DOJ Enters a New, Even More Aggressive Phase

The Justice Department is entering a hyperaggressive new era, cutting legal corners in service of getting President Trump the headlines—and revenge—he wants. Last month, Trump pushed out Attorney General Pam Bondi, reportedly because he was unhappy with her failure to secure legal victories against his enemies. Todd Blanche, for now the acting attorney general, seems to be campaigning for Trump’s nomination to replace Bondi: On his watch, the department has announced a spate of new prosecutions and submitted a bizarre court filing channeling Trump’s voice to argue for the construction of a White House ballroom. Under any other president, DOJ’s recent activity would represent an astonishing abuse of power. Even by the standards of the second Trump administration, these actions are absurd, and unusually dangerous.

The indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the left-leaning antiextremism group that has long been a bête noire of the American right, heralded this new era. The SPLC had been “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred,” Blanche alleged, standing next to FBI Director Kash Patel and flanked by two posters tallying funds allegedly spent by the organization to pay informants within extremist groups. (Trump took things even further, insisting on Truth Social, “If it is true, the 2020 Presidential Election should be permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect!”) This is far more than the indictment can actually show—though the document is written coyly, in a way that almost encourages the reader to find more in it than DOJ states outright. What DOJ alleges is that the SPLC sent funds to informants and used shell companies to disguise the source of the payments, presumably so that the informants’ relationships with the SPLC would remain obscured from their fellow extremists.

DOJ has one small problem: It’s not clear that any of what the indictment describes is illegal. Paying informants is not a crime, and the government has provided no evidence that the SPLC’s donors were duped about the SPLC’s practice of sending such payments, which is the foundation of the wire-fraud allegation. The indictment also charges the organization under a statute that prohibits lying to influence a bank, but it explains neither what DOJ understands the lies to have been, nor what the SPLC was supposedly trying to persuade the bank to do. (This is sort of like charging someone for drunk driving without ever stating that they were drunk.) The case, Kyle Boynton, a former prosecutor at DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, told me, is “a new front in the prosecutorial misconduct this department is willing to engage in to get an indictment returned.”

Court filings submitted this week by the SPLC further undermine the administration’s claims. In a Fox News interview, Blanche commented that in no instance had the SPLC ever “turned around and shared what they learned with law enforcement.” This suggestion added fuel to a growing MAGA conspiracy theory that the indictment showed the far-right violence in Charlottesville in 2017 to have been a setup somehow planned by the SPLC. But in a motion to obtain the grand-jury transcripts from the indictment, the organization states that it “used the informant program to gather voluminous and detailed information about the risk of violence at Charlottesville,” and shared that with the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies in advance of the Unite the Right rally. The motion also notes other instances in which the SPLC passed along material from paid informants to the FBI, including one case in which the SPLC may have helped avert a white-supremacist terrorist attack in Las Vegas. None of these details makes it into the indictment, presumably because they would ruin the story the administration wants to tell.

[Jonathan Chait: Pam Bondi couldn’t possibly succeed]

That same disregard for reality also appears in recent arguments made by the Justice Department in the litigation over Trump’s ballroom project. After the attempted attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last weekend, Trump responded by insisting that he be allowed to continue with his construction of a “Militarily Top Secret Ballroom” in the place of the demolished East Wing of the White House. In an apparent effort to dutifully execute his wishes, DOJ filed a motion demanding that District Judge Richard Leon dissolve his injunction halting the ballroom project. The filing reads remarkably like a Truth Social post, albeit with a few stray legal citations. The plaintiffs, DOJ lawyers write, “are very bad for our Country” and “suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome.” The ballroom will be built “FREE OF CHARGE AS A GIFT TO THE COUNTRY!”

This is not how the federal government’s legal filings typically read. DOJ has traditionally prided itself on professional, careful, and scrupulously un-emotive legal work—what some within the department term “government gray.” The department’s court filings have become stranger and more erratic under Trump—“Courts cannot tell the President what to say,” DOJ blustered in a March brief defending the president’s targeting of law firms he dislikes—but an entire motion written with language so reminiscent of the president’s own style is a new blow to DOJ’s credibility. There is little reason to think that Leon, who has already ruled against the government, will look with particular kindness on this experiment in literary form. Presumably, the DOJ attorneys who drafted the motion know this. The goal must be to just make the boss happy in the short term.

The day after DOJ submitted this incendiary motion in the ballroom case, Blanche and Patel revealed a new indictment against former FBI Director James Comey—the second criminal case against him after a previous charge was tossed out by a judge in November. These fresh charges involve a year-old Instagram post: Comey, on vacation, had shared a photo of seashells arranged to spell out “86 47.” Trump allies immediately concluded that Comey had endangered Trump’s life—“86,” they argued, is slang for “murder,” and “47” refers to Trump, the 47th president of the United States. But “86,” a term from the service industry, more commonly refers to throwing out a truculent customer or denotes that an ingredient or dish has run out. At the time of the Instagram post, even Bondi’s Justice Department declined to take the matter too seriously. According to MS NOW, however, Blanche revitalized the case after Bondi’s departure and ordered North Carolina prosecutors to seek an indictment against Comey for threatening the president.

This development is so ridiculous that it is difficult to know where to begin. Comey, for his part, said in 2025 that he had no idea “86” could be meant as a threat, and quickly apologized and deleted the post. This is particularly relevant because of the high standards established under the First Amendment for prosecuting threats: Recent Supreme Court precedent requires not only that observers must read the language as threatening, but that the defendant himself knows it will be understood that way or recklessly disregards the possibility that it might. At any rate, even if Comey had intended the message as a threat, the courts have previously found that constitutional protections shield, for example, a Vietnam War protester’s comment that “if they ever make me carry a rifle, the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ,” and a message-board post suggesting that Barack Obama “will have a 50 cal in the head soon.” The Justice Department will have its work cut out for it if prosecutors intend to argue that seashells spelling out “86 47” are more threatening than these statements.

[Quinta Jurecic: The next attorney general has an impossible job]

The legal flimsiness of the indictment indicates just how far Blanche’s DOJ is willing to go to please the president. In the first case against Comey—the one that was tossed last year—DOJ managed to secure the indictment that Trump wanted by stretching the facts to conform to the law. In the second Comey case, prosecutors seem to have distorted the law itself—which raises questions about whether or not they accurately instructed the grand jury about the legal standards at issue. The SPLC case also displays this new tactic of suggesting the law is simply other than it is. When I spoke with Boynton last week, shortly after the SPLC case was filed, he voiced the concern that this shift will give DOJ freer rein to harass Trump’s enemies. “A Justice Department that is willing to stretch both the facts and the law to mislead a grand jury into returning an indictment could literally charge any American with a crime,” he said.

This kind of slapdash approach can’t be restricted only to specific cases. It poisons the department as a whole, so that the judiciary and the public no longer know whether they can trust DOJ’s work even in legitimate cases. Already, the prosecution of Cole Allen, the alleged White House Correspondents’ Dinner attacker, has been shadowed by questions over whether or not Allen really fired his shotgun, as DOJ claims. That case will be a test for whether the Justice Department can competently handle a high-profile matter of interest to the president, or will manage to derail even this straightforward prosecution—by Trump’s whims, or by a judge’s skepticism influenced by this DOJ’s flexible relationship with the facts. Another recent indictment against the former National Institutes of Health official David Morens is similarly troubling: Is this a reasonable prosecution in response to Morens’s apparent efforts to avoid public-records laws, or an excuse to harass scientists involved in the 2020 COVID response—or both?

While the Allen and Morens prosecutions move forward, the factual and legal defects in the SPLC and Comey indictments suggest that both defendants will likely succeed in any effort to get their cases tossed out of court. Just as with the Trumpian motion in the ballroom case, DOJ ought to understand that just making things up is not a recipe for long-term success. At this point, though, long-term success may be considered irrelevant within the department. The only thing that matters is whether Trump is satisfied.