Trump Needs A ‘Vicious Operator’ at The Department of Justice

Bondi was out of her depth.

After months of mounting frustration, the DOJ failed to act on explosive evidence, delivering talk instead of accountability. Promised prosecutions never materialized as critics point to a year of inertia inside the Justice Department. Whistleblowers spoke, documents piled up and still no action.

Trump Needs A ‘Vicious Operator’ To Bring Justice Back To The Justice Department

Government investigator Mike Howell says Pam Bondi, out as attorney general, wasn’t the right fit to take on the weaponizers.

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By: M.D. Kittle, The Federalist, April 3, 2026;

Pam Bondi was President Donald Trump’s second choice for attorney general, and she never quite fit. Bondi often looked uncomfortable in the top prosecutor role, fumbling her way through and failing to meet the demands of a Department of Justice with a mandate to bring the criminals in the corrupt Biden administration to account.

The frustration from the MAGA movement has been mounting for many months. The president’s patience had worn threadbare with an attorney general who — for many reasons — never did deliver on one of Trump’s biggest campaign promises: justice for the people caught in the crosshairs of the left’s political lawfare campaign.

So the president gave Bondi the “Great American” sendoff on his Truth Social platform Thursday and sent his second choice AG packing.

“Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year,” Trump wrote Thursday, saluting Bondi for the DOJ’s work in bringing the nation’s murder rate to the lowest level in 125 years.

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Maybe Bondi was stuck in an untenable position for what the job entailed, but her biggest problem, one government watchdog says, was her inability to run a tenacious prosecution operation that would send a clear message to the leftist lawfare crowd. Of course, she did herself no favors with the Epstein Files mess.

“I’m not saying Bondi didn’t want to do that, but it certainly didn’t happen,” Mike Howell, president of the Oversight Project, told The Federalist Thursday afternoon in an interview on the Vicki McKenna Show. The conservative organization investigates and litigates to expose and root out corruption in government,

“Look, she got subbed in after Matt Gaetz went down and I think there was an understanding that she really wasn’t that type of lawyer or operator but she would have a cast surrounding her [so she could] be a spokesperson for the agency,” Howell said. “But over time it just became clear that there weren’t enough people who were actually committed to doing the mission and that was borne out by the lack of results.”

Gaetz, a former Republican congressman, withdrew from consideration amid a buzzsaw confirmation process.

‘Shouting from the Mountaintops’

Corrupt corporate media outlets framed Bondi as another victim of Trump’s vendettas against his political enemies. Missing from their narrative, per usual, is the fact that many of Trump’s political enemies bludgeoned the Constitution in their soft coup to cripple the president’s first term, and to do all in their power to make sure he wouldn’t win a second. They failed miserably. Trump and the Americans who voted for his return to the White House won the right to the records. And thousands of documents made public thus far have exposed Democrats and deep staters as defilers of the rule of law and the will of the people.

The frustrations of the president and those who watched the left’s sustained lawfare campaign have only grown with the DOJ’s failure to act on the damning documents and testimony of whistleblowers. Bondi, and the attorneys surrounding her, have been loathe to move swiftly, if at all.

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Howell said the real victories have been few.

“In place of actual actions you have been celebrations that I think are unwarranted. Like if you look at the FBI, it’s been all ‘Mission Accomplished’ over there and the claim that it’s been rebuilt from the ground up, but that’s just not true whatsoever,” he said.

Bondi critics charge there has been too much deference paid to the old guard at the FBI and the Justice Department. The Oversight Project has been a lead investigator in the autopen scandal of the Biden years. Much evidence suggests President Joe Biden’s inner circle signed off on a glut of clemency orders — more than 4,200, smashing previous records for presidential pardons, commutations and remissions and respites. Biden’s acts of clemency covered members of his corrupt family, government crushers of individual liberties, and some very violent criminals.

The get-out-of-jail-free card winners included a career criminal “who admitted to killing someone on camera and has a long rap sheet of violent crimes,” according to the Oversight Project. Howell and his team urged Bondi and the DOJ to stop the release of the “illegitimate” clemency orders through a disqualifying use of the autopen.

“There are a lot of violent criminals whose sentences were shortened by the autopen that this DOJ continues to release,” Howell said. “It’s been happening like clockwork and we’ve been shouting from the mountains tops.”

Bondi released a statement Thursday pledging to “work tirelessly” to transition control of the AG’s office to her Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, whom Trump tapped as interim AG for the time being. She said she’s moving to “an important private sector role” where she will “continue fighting for President Trump and this Administration.”

“Leading President Trump’s historic and highly successful efforts to make America safer and more secure has been the honor of a lifetime, and easily the most consequential first year of the Department of Justice in American history,” Bondi wrote on X.

Her conservative critics disagree. Democrats said “good riddance,” with a straight face accusing Bondi of leading a corrupt department while they shrugged off the cesspool of corruption at Merrick Garland’s DOJ.

‘De-weaponize’ the Government

Speculation on who will ultimately replace Bondi was running rampant Thursday. Blanche appears to be a leading candidate, although his conservative credentials have come under scrutiny. Fox News reported that Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin is in line for the post.

Howell said the next AG must be run by a “vicious operator” if there is any hope for accountability.

“You need somebody who is not going to care what the liberal press thinks of them, what the rank and file of these departments and angencies will think of them, and how they’ll be framed as an institutionalist,” he said. “No, you need someone who is there primarily to get the job done and roll up their sleeves.”

Continued…