Attorney General Pam Bondi’s prosecutorial sprint speed is improving, at least from the perspective of the man holding a stopwatch, President Trump.
Just 217 minutes elapsed between Mr. Trump’s command on Friday morning that she investigate prominent Democrats like Bill Clinton who were named in documents Congress obtained from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate and Ms. Bondi’s announcement that she had referred the matter to the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. Earlier demands took days, sometimes weeks, to fulfill.
Ms. Bondi’s statement was an unmistakable demonstration of Mr. Trump’s near-total success in subordinating the Justice Department’s post-Watergate independence to his will. Friday was a milestone of sorts. The department was deployed, in effect, as an arm of the president’s rapid-response operation to help him muscle through a damaging news cycle, current and former officials said.
“Whether you are investigated or prosecuted, or whether you are pardoned or have your sentence commuted, depends on whether you are an enemy or a friend of Donald Trump,” said Mary McCord, who once oversaw the Justice Department’s national security division and is now a professor at Georgetown Law.
“There is no pretense of evenhanded justice,” she said. “That core principle is gone.”
Mr. Trump has ordered partisan investigations in bulk: James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director; Letitia James, New York’s attorney general; John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director; Adam B. Schiff, a Democratic senator from California; and Jack Smith, the special counsel who twice indicted Mr. Trump, among others.
Friday’s batch consisted of an all-Democratic roster of men who, like Mr. Trump, socialized with Mr. Epstein, a convicted sex offender. They included Mr. Clinton, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, and the megadonor and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, along with a bank that has longstanding ties to Mr. Epstein.
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