Poised to face tough questioning from Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats about President Donald Trump’s weaponization of the Justice Department against perceived enemies, Attorney General Pam Bondi has brought a retort: Trump’s economic adviser Peter Navarro.
Bondi is testifying Tuesday at the panel’s annual oversight hearing of the DOJ, with Navarro in attendance in the Capitol Hill meeting room. A former aide in Trump’s first administration and now the president’s current trade adviser, Navarro has continued on a crusade against the Justice Department for his four-month prison sentence during the Biden administration, when he failed to comply with a subpoena from the Democratic-led committee investigating the Capitol attacks on Jan. 6, 2021.
Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) announced he had obtained documents around the FBI’s handling of the Navarro case, including a request for physical surveillance of Navarro on the day the FBI arrested him and a timeline of that surveillance. Navarro was ultimately arrested publicly in 2022 at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Grassley called the treatment “unnecessary.”
“They were playing politics with law enforcement powers, and will go down as a historic betrayal of public trust,” Bondi said of the former Biden administration. “This is the kind of conduct that shatters the American people’s faith in our law enforcement system.”
The revelations appeared designed to preempt Democratic criticism of Trump’s broad campaign to leverage the DOJ against the president’s political adversaries. The Justice Department in the Trump administration has opened investigations into Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) — who, as a member of the House, managed Trump’s first impeachment trial — and New York Attorney General Letitia James — who had pursued a civil lawsuit against the Trump organization.
Last month, former FBI Director James Comey was charged with obstruction and lying to Congress.
Schiff, a now member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, will question Bondi later Tueday.
Grassley also continued to decry what he believed was an “unconstitutional breach:” the FBI’s decision under former President Joe Biden to request telephone records for Republican members of Congress as part of the investigation into Trump’s efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election. Republican senators announced this new information Monday, arguing it constituted an unjustified weaponization of law enforcement against the GOP.
The judiciary panel includes several lawmakers who were targets of that FBI probe, which was narrowly tailored around the date of the certification of the 2020 election results and the subsequent attack on the U.S. Capitol. The FBI did not obtain the content of their calls.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report misspelled New York Attorney General Letitia James’ name.
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