi, the DOJ no longer does the work of justice. Instead, it does the work of grievance, staffed by unqualified true believers.
To be fair, it’s not just that the lawyers in President Donald Trump and Bondi’s orbit are unqualified. They’re also completely unhinged, driven by a toxic brew of bigotry and resentment. How else would we get the spectacle of the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, explaining to the Wall Street Journal that her method for finding civil rights complaints is to wake up at 6 AM to troll X for discrimination claims—many of them about universities?
Does it even need to be said that this is not how the Civil Rights Division typically handles complaints?
Complaints about schools were historically handled by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, but as the Trump administration chips away at that department, it seems to have shifted complaints—at least those involving colleges and universities—to Dhillon.
Harmeet Dhillon, head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, finds civil rights complaints by scrolling through the social media platform X.
If you’d like to see what a normal government report about civil rights complaints looks like, here’s the Education Department’s report from the Biden era. It covers the number of complaints received and resolved, compliance reviews undertaken by the division, types of complaints most commonly received, policies and fact sheets for each major category of discrimination complaints, illustrative cases, government staffing levels, and more.
But, hey, Dhillon has X. So what does she do after her early morning scan of a social media site overrun by bots and white supremacists? After compiling “a list of new horrors,” she “text[s] her deputies, and we assign cases, and we get cranking.”
So the work of the Civil Rights Division is now governed by randos on X, and Dhillon picks and chooses which 280-character screed warrants the full might of a DOJ investigation, and then orders her deputies to … what? DM the X account to get more information? Treat the post itself as a complaint and open an investigation into a college right then and there?
At least Dhillon has a lot of free time for this, given that the DOJ has killed police reform consent agreements, eliminated the right to bring disparate impact complaints—which are the bulk of civil rights complaints—and is generally not pursuing voting rights cases unless the end result would be fewer people voting.
The true purpose of Dhillon’s job, in her own words, is that “we don't just slow down the woke. We take up the cause to achieve the executive branch's goals.”
But the Trump administration isn’t content with stopping at the DOJ; it’s also going to stuff the judiciary with the hackiest of hacks, and it doesn’t want the pesky American Bar Association to point out their lack of qualifications, per Bondi’s letter to the ABA, which was provided in an exclusive preview to Fox News.
Let’s stop there for a minute. This is not how the government works. Bondi’s letter to the ABA is an official piece of government communication, not something to be dangled in front of servile media outlets as an “exclusive.”
As of Thursday afternoon, several hours after the breathless Fox News piece, there’s still no announcement on the DOJ website, nor an official copy of the letter. But you can find the letter in full over on X, posted by former Trump criminal defense attorney/current unqualified high-level DOJ appointee Todd Blanche.
So the only way to learn about big changes at the DOJ is to wait for an announcement to pop up on the absolute worst social media platform. A totally normal way to run the government.
Trump isn’t the first president to be unhappy about the ABA ranking a judicial nominee as unqualified. President George W. Bush iced out the ABA, barring the group from receiving future names of nominees before they were submitted to the Senate.
And Trump’s anger at the ABA goes back to his first term, when the organization deemed 10 of his nominees unqualified. This made Trump so sad that he posted a National Review op-ed on an official government website about how his nominees were too qualified, so there.
Now in his second term, Trump is gearing up to choose the most unqualified partisans as judges, so he can’t have the ABA hanging about saying bad things like “they have no trial experience” or “they said queer people should be driven out of public life.”
Trump simply isn’t interested in hearing why his criminal defense attorney and DOJ bully Emil Bove isn’t qualified to be a judge.
This time around, the Trump administration also won’t be directing judicial nominees to provide waivers that would allow the ABA to access information about them. Terrific. The one thing Trump’s nomination process needs is less transparency. Wouldn’t want the public to know that Trump is transforming the judiciary into a handmaiden to power, only existing to help him achieve his terrible goals. Best to keep that all under his hat.
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