DOJ Organizing Vast Conspiracy Investigation Against Trump Enemies, Bondi Says

For months, MAGA insiders and pundits have hinted that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is preparing a vast grand jury investigation against an expansive list of President Donald Trump’s enemies.

Located in the Trump-friendly Southern District of Florida, the investigation would pursue former intelligence and law enforcement officials who had allegedly conspired over the past decade to prevent Trump from exercising his constitutional and federal rights.

Among its top targets would be officials who scrutinized the 2016 Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia and who brought charges against the president for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and hoard classified documents.

Or so MAGA insiders claimed. But hard evidence was scant.

Now, Attorney General Pam Bondi has all but confirmed the existence of the conspiracy probe, pulling back the curtain on the potential next stage in Trump’s campaign of retribution against anyone who has stood in his way.

In comments Sunday evening to conservative commentator John Solomon, Bondi said U.S. attorneys and federal agents were investigating Obama-Biden era officials at her direction in an ongoing election-meddling conspiracy. She framed the probe as part of nationwide investigation into the “weaponization of government,” a popular GOP allegation.

Those officials, Bondi asserted, had protected Democrats like Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton from criminal investigations “while pursuing conservatives for their beliefs, using legal process and operations that were excessive.”

“This is a ten-year stain on the country committed by high-ranking officials against the American people,” the attorney general claimed.

Bondi didn’t confirm where the investigations were taking place, but she didn’t have to. Other anonymous officials familiar with the probe told Solomon that a large part of the work was being carried out in southern Florida.

Bondi’s comments were also extraordinary for their inadvisable candor: They blatantly violated internal DOJ policies around commenting on ongoing investigations and likely undermine the DOJ’s efforts to prosecute Trump’s opponents.

In the past, the department has kept major investigations private, as public disclosures could make obtaining witness cooperation or gathering evidence more difficult or could compromise future charges.

DOJ officials also generally avoid remarking on potential targets of investigations or making public assessments of a defendant’s character, as such comments can prejudice a case.

Bondi, however, departed from that norm of restraint by calling former CIA Director John Brennan a “bad actor” for asking a federal judge last week to preemptively intervene in the grand jury conspiracy.

The department has been investigating Brennan since at least July for overseeing the intelligence community’s 2017 assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf. In 2020, the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee came to the same conclusion.

Brennan has not been charged with a crime. However, he is a prime target for the DOJ’s conspiracy probe.

In a letter last week, the ex-CIA director asked the chief judge in the Southern District of Florida to block Judge Aileen Cannon from overseeing the DOJ’s conspiracy investigation.

Cannon, a Trump appointee, has shown the president unusual favor in special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents investigation.

Brennan accused the DOJ of manipulating case assignment procedures in order to place its grand jury probe before Cannon.  

“We submit that such manipulation amounts to a clear case of prosecutorial judge shopping and thereby threatens the ‘appearance of impartiality that is required to maintain the confidence of the public and the accused in the criminal justice system,’” Brennan’s legal defense stated.

But that request led Bondi to say that Brennan was among “bad actors” who “are clearly concerned about their liability and want to preserve a two-tiered justice system: one for them and one for everyone else.” 

“No more,” she added.

According to Solomon, Bondi also claimed that the evidence the DOJ currently had against Obama-Biden era officials indicated an “ongoing conspiracy” against Trump. Alleging that officials are part of an active conspiracy would conveniently allow the DOJ to press charges against potential defendants even after the statute of limitations for their alleged crimes had expired. 

MAGA influencers previously claimed that Jason Reding Quiñones, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida and a staunch Trump ally, was overseeing the conspiracy investigation. 

As part of the probe, a grand jury is set to convene in Fort Pierce, Florida in mid-January.

Currently, Cannon is the sole federal judge at the U.S. courthouse in Fort Pierce.