Steven Harper, Common Dreams

Incompetence will be President Donald Trump’s undoing. The only question is whether he and his minions will undo the nation first. Today’s subject is Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Blunders and bluster

In her first year, Bondi has established an unprecedented record of destruction in the service of Trump. Servitude is more apt. Here’s a small sample:

• Thousands of experienced attorneys have left the Justice Department. Bondi fired those she deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump. Others resigned in protest over her directives, such as investigating the partner of Renee Nicole Good — a US citizen whom an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minnesota killed — rather than scrutinizing the actions of her killer.
• Bondi has decimated the department’s civil rights division, which historically investigated whether federal officers had used excessive force in killings like Good’s. As division head Harmeet Dhillon turned its mission upside down, more than 70 percent of its attorneys left. University of Chicago Law School Professor Craig Futterman explained that the Trump administration “is using a division that has a history of protecting the most vulnerable among us to wage an all-out assault on the civil rights of vulnerable people, including Black people, brown people, women, LGBTQIA folk.”
• Across the country, judges are chastising federal prosecutors for defying court orders and are wondering if the problem is incompetence, work overload, or the executive branch’s systematic attack on the judiciary. At least 35 times since August, federal judges have ordered the Trump administration to explain why it should not be punished for violating their orders in immigration cases: “Antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening,” Judge Joseph R. Goodwin in West Virginia wrote, calling the warrantless arrest and imprisonment of thousands across the country “an assault on the constitutional order.”
• On Capitol Hill, Bondi refused to answer pointed questions and, instead, descended into bipartisan insults of elected representatives who dared to challenge her. When ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a constitutional law professor, told her not to filibuster through his limited time for questioning, she snapped, “You don’t tell me anything, you washed up loser lawyer.” She called Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) a “failed politician” who had “Trump derangement syndrome.”
• Bipartisan outrage grows over Bondi’s incompetent and incomplete production of the Justice Department’s infamous Jeffrey Epstein files. It took Massie and a handful of fellow Republicans in the House to overcome the opposition of Trump and his congressional allies in forcing legislation requiring full disclosure by Dec. 19, 2025. That deadline came and went before Bondi’s department finally produced files that included victims’ identities. The public learned on Feb. 24 that the Justice Department’s belated 3.5 million-page document dump excluded files relating to allegations that Trump sexually abused a minor, according to an NPR analysis and the New York Times.

Backstory

Understanding Bondi’s loyalty to Trump over her oath to uphold the Constitution requires a timeline:...

I was born and raised in Minnesota. One of my childhood homes in south Minneapolis is less than a mile from the scene of last Saturday’s brutal Border Patrol killing. The victim was 37-year-old Alex Pretti, a US citizen born in Illinois and a registered ICU nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs hospital.

Pretti’s crime: He was “Minnesota nice.”

Before proceeding further, please watch this New York Times video....

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s job is to calm the economic fears that President Donald Trump creates. He has followed a curious journey to get there, and now he’s sacrificing his integrity and legacy to remain.

Stage 1: Democratic Fundraiser

Born in a small South Carolina town, Bessent, 63, graduated from Yale in 1984 with a bachelor’s degree in political science. Eventually he went to work for Soros Fund Management — founded by the Republicans’ favorite Democratic demon, George Soros.

Bessent is openly gay, married since 2011 to a former New York City prosecutor, and has been a strong advocate for gay rights and marriage equality. In 2000, he supported Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, co-hosting a fundraiser for him in East Hampton, New York. He donated $2,300 to Barack Obama’s campaign in 2007. Although he donated $25,000 to support Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations, by then he was also a major donor to Republican candidates....

During rambling remarks on Jan. 3, President Donald Trump announced that the United States had bombed Venezuela, “captured” President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and gained control of that country’s oil reserves.

Now what? Trump has no idea, but historical precedent portends disaster.

Dubious legal basis

As with his bombing of alleged drug-smuggling boats that have killed at least 115 civilians, Trump offered no justification under international law for his actions:...

In the service of President Donald Trump, Lindsey Halligan, Trump’s second interim appointment as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, may lose her license to practice law.

Who is Halligan?

Competence is a key requirement for obtaining and retaining a law license. But nothing in Halligan’s education, experience, or training qualified her to prosecute federal crimes, much less lead a US Attorney’s office of more than 300 attorneys and staff in four divisions in Alexandria, Richmond, Norfolk, and Newport News.

For starters, she has never tried a criminal case. But Trump always prefers loyalty over competence....