The Justice Department’s newly formed “Weaponization Working Group,” announced in a memo this week by Attorney General Pam Bondi, was purportedly intended to root out “abuses of the criminal justice process” by local and federal law enforcement officers.
But a literal reading of its name suggests that the investigative body was also an example of the department itself, now under new leadership, weaponizing its expansive powers to scrutinize and perhaps take action against several officials who, for various reasons, have run afoul of President Trump.
“They are trying to politicize all this,” said Donald Voiret, a former F.B.I. senior executive who was the top agent in Seattle and also ran the bureau’s London office before retiring in 2022. “They are doing exactly what they accused the F.B.I. and D.O.J. of doing.”
The memo, issued on Wednesday, signaled the most significant first step in deploying the levers of government to carry out Mr. Trump’s repeated suggestions to exact retribution against those he perceives to be his enemies.
While the memo contained some conciliatory language, promising that no one who had “acted with a righteous spirit and just intentions” had any cause for alarm, it also included a laundry list of Republican boogeymen and grievances that the working group was intended to address.
At the top of that list were three prosecutors who all brought separate cases against Mr. Trump, even though there is no indication that any of them violated the law. They are the former special counsel Jack Smith; Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney; and Letitia James, the New York attorney general.
Mr. Smith’s two cases — accusing Mr. Trump of seeking to subvert the 2020 election and of illegally holding on to classified documents after he left office in 2021 — were dismissed after Mr. Trump won re-election in November. The victory triggered a longstanding Justice Department policy that forbids pursuing prosecutions of a sitting president.
Mr. Bragg’s case was more successful and resulted in Mr. Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal on the eve of the 2016 election. In Ms. James’s case, Mr. Trump was found civilly liable of doctoring the value of his real estate portfolio and was ordered to pay a penalty of more than $450 million.
The directive is just as noteworthy for what it does not say. Former department officials and lawyers representing some of those who might be targeted said the memo was too ambiguous to provide a clear indication of how the department planned to proceed….