Pam Bondi’s Justice Department in Uproar After Comey Indictment

The Justice Department is in an uproar against Attorney General Pam Bondi’s indictment of former FBI director James Comey.

Comey, who has drawn the ire of President Trump ever since he led the Russiagate investigation in 2016, has been charged with one count of making a false statement during a Senate hearing and one count of obstructing Congress. Bondi’s office also tried to get Comey on a second charge of making a false statement to Congress, but that was struck down. If convicted, Comey could face up to five years in prison.

But even Bondi’s own staff think this is a weak move designed to make Trump feel better in spite of the fact that the charges will be hard to prove.

“What I am hearing from DoJ sources: The Comey indictment is among the worst abuses in DOJ history,” MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian wrote Thursday on X. “Shocking. It’s hard to overstate how a big a moment this is.”

“Everybody is in shock,” former DOJ Director of Public Affairs Xochitl Hinojosa told CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront. “It doesn’t surprise them, though, because this is the way the Justice Department has been. Career officials have largely been either pushed out or silenced and are not in meetings about major decisions about cases.”

Hinojosa also commented on Bondi’s reasoning that “no one is above the law” in indicting Comey.

“That is what we all believe in, in that building,” Hinojosa added. “But the reality is that the actions over the last nine months are not the case. Donald Trump was charged on 44 counts. He is the sitting president of the United States.... And now Donald Trump is going after his political enemies.”

“I think this is a tragic day for America,” former White House lawyer Ty Cobb told CNN. “What we have here is a clear vindictive prosecution, a clear selective prosecution. We have a president for the first time in history ordering his Attorney General to indict his enemies,” Cobb said. “And the Attorney General, instead of being the independent force that she’s supposed to be saying: ‘Yes, sir. How fast can I get that done for you?”

Even Bondi herself seems to be feeling hesitant about going after Comey. CNN reported on Thursday that Bondi was apprehensive at best about the indictment, and some of her attorneys indicated similar feelings in a written memo. Bondi denies all of this.

Regardless, it’s clear that this indictment is the result of Trump personally calling for it, rather than some stringent, by the book investigation. Only time will tell how it’ll all play out.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has once again been caught on camera violently arresting people in the halls of immigration court. 

Conservative journalist Elaad Eliahu on Thursday filmed a man desperately holding onto his wife and children as about five ICE agents—all but one masked—surrounded them in a New York City immigration court. Two of them wrapped their arms around the man’s neck, putting in him a chokehold as they attempted to drag him away. The agents eventually ripped him away from his distraught, screaming family and detained him. It’s a gut-wrenching scene. 

After he was dragged away, the man’s wife walked up to the only unmasked ICE officer, pleading with him in Spanish. The agent just yelled “Adios! Adios!” in her face. She continued to beg him, until he quickly shoved  her into the wall, and then the ground, standing over her as her children screamed in horror. 

“I was back at 26 Federal Plaza today, where an ICE agent violently threw this bereft woman to the ground in front of her kids,” New York City Comptroller and former mayoral candidate Brad Lander wrote. “She had not touched him. She did not pose any threat. She had to be taken to the hospital.” 

“Seconds earlier, her husband had been abducted by masked ICE agents who did not identify themselves, did not present a warrant, did not give any lawful grounds for his detention,” Lander continued. “Every day, masked ICE agents are acting violently against our neighbors, illegally abducting them, holding them in cruel and inhumane conditions. Treating them as less than human and not deserving due process.”

There have been so many scenes like this since the Trump administration initiated its deportation campaign. Mothers, fathers, laborers, students, and community members have been ripped off the streets by men who often refuse to identify themselves, and sent to God knows where. And as of right now, there is no end in sight. 

Democratic Representative Ro Khanna has collected almost 50 signatures on a petition of lawmakers urging the Trump administration to acknowledge the State of Palestine. 

Since the letter was first reported early last month, dozens of House Democrats have signed on, and it now bears the names of 47 representatives, or more than one-fifth of the party’s House members.

“We are writing to request that the United States officially recognize a Palestinian state, as this tragic moment has highlighted for the world the long overdue need to recognize Palestinian self-determination,” the letter states, according to a copy viewed by The New Republic.

Khanna says he hopes to have more than 50 before it is delivered to the White House on Friday. His office says he is accepting signatories until Friday at 4 p.m. 

“This week, the UK, France, Canada, and Australia officially recognized Palestinian statehood,” Khanna said in a statement. “We cannot be isolated from the rest of the free world. We must stand up for the dignity and rights of the Palestinian people. That is why I am pushing for the US to join in recognizing Palestinian statehood.”

The following are the 47 House Democrats who have signed on to the letter as of Friday afternoon, per Khanna’s office:

• Becca Balint — VT
• Donald Beyer —  VA
• André Carson — IN
• Greg Casar — TX
• Joaquin Castro — TX
• Judy Chu — CA
• Danny Davis  — IL
• Madeleine Dean — PA
• Diana DeGette — CO
• Christopher Deluzio — PA
• Mark DeSaulnier — CA
• Maxine Dexter — OR
• Lloyd Doggett — TX
• Veronica Escobar — TX
• Dwight Evans — PA
• Bill Foster — IL
• Maxwell Frost — FL
• John Garamendi — CA
• Jesús García — IL
• Robert Garcia — CA
• Sylvia Garcia — TX
• Al Green — TX
• Val Hoyle — OR
• Jared Huffman — CA
• Jonathan Jackson — IL
• Sara Jacobs — CA
• Pramila Jayapal — WA
• Henry Johnson — GA
• Marcy Kaptur — OH
• Ro Khanna — CA
• Zoe Lofgren — CA
• Stephen Lynch — MA
• Betty McCollum — MN
• James McGovern — MA
• Chellie Pingree — ME
• Mark Pocan — WI
• Mike Quigley — IL
• Emily Randall — WA 
• Mary Gay Scanlon — PA
• Janice Schakowsky — IL
• Bennie Thompson — MS
• Mike Thompson — CA
• Jill Tokuda — HI
• Paul Tonko — NY
• Nydia Velázquez — NY
• Maxine Waters — CA
• Bonnie Watson Coleman — NJ

As the destruction and humanitarian crisis wrought on Gaza by Israel draws increased international scrutiny, 10 countries recognized Palestinian statehood in the past week, bringing the total to 157 of 193 U.N. member states. 

“We encourage the governments of other countries that have yet to recognize Palestinian statehood, including the United States, to do so as well,” Khanna’s letter states. An August Reuters/Ipsos poll found that most Americans, 58 percent, agree. Trump, meanwhile, has dismissed recognizing Palestinian statehood, claiming it would be a “reward to Hamas.”

This story has been updated.

A federal court has ordered the University of South Dakota to reinstate an art professor who was removed for calling Charlie Kirk a “hate spreading Nazi.”

U.S. District Court Judge Karen Schreier in South Dakota’s Southern Division granted Professor Phillip Michael Hook’s request Wednesday night to block the school from firing him over the post on his personal Facebook page, ruling that Hook had a fair chance of proving that his First Amendment rights had been violated.

Hours after the right-wing activist was fatally shot in Utah, Hook posted on Facebook calling Kirk a “hate spreading Nazi” and questioned why there had been no equivalent outrage for the shootings that killed Minnesota state Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband in June.

In a subsequent post, Hook said he’d taken down his original post and apologized to “those who were offended.”

Soon after, Hook received a letter from the university placing him on administrative leave and expressing school leadership’s intent to terminate his contract for violating USD’s speech policy requiring employees with “special obligations” to “be accurate, show respect for the opinions of others, and make every effort to indicate when they are not speaking for the institution.”

But Schreier didn’t buy it. “The court concludes that Hook spoke as a citizen and his speech was on a matter of public concern,” she ruled, adding that the university had blatantly punished him because of his speech, and done so without proving his words had an adverse impact on the institution. Therefore, Hook was likely to win First Amendment protections.

Schreier ordered the university to reinstate Hook until the preliminary injunction hearing early next month.

This ruling comes as Vice President JD Vance has come down hard against calling political enemies Nazis (something he once did to the sitting president), and Donald Trump warned that violent rhetoric from the left had sparked a recent spate of violence—and would soon invite “bad things” from the right.

Yet another Trump nominee is facing scrutiny for their history of incendiary and racist social media posts.

Jeremy Carl is a current senior fellow at right-wing Claremont Institute who is up for a position at the State Department in which he would head the Bureau of International Organization Affairs. He has a trove of despicable online statements that he went out of his way to wipe from X, according to CNN’s KFile. He also tried to delete his posts from the archival website The Wayback Machine, though posts from his previous username can still be found.

In one post, Carl called for the execution of American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten. “If the U.S. were a serious nation,” he wrote, “Weingarten would be tried for crimes against America’s children and would get the death penalty.”

“I’m sure George Floyd is looking up from hell right now and he is so proud of America,” Carl wrote in another post, referring to the unarmed Black man who was choked to death by police in 2020. Carl also reposted that “statues in [Floyd’s] honor are a disgrace and an embarrassment to our country.”

“There is no ‘peaceful coexistence’ we are going to have when our opposition is led by people like this,” Carl said in response to former Representative Cori Bush commenting on the mass incarceration of Black folk on Juneteenth in 2021.

“If you’re a white person celebrating Juneteenth, you’ve already surrendered,” he said a day later.

Carl is also an ardent believer in the “great replacement,” the conspiracy theory that immigration is part of a plot to replace white people and destroy the United States.

“The great replacement is real,” he said in 2021. “And they’re going to try to make you pay for it.”

“We must utterly defeat the Great Replacement as a political strategy, and permanently remove from power all who advance it,” he wrote in 2022.

He also lamented what he saw as an insufficient number of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in government.

“I just can’t understand why the under-representation of white Christians and the total absence of white Protestants in the Biden Administration isn’t a huge story,” he said. “The media loves covering stories of systemic exclusion and lack of representation.”

Carl was of course very pro–January 6. He considered the insurrectionists to be political prisoners and blamed Representative Nancy Pelosi, not Trump, for the events on that day.

“Donald Trump addressed a political rally and said ‘I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard,’” he said. “Pelosi attempted a military coup and must be prosecuted.”

So a man who is racist and thinks “Dems R the real fascists” has an excellent chance to be nominated and begin to impact U.S. policy at the United Nations and elsewhere. Carl would head more than 100 diplomats in over six countries.

This isn’t the first time a Trump nominee’s older tweets have been dug up. Current Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Darren Beattie declared that “competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” among other racist statements. “Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”

There’s also E.J. Antoni, the MAGA rioter Trump tapped to replace Erika McEntarfer as head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who said that former presidential candidate Kamala Harris couldn’t run for office “on [her] knees.”

It seems that the Trump administration is going out of their way to select the most despicable, incendiary characters to join their team. It might be time to fire up the Wayback Machine if you want a job with them next.