A New Dawn for American Justice

Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice has arguably the most important agenda for any agency within the executive branch of the incoming administration. Over the last four years, Americans have observed justice be systematically desecrated and attacked by vengeful actors, working shamelessly in tandem with Merrick Garland’s corrupt DOJ, with an agenda to censure – and even imprison – those with opposing or dissident political views. At the same time, they ran roughshod over those timeless constitutional guardrails necessary for preserving justice in the United States, such as the presumption of innocence and due process of law. These nefarious actors got away with their lawfare with virtual impunity. The protections granted to people like Fani Willis, Jack Smith, and Alvin Bragg originate ultimately in the example set by Garland’s DOJ, who dutifully carried out the marching orders of his commander-in-chief.

Lawfare became the rule of the day, and America’s legal institutions paid a mighty price for it. Americans witnessed their next President be ruthlessly prosecuted in a banana republic show trial in Manhattan, Washington, and Fulton County. Marxist district attorneys, with the financial backing of George Soros, Reid Hoffman, and other leftist radicals, eroded the rule of law in this country by launching the first all-out political persecution (which also stood as the most brazen form of election interference in American history) of a major party politician in the history of the United States, bookending the darkest chapter in the history of American justice. In a phrase, justice was put on the chopping block. Had it not been for the political miracle that was November’s historic election victory, the United States would be in a much bleaker place; for all intents and purposes, the light of American freedom would have been vanquished for good. No fundamental constitutional rights would have been guaranteed under a regime led by Kamala Harris, including the unassailable rights to speak, assemble, and worship God, as enumerated in the First Amendment, or the protections of due process, like the right to a fair and impartial tribunal, as enshrined in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Accordingly, much of the department’s resources must be allocated to restoring public confidence in the rule of law and integrity of our judicial institutions over the next four years. Paramount among these considerations will include both reforms that will facilitate public trust that justice is being carried out fairly and impartially. Additionally, the DOJ should embrace its electoral mandate to advocate for concrete policies that will help guide jurisprudence throughout the federal government with respect to how prosecutors, courts, and even administrative agencies manage important constitutional issues presented before them. The latter might include, for example, recommendations for courts to apply a broad construction of presidential power, one that respects the Supreme Court’s recognition of broad-based immunity for presidential actions, a decision that is perfectly consistent with a unitary executive. The latter might also include recommendations to the civil rights division, as but one example, for courts and prosecutors to retain a rigorously originalist construction of constitutional law, one that does not freely submit to innovations, like substantive due process or a spirited understanding of equal protection with its innumerable manufactured “protected classes,” which has no basis in the text of the Fourteenth Amendment or any other provision in the Constitution itself.

To that end, I would describe the main agenda items for the incoming DOJ as the following three categories: 1) restoration of the rule of law and public confidence in the administration of justice; 2) legal support for a unitary executive in which the federal bureaucracy is directly responsible to the President of the United States alone, ensuring robust protections are in place to allow the President full authority over his executive branch; and 3) help shape and implement the administration’s overall policy agenda, particularly with respect to assisting agencies like DHS and ICE carry out the “largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America.”

With respect to the first category, the President will have an opportunity to launch both retributive and restorative justice. Both are necessary, particularly in the aftermath of the last four years, which has observed the emergence of a two-tier system of justice, one that persecutes political conservatives and Trump supporters by and large while allowing countless violent criminals – including illegal alien repeat offenders that pose grave dangers to American citizens – off the hook.

This two-tier system of justice has been called, in a related context, “anarcho-tyranny”: heavy-handed justice is leveled against otherwise law-abiding American citizens, while true criminals are for whatever reason, given a free pass time and again. In many cases, such as what occurred to a tragic number of J6 defendants (see here, here, here, and here), what otherwise should have been a misdemeanor at worst was elevated to a felony, and the persecuted was forced into a dehumanizing sentencing proceeding that at the end of it left the defendant spiritually demoralized and financially bankrupted. Judicial resources are recklessly expended on make-believe crimes, resulting in the sort of egregious abuses that were recurrent all throughout the Biden years: from the deployment of FBI agents upon Catholic masses to having the DOJ label parents who challenged public school boards for woke curricula and covid mandates as “domestic terrorists,” grouped in with al-Qaeda or ISIS.

The judicial temperament that drives this hostile approach is one born out of woke ideology and totally divorced from common sense principles of justice and certainly the Constitution. Part of Bondi’s grand agenda will have to be restoring public faith in what is so clearly a broken justice system; to restore parity, justice will have to be administered honestly and fairly again. Those who the public have good reason to believe have gotten away with no accountability – from Mark Milley to Anthony Fauci to Alvin Bragg and Fani Willis to the Epstein list disclosures — (as I have written about previously at good length) must be prosecuted if there is sufficient evidence to support a case against them, to the fullest extent of the law. Republicans must begin to learn that the Left is so effective with their lawfare – and nearly incarcerated a former and future President for life, while he was on the campaign trail, no less – because they are unafraid to use the levers of power given them. The Right must start to take a lesson from the Left’s playbook and begin to do the same.

That is not to say that Republicans should go off on witch-hunts, copying their Leftist counterparts, making cases out of thin air, in the pursuit of pure retaliation. That is not justice, but revenge, and revenge should never be tolerated. The rule of law must be our guiding light, the only wellspring upon which true justice can spring. But Republicans must also not shy away from apparent facts presented to them and shirk from their public duties to enforce the law and hold criminals – especially those who breached the public trust through their repeated miscarriages of justice that have done irreparable harm upon our institutions – accountable, once and for all.

The public accountability measures should also include the establishment of independent commissions. An obvious example of this might be one designed to expose the truth behind the events of January 6^th, 2021, and another with the mandate to finally discredit and hold accountable those who peddled the Russian collusion hoax over the past eight years. Moreover, the worst perpetrators of those bogus narratives who still retain security clearances – people like John Brennan, Adam Schiff, James Clapper, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and countless others – who abused the privileges afforded to them must have those clearances taken away permanently. These are the kinds of accountability measures that must be enacted on day one to begin to right the wrongs of the Trump era. Because so much of that persecution originated from within the DOJ and intelligence agencies, like the FBI, over which the former has jurisdiction — the DOJ should take its prerogative seriously and spearhead these charges out of recognition that the public has a right to be made whole again for the untold harm exacted by these agencies to institutions of public life — as well as the Constitution itself, perhaps the greatest casualty of all.

On presidential power, the Justice Department has the ability to assist law enforcement agencies – like Homeland Security – which has primary jurisdiction over the mass deportation initiative, by speeding up hearings and ensuring an orderly and efficient process that is largely unencumbered by governmental obstruction. The DOJ’s role in the mass deportation campaign is instrumental because it can help determine the speed with which the campaign takes place. In many cases, governmental logjams are based on pending litigation; the DOJ thus has a duty to move things along by ensuring a timely appeals process for the immigration courts, which EOIR, a part of the DOJ, manages. Where individual state governments might be out of compliance with federal law, such as unlawfully housing illegal aliens through sanctuary cities and other such policies, the DOJ will have a duty to investigate and prosecute these cases as they arise to protect the public’s health and safety. These efforts can go a long way towards helping the President deliver on arguably his most important promise to the American people, all while ensuring that it is done orderly and efficiently in accordance with preserving the individual liberties of everyone involved and putting the best interests of the public first and foremost.

The above presents only a preliminary outline of the policies the DOJ can help implement. The nitty gritty details of each will naturally be hashed out with time. But from the start, the DOJ’s priorities must center on restoring integrity in a system that has been tarnished irrevocably by the previous administration. This will only be accomplished by reviving justice in its true and original meaning. The Constitution, not activist lawyers, and judges, must be the guiding principle for DOJ policy: its text and original meaning and purpose must hold supreme – for that will be the only way “a government of laws, not of men,” might be saved – and public confidence restored.

Paul Ingrassia is a Constitutional Scholar; Communications Director of the NCLU; a two-time Claremont Fellow, and is on the Board of Advisors of the New York Young Republican Club and the Italian American Civil Rights League. He writes a widely read Substack that is regularly posted on Truth Social by President Trump. Follow him on X @PaulIngrassia, Substack, Truth Social, Instagram, and Rumble.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.