And not just a fun clownshow like maybe you’d be able to see back in the heyday of Ringling Bros. Barnum and Bailey. No, as of March 2026, the DOJ is fully a clownshow in service of one petty, shitty man. I hate that this is where we find ourselves. I also hate that there appears to be no end in sight.
I’ve sat down several times over the last month or so to write some version of this post multiple times. Each time the thought of doing it has ended up making me so genuinely angry at the reality of the situation that I have ended up doing something else instead.
What kind of development does it take to finally bring me around to actually doing the job of writing this? It is quite literally the report of the exchange in San Diego at an ABA Rule of Law conference that I read on the Bloomberg Law service on Tuesday of this week.
A participant in the panel discussion was John Lauro, a former Trump lawyer, and he was quoted as saying that the Department of Justice was in a “better” place today than it was a year ago. This was met with an appropriate level of outrage from the crowd, particularly when he reportedly explained that “Everything that has gone on in the current administration must be looked at from the eyes of a man who was victimized by the criminal justice system.” Some audience members were quoted as thanking him for saying the quiet part out loud and confirming that the DOJ was letting itself satisfy the whims of a man desperately pursuing the status of a dictator. The article also reports on this exchange:
Sandy Weinberg, the Zuckerman Spaeder attorney moderating the panel has known Lauro—his former law partner—more than 40 years. But on several occasions Weinberg interrupted Lauro’s defense of Trump administration actions with sharp questions.
“I can’t believe that you think that that’s normal or good that one person can dictate who the Department of Justice investigates and indicts,” Weinberg said.
“That’s what the Supreme Court said,” Lauro countered, referring to the justices’ 2024 decision granting Trump and any president immunity.
One audience member though, according to the article, simply blurted out “You’re a clown” to describe the speaker.
Someone in that crowd being willing to say “clown” out loud was what prompted me to finally push past all of the unpleasantness and write.
Because time and again in the last month or so as I have followed developments, I have thought in my head (and sometimes out loud in the presence of others): “It’s a clownshow.”
One of the more prominent such moments was on March 3, 2026. That was the day that the DOJ reversed course after filing a notice of dismissal of its appeal the prior day and insisted that it would continue to appeal four district court rulings striking down Trump Executive Orders attacking certain law firms. That same day, March 3, the Wall Street Journal reported that the reversal of the DOJ’s position happened when Trump erupted in anger at the DOJ leadership, presumably Pam Bondi, for backing down. Quickly thereafter the term surfaced again in my office when the DOJ filed its brief on March 6 arguing, among many other things, the bizarre notion that by striking down these Executive Orders, the courts were infringing on Trump’s governmental right of free speech. By the time that a DOJ official argued on March 11 that the filing on March 2 about dismissing the appeal was “inadvertent,” other clown acts had also been given a bit of media attention.
One such prominent act was the publication of a notice of proposed rulemaking by the DOJ seeking to try to shut down the ability of state bar regulators to pursue discipline against attorneys employed in the Department of Justice. In terms of its intent, as the “Summary” describes:
Under the proposed rule, before a current or former Department lawyer
may participate in any investigative steps initiated by the bar disciplinary
authority of a State, Territory, or the District of Columbia in response to
allegations that a current or former Department attorney violated an ethics rule while engaging in that attorney’s federal duties, the Department will have the right to review the allegations in the first instance and shall request that the bar disciplinary authority suspend any parallel investigations until the completion of the Department’s review.
As a lawyer who defends lawyers in disciplinary proceedings, it certainly would be helpful for me to be able to claim on a client’s behalf that they can’t be investigated until some other event has happened, but anyone paying even the smallest amount of attention to how the DOJ operates under Pam Bondi understands that her desire to be able to tell DOJ attorneys that they cannot participate in any disciplinary investigations against them comes purely from a place of demanding total unaccountability.
And, of course, I am sure it is just coincidence that within close proximity to the publishing of this proposed rule news has trickled out of actual state bar investigations of conduct of some lawyers in the DOJ who appear to be operating with disregard to the idea that there are any rules constraining their conduct at all. I wrote “investigations” but that may be too generous a statement as the Florida Bar has now taken a page out of the DOJ’s own playbook and recanted an initial statement that they were actively investigating Lindsey Halligan for her conduct associated with unlawfully claiming to have been the U.S. Attorney in New Jersey.
Another act of buffoonery in the last 30 days involves the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia and the press conference she had after a federal judge declined to let her office move forward with subpoenas as part of a grand jury investigation she launched against the Chair of the Federal Reserve based on Trump’s public demands. In a press conference, she was willing to say: “This is the antithesis of American justice. Exonerating anyone without any records, without an investigation, or question is not how our criminal justice system works.” That ought, on its own, to be sounding alarm bells. And, even in only focusing on that language, I am left to feel like I am glossing over the inappropriateness of the D.C. U.S. Attorney so easily being willing to offer disparaging comments about the judge in question.
In the very early days of this second Trump administration, I wrote about how he was not going to be able to inflict the kind of damage on the Rule of Law in the United States that he wants without the help of attorneys. He has gotten that help in spades from Pam Bondi who has completely embraced the idea that the Department of Justice should now serve as the law firm for the President and his political agenda.
And I am not being at all hyperbolic as she has committed that position to writing.
If there is even the faintest flicker of any sort of good news for the potential that the DOJ cannot continue indefinitely down its current path, it is that the ability to continue to find lawyers who are willing to work there has become problematic enough that only is the DOJ enlisting military attorneys to serve as prosecutors but has now dropped its requirement of at least one year of experience for new hires.