Pam Bondi opened a criminal investigation into one of President Donald Trump’s enemies in a last-ditch effort to win back his favor and keep her job as attorney general.
In an unprecedented move, Bondi assigned the Department of Justice’s civil rights division—which traditionally handles civil rights abuses such as racial discrimination and unlawful use of police force—to investigate whether former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson lied to Congress, The New York Times reported.
In 2022, Hutchinson provided explosive testimony to a House committee implicating Trump in the deadly Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. Other witnesses later contradicted some of the information she provided, which Hutchinson told lawmakers she had received second- and third-hand.
Despite some DOJ officials expressing skepticism that there’s a viable criminal case to be made against Hutchinson, Bondi opened the inquiry in the past few weeks in hopes of getting back on Trump’s good side, sources told the Times.
Trump nevertheless fired Bondi last week in part because she has failed to indict and convict his political enemies. He named her deputy Todd Blanche, who previously was Trump’s personal lawyer, as acting attorney general.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the DOJ and Hutchinson’s lawyer for comment.
Those failures weren’t for lack of trying on Bondi’s part, though. Judges, grand juries, and even some of the DOJ’s own prosecutors have thwarted the president’s attempts to use the federal court system to carry out his revenge campaigns.
Normally an inquiry into criminal perjury before Congress would be handled by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., which is led by Trump ally and former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, the Times reported.
But Pirro and her deputies have struggled to secure indictments against Trump’s critics, including six Democratic lawmakers with military and intelligence backgrounds who made a video urging members of the armed forces to follow the Military Code of Justice and not obey illegal orders.
Pirro and her team have also failed to advance cases against former President Joe Biden over his use of an autopen to sign presidential documents, and have hit a major roadblock in a case against Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell linked to renovations of the central bank’s headquarters.
Some legal insiders say the politically motivated prosecutions have poisoned the jury pool in D.C. against the DOJ, making it more difficult for the government to win cases there.
The Hutchinson probe began when a Trump ally in Congress sent the DOJ a referral accusing her of lying to Congress.
The now 29-year-old, who served as an aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, testified that Trump had encouraged the crowd that gathered to hear him speak at the “Stop the Steal” rally to march to the Capitol, even though he knew his supporters were armed and could turn violent.
She also said she was told that after the speech, Trump demanded that his Secret Service agents drive him to the U.S. Capitol. When his lead agent refused, Trump cursed and tried to grab the wheel, and lunged at another agent.
The driver later testified that he never saw Trump try to grab the wheel.
