Pam Bondi has a Fox News problem

From the Epstein files to gun rights to immigration enforcement, senior Justice Department officials keep running to Fox News to freelance policy and signal loyalty to Donald Trump. But in the process, they are also riling up the MAGA coalition. Each media appearance creates a new mess that career lawyers then have to clean up. At this point, the most responsible thing Attorney General Pam Bondi could do is confiscate the department’s television remotes and log everyone out of their social media accounts. But restraint has never been the MAGA brand.

Consider Jeanine Pirro, the former co-host of “The Five” on Fox News before she was confirmed as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Pirro recently returned to her old network and vowed to arrest gun owners who bring firearms into the District, even if they are licensed elsewhere. “You bring a gun into the District, you mark my words, you’re going to jail,” she told Fox’s Martha MacCallum on Monday. “I don’t care if you have a license in another district and I don’t care if you’re a law-abiding gun owner somewhere else.”

The reaction was swift and furious on the right.

“What is Pirro talking about here, and why is a Fox anchor cheering her on?” asked conservative firearms reporter Stephen Gutowski. The National Association for Gun Rights decried Pirro’s warning as “unacceptable and intolerable comments by a sitting US attorney.” Right-wing gun hero Kyle Rittenhouse concluded that “Pirro should be fired.” 

The U.S. attorney’s stance also angered several Republican members of Congress.

“I bring a gun into the district every week… I have a license in Florida and DC to carry. And I will continue to carry to protect myself and others. Come and Take it!” Florida Republican Rep. Greg Stuebe said. “Second Amendment rights are not extinguished just because an American visits DC,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis posted on X.

Pirro eventually tried to clean up the mess on X, clarifying that D.C. law requires firearms to be licensed locally and that her office is focused on unlawful carrying. But the damage was done. A senior federal prosecutor had used a Fox News appearance to issue what sounded like a blanket threat to gun owners, contradicting both conservative orthodoxy and the administration’s own efforts to promote permitless carry and national reciprocity. 

The Fox News habit shows up again in the handling of the Epstein files, where senior officials seem desperate to minimize embarrassment to the powerful. Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general and Trump’s former personal defense lawyer, went on the network this week to reassure viewers that partying with Jeffrey Epstein “is not a crime.” He offered this absolution in the context of revelations that CBS News’ new hire Peter Attia, a health and wellness influencer, appears more than 1,700 times in newly released Epstein documents. 

The Epstein files were supposed to be Trump’s transparency moment, a chance to finally reveal what powerful men knew about a serial sexual predator. Instead the president echoed Blanche’s sentiment from the Oval Office, declaring that it was “really time” for the country to move past Epstein. Podcast host Katie Miller, wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, dutifully dismissed the files as a “Democrat hoax.” FBI Director Kash Patel went even further, going on Fox News’ “Special Report” this week to declare that he was done with the Epstein matter entirely. This coordinated shrug comes as Trump’s inner circle keeps popping up in Epstein-adjacent reporting.

Meanwhile, Bondi’s Justice Department is hemorrhaging prosecutors, and nowhere is the crisis more visible than in Minnesota. The state’s U.S. Attorney’s office has been decimated, shrinking from 70 assistant federal prosecutors under Biden to as few as 17 now. The four prosecutors who spearheaded the $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud case all resigned within days of each other, joining more than a dozen others in resigning rather than defending an immigration enforcement campaign so aggressive and sloppy that federal judges are openly threatening contempt citations on a near-routine basis. 

The breaking point for many was the department’s refusal to open a civil rights investigation into the January killings of U.S. citizens Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, who were fatally shot by federal immigration agents. Prosecutors raised alarms internally about the administration’s efforts to block state and local authorities from investigating the shootings as potential homicides, as well as about orders to rush through charges against defendants accused of assaulting federal officers without full investigations. One retiring attorney described it plainly: “This was the ultimate example of selective prosecution.”

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More than 300 former Justice Department attorneys have now urged Bondi to allow local investigators to do their jobs, warning that blocking state and local probes into possible violations of state law “poses a threat to the rule of law.”

While prosecutors are drowning in habeas corpus petitions and judges are losing patience, Bondi herself is finding time to go on Fox News and threaten journalists. Discussing the recent arrest of Don Lemon, who was charged with federal civil rights violations for entering an evangelical church in St. Paul to report on an anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protest, Bondi did not hedge or walk anything back. “We’re going to prosecute you, and you will be held accountable,” she said on “Hannity” this week. “Doesn’t matter if you’re a failed journalist with a camera in your hand, you can’t do it.” 

Chad Mizelle, a former top DOJ official, took to X to openly solicit “pro-Trump” lawyers for assistant U.S. attorney positions, asking applicants to support Trump’s “anti-crime agenda.” Stephen Miller amplified the call, declaring that “patriots” were needed. Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney in Miami, shared Mizelle’s post with his own message: “We are hiring!” 

These messages amount to a public declaration that loyalty to Trump is now a hiring criterion for federal prosecutors. For her part, Bondi has just hired a new chief of staff after leaving the position vacant since September, but no staffing shuffle can solve a leadership problem this fundamental. 

The move triggered alarm even among conservatives, with the National Review warning about politicized prosecution. Andy McCarthy, a writer for the magazine and a Fox News contributor, said the Justice Department should be defunded if support for the incumbent president is a condition of enforcing the law. The department “should only exist if it’s nonpartisan,” the former federal prosecutor wrote, warning it would be “too dangerous to liberty otherwise.” Commentary editor and National Review contributor John Podhoretz agreed. 

The brain drain has been catastrophic at the department, which is engulfed in personnel chaos. Lindsey Halligan, a former Trump personal attorney with no prosecutorial experience, washed out of the Eastern District of Virginia after failing to deliver cases against Trump’s enemies and “masquerading” as a U.S. attorney, in the words of a federal judge. Alina Habba met a similar fate in New Jersey, disqualified after courts ruled she was unlawfully serving. Ed Martin, Trump’s interim U.S. attorney in D.C., was demoted and sidelined after a review found he had shared secret grand jury material related to mortgage fraud inquiries involving Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. He is expected to leave the department after being demoted earlier this week, and Schiff would be well within his rights to file a bar complaint.

As loyalists flame out, career lawyers are fleeing. The Trump administration tried to offset the attrition in the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s office by creating emergency jump teams, demanding that offices rapidly designate prosecutors for short-term surges in unspecified critical situations.

Judges, meanwhile, are openly complaining that filings are late, orders are ignored and basic constitutional requirements are being violated. Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz noted with barely concealed exasperation that the Trump administration decided to send thousands of agents to Minnesota without making any provision for dealing with the hundreds of habeas petitions that were certain to follow. One prosecutor, Julie Le, told a judge that the system was so broken she sometimes wished to be held in contempt just to get a full night’s sleep. She described begging ICE to comply with court orders, emailing in 24-point font and threatening to name names in filings. “I am not white, as you can see,” she told the judge, explaining that her own family was at risk of being swept up in the same dragnet she was being forced to defend.

The administration is carrying out more arrests than it has the capacity to process humanely or legally, and it’s doing so on purpose. At any moment, they could slow down, ensure people’s rights are respected and give their own attorneys time to prepare cases properly. They have refused. 

The Department of Justice used to be a career aspiration, a place where lawyers of all backgrounds believed they could serve the public and the law. Under Trump, it is increasingly becoming an agency of career suicide. Experienced attorneys are fleeing. The post-Watergate norms — that the Justice Department should operate with a degree of independence from political pressure, that it shouldn’t be used as a weapon against the president’s enemies and that the attorney general works for the American people and not as the president’s personal lawyer — is being incinerated. Bondi and her deputies are treating every legal crisis like an opportunity for a cable news hit, and turning our constitutional project into a plotline in their ongoing MAGA reality show.

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